Heiner Mühlmann (born 1938) is a German philosopher.
Biography
Heiner Mühlmann was born in
Regensburg
Regensburg (historically known in English as Ratisbon) is a city in eastern Bavaria, at the confluence of the rivers Danube, Naab and Regen (river), Regen, Danube's northernmost point. It is the capital of the Upper Palatinate subregion of the ...
in 1938. He studied art history and philosophy in Germany, France and Italy before he received his doctorate in 1981 with a dissertation on the
Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti (; 14 February 1404 – 25 April 1472) was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, Catholic priest, priest, linguistics, linguist, philosopher, and cryptography, cryptographer; he epitomised the natu ...
. He wrote his
habilitation
Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...
thesis about
catastrophe theory
In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry.
Bifurcation theory studies and classifies phenomena chara ...
,
graph theory
In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...
and architecture at the
University of Wuppertal
The University of Wuppertal (''Universität Wuppertal'') is a German scientific institution located in Wuppertal in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
The university's official name in German is ''Bergische Universität Wuppertal'' ...
where he then became a professor.
His work has focused on cultural theory. He is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary research project TRACE which uses
neuroanthropology
Neuroanthropology is the study of the relationship between culture and the brain. This field of study emerged from a 2008 conference of the American Anthropological Association. It is based on the premise that lived experience leaves identifiab ...
to study memory.
Mühlmann's 1996 book ''The Nature of Cultures'' received considerable attention in the fields of
systems theory
Systems theory is the Transdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, de ...
,
polemology,
mediology
Mediology (French: ''médiologie'') broadly indicates a wide-ranging method for the analysis of cultural transmission in society and across societies, a method which challenges the conventional idea that 'technology is not culture'. The mediologic ...
and
neurorhetorics upon its publication. In it, he presents what he calls the Maximal-Stress-Cooperation (MSC) model, which attempts to explain the relationship between stress and the birth of cultural groups.
Selected works
Published in English
* ''The Nature of Cultures: A Blueprint for a Theory of Culture Genetics''. Vienna; New York: Springer. 1996.
* ''MSC: Maximal Stress Cooperation: The Driving Force of Cultures''. Vienna; New York: Springer. 2005.
References
Citations
Sources
*
1938 births
Living people
Writers from Regensburg
20th-century German philosophers
21st-century German philosophers
Academic staff of the University of Wuppertal
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