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Summary The essay exposes, recognizes the astonishing originality, and showcases the shortcomings of Christoph Türcke’s Philosophy of Dreams, which offers a theory of the origin of religion inspired by both psychoanalysis and critical theory. Among the objections raised are the speculative nature of the enterprise, which is not sufficiently based on empirical data, the lack of knowledge concerning the transition from apes to humans, the impossibility for hallucinations to be the basic doxastic act, the exaggerated focus on dread, which is only one form of the numinous experience, and on the repetition compulsion, which could hardly prove as creative as the author assumes particularly concerning the origin of sacrifice, and the confusion of genesis and validity.

The essay deals with an important epistemological debate in the Lucullus: Can there be remembrance of false beliefs, as Cicero argues against his interlocutor, who defends Antiochus’ position? It is shown that Antiochus, like Aristoteles, considers ‘remember’ to be a double achievement verb: Remembrance occurs only if a correct past perception is faithfully transmitted to the present. Cicero, on the other hand, insists that faithful transmission can also occur with false beliefs. The distinction seems to be analogous to that between valid and sound inference in contemporary Stoic logic. Finally, I discuss differences between ancient and modern forms of skepticism, address the issue of why misremembering plays no role in the Lucullus, and find an answer in Cicero’s doctrine of the orator.

Der Aufsatz legt die verschiedenen Formen dar, in denen Sprache Wirklichkeit ›malen‹ kann, und veranschaulicht sie mit zahlreichen Beispielen zumal aus der griechischen, lateinischen und deutschen Dichtung. Sechs Grundformen werden unterschieden: erstens der offenkundige Fall der Lautmalerei, zweitens Lautsymbolismus, bei dem phonematische Eigenschaften sensorische, aber nicht-akustische Eigenschaften abbilden, drittens prosodische Malerei, bei der Eigenschaften von Bewegungen und Ruhe nachgeahmt werden, viertens Anordnungsmalerei, bei der Relation der Ahnlichkeit und der Anordnung imitiert werden, funftens Malerei durch sprachliche Eigenschaften zweiter Ordnung, die Eigenschaften zweiter Ordnung wie etwa Scheinhaftigkeit abbildet, und sechstens reflexive Malerei, die auf die eigene Tatigkeit des Dichters referiert.

Summary The essay compares the two most original philosophical doctrines of the Trinity, namely the Augustinian and the Hegelian one. It focuses on their concepts of the philosophy of religion, their epistemologies of religion, their doctrines of the mind, and their conceptions of the immanent Trinity. It ends with a sketch of an alternative theory of Trinity that finds the best approach to the Trinity not in the individual mind but in intersubjective relations.

The essay studies the influence of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre on Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. The relation of Nell and her grandfather, of the latter and his brother, and Nell’s comic counterpoint, the Marchioness, are all inspired by Goethe’s novel. Yet Dickens’s de-aristocratization, desexualization, and re-Christianization represent crucial differences from the German model.