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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

sexual psychology, gender theory, Friedrich Schiller, eighteen-century

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

Abstract

Perhaps the most difficult thing about doing scholastic research is coming up with a good question. The philosopher Imre Lakatos has suggested that the modern research programme works by establishing positive and negative heuristics which dictate the questions that are and are not profitable to ask. As Thomas Kuhn has claimed, there are moments when scientists (and, I would argue, scholars) choose to break from tradition, but for the more part scholarship tends to follow the pattern of that which comes before it. When I submitted my ORCA proposal in the Fall of 2008 I thought I had found something new; developed a question which was novel, answerable, and provocative. In all my reading I had found clear connections between eighteenth century medical philosophy and the theory of Isaac Newton, and it seemed only natural to ask how Isaac Newton might have influenced a philosopher/physician as prominent as Friedrich Schiller. After a year of research and writing, however, I am convinced that this is exactly the wrong type of question to ask.

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