Andreas Rydberg

I got my PhD in 2017 in History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University and was promoted to associate professor in 2023. In my research, I study early modern philosophy, science and medicine. I am interested in knowledge production, spiritual exercises, technologies of the self, identity formation and the historicity of basic categories such as truth, fact, objectivity and experience.

In 2017, I defended my doctoral thesis on different forms of scientific experience in early modern Germany. I then worked on a number of smaller research projects on, among other things, early modern medicine, theology and culture before receiving a grant from the Swedish Research Council in 2019 for the three-year project Self-Knowledge and the Emergence of Modern Objectivity. Since 2023, I am working on a two-year project, funded by the Olle Engkvists Stiftelse, entitled Histories of the Heart: Communicating Civic Technologies of the Self in the German Enlightenment.

Most of my education has been done in Sweden, where I have studied at both Uppsala University and Stockholm University. I have also done exchange studies in philosophy at Freie Universität in Berlin in 2005-2006 and spent more than six months as a visiting scholar at York University in Toronto, where I studied the history of psychology.

In my thesis, Inner Experience: An Analysis of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Germany, I study different types of scientific experience in Germany during the first half of the 18th century. In particular, I am interested in various forms of internal experience and the relationship between scientific and religious practices and discourses on experience. Since the public defense, I have worked on identity formation within German philosophy during the first half of the 18th century. In 2019–2022 I worked on a three-year research project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, entitled Self-Knowledge and the Emergence of Modern Objectivity. The project analyzed the category of self-knowledge in eighteenth-century Germany based on the hypothesis that it reflects processes of change linked to the emergence of the modern concept of objectivity. In 2023 I received a grant through Olle Engkvists Stiftelse for the project Histories of the Heart: Communicating Civic Technologies of the Self in the German Enlightenment. The project studies how a long tradition of spiritual exercises was channeled into the formation of a civic morality and sense of self in the German Enlightenment.

In my research I often combine perspectives developed in the history of science, intellectual history and cultural history. Chronologically, my research focuses mainly on the long German eighteenth century. Thematically, however, I move across a broad field, from philosophy, science, medicine, psychology and theology to specific themes such as friendship and solitude. Theoretically, my research moves at the intersection between the history of epistemic categories and the analysis of philosophy as spiritual exercise and cultura animi. I also draw on the analytical concept of persona in analyzing identity formation.