GOETHES PROTESTANT REFORMATION AS A TEXTUAL DEMONSTRATION - COMMENT

This Comment fakes its point of departure from Myles Jackson's histori cal study of Goethe's attempt to incite a 'protestant reformation' in colour theory. According to Jackson, Goethe tried to unseat the remote authority of Newton's science in favour of a science grounded in non- specialized personal knowledge. Goethe's natural-philosophical texts, as we shall demonstrate, involve readers in a firsthand engagement wit h the actual experimental materials. Consequently, Goethe's physics is presented in the form of a reflexive anthropological inquiry. When Ja ckson proposes that Goethe respecifies Newton's optical experiments, h e treats this as a substantive historic accomplishment Although his pa per nicely reviews how Goethe can be understood to be respecifying New ton's experiments, in this Comment we demonstrate the possibility of s uch respecification both as a way of reconceptualizing an event in the history of science, and as a distinctive mode of ethnomethodological inquiry. In other words, we invite readers to work with the materials of this text in order to demonstrate the possibility of a reformed exp erimental field.