Heiner Schwenke

Heiner Schwenke studied forest sciences, philosophy, and modern and medieval German literature at the Albrecht-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br. He obtained a PhD in natural sciences in 1990 with a dissertation on water transport mechanisms in plant roots, and a PhD in philosophy in 1992 with a dissertation on the question of the naturalization of consciousness. He has lectured at several universities and published in various fields, including plant physiology, history of philosophy, epistemology, transcendent experiences, religious studies, theology, and legal theory. In his research project at the MPIWG, he investigates transcendent experiences with regard to their phenomenology, their impact on the history of ideas, and the difficulty of understanding and judging them.