Despite a steep admission fee of eighty Swiss francs, the 140 seats in the NZZ Foyer were almost sold out, when the editor in chief of “NZZ Geschichte”, Peer Teuwsen, invited the literary scholar Jan Philipp Reemtsma and the geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger to a panel discussion on 27 November 2017. For one and a half hours the panellists talked about the investigation into the Luwian civilisation. The conversation soon centred on the issue of how to deal with new questions and results in research. Jan Philipp Reemtsma quoted the US-American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who described a phase of “normal science” in which researchers advance knowledge based on certain pre-defined questions and using equally well-defined methods. At some point, however, all permitted questions are answered with the methods that are available. Often it is outsiders or scholars from other disciplines who then start to ask completely new questions and propose entirely new methods to answer them.
The video shows a part of the panel discussion.
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