Some years ago, I found myself in Vienna, meeting and talking to my friend and former student Ralph Kray on ultimately failing university business. Thinking back to those lectures of mine which he had attended in former times, he had the idea, flattering for me, that these lectures, old as they were, should be published. Extensive scanning activitities took place, resulting in a digital collection established by Ingo Berensmeyer (whom Ralph had persuaded of or browbeaten into the enterprise), another friend, former student and now very successful colleague of mine, at the University of Giessen. A few glances into the collection brought me to the ungrateful and unpleasant conclusion that the plan was doomed to failure. The texts were old, without aura, at best clad with pleasant patina. To save face, we mumbled something about subjecting them to a rejuvenating treatment which might be performed in the perspective, fashionable at the time, of the resilience of the mind. For that purpose, I plunged (or rather replunged) into studies of neurobiology which I had started about ten years before for another research project with Klaus Vondung, called “Mysticism and Modernity”. Strangely enough, although I ignored both lectures and mysticism, one chapter after another got written until my confusion about the connections between these chapters was complete. I turned to other friends and colleagues (Peter Gendolla, Ralf Schnell and the aforementioned Klaus Vondung) and forced them to read that stuff with special attention to the ‘logic’, absent or present, of and between the chapters. Their criticisms, in turn, forced me to do something about that. As a consequence I rewrote large parts of the text sometimes up to ten times. I then sent the text to Wolfgang Wicht, among other things one of the two best reviewers I know (the other was the late Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus). Fortified with Wicht’s blessing, I tried my luck with the publishers and had the incredibly good fortune to run into Hubert Zapf who not only wrote a detailed (and very flattering) evaluation, but also suggested the Anglia Book Series as a suitable publishing platform.

My sincere thanks go to all the names mentioned so far and, in one of these paradoxes we know, with special intensity to those who do not want to be mentioned. I should now extend my thanks to the people at the publishing company Walter de Gruyter, in particular Katja Lehming and Olena Gainulina.