Vitalizing Nature In The Enlightenment

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Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment

Peter H. Reill
Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment Book PDF

Author : Peter H. Reill
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2005-06-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780520931008

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Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment by Peter H. Reill Pdf

This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life.

History and Nature in the Enlightenment

Nathaniel Wolloch
History and Nature in the Enlightenment Book PDF

Author : Nathaniel Wolloch
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-22
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317121725

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History and Nature in the Enlightenment by Nathaniel Wolloch Pdf

The mastery of nature was viewed by eighteenth-century historians as an important measure of the progress of civilization. Modern scholarship has hitherto taken insufficient notice of this important idea. This book discusses the topic in connection with the mainstream religious, political, and philosophical elements of Enlightenment culture. It considers works by Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Herder, Vico, Raynal, Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and a wide range of lesser- and better-known figures. It also discusses many classical, medieval, and early modern sources which influenced Enlightenment historiography, as well as eighteenth-century attitudes toward nature in general.

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines

Minsoo Kang
Sublime Dreams of Living Machines Book PDF

Author : Minsoo Kang
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2011-02-28
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780674264908

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Sublime Dreams of Living Machines by Minsoo Kang Pdf

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art

Sarah Cohen
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth Century Art Book PDF

Author : Sarah Cohen
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2021-02-11
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781350203600

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Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art by Sarah Cohen Pdf

How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters such as Chardin, as well as sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.

Re-Imagining Nature

Alister E. McGrath
Re Imagining Nature Book PDF

Author : Alister E. McGrath
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2016-05-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781119046370

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Re-Imagining Nature by Alister E. McGrath Pdf

Reimagining Nature is a new introduction to the fast developing area of natural theology, written by one of the world’s leading theologians. The text engages in serious theological dialogue whilst looking at how past developments might illuminate and inform theory and practice in the present. This text sets out to explore what a properly Christian approach to natural theology might look like and how this relates to alternative interpretations of our experience of the natural world Alister McGrath is ideally placed to write the book as one of the world’s best known theologians and a chief proponent of natural theology This new work offers an account of the development of natural theology throughout history and informs of its likely contribution in the present This feeds in current debates about the relationship between science and religion, and religion and the humanities Engages in serious theological dialogue, primarily with Augustine, Aquinas, Barth and Brunner, and includes the work of natural scientists, philosophers of science, and poets

Organic Supplements

Miriam Jacobson,Julie Park
Organic Supplements Book PDF

Author : Miriam Jacobson,Julie Park
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813944951

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Organic Supplements by Miriam Jacobson,Julie Park Pdf

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms—and things that originate from living organisms— enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.

The Natural Laws of Plot

Yoon Sun Lee
The Natural Laws of Plot Book PDF

Author : Yoon Sun Lee
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2022-10-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781512823417

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The Natural Laws of Plot by Yoon Sun Lee Pdf

Is plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting—and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place. In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world—and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel participates in the same lines of inquiry about the world as pursued by the natural and physical sciences. Lee argues that the novel emerges and evolves in tandem with the development of scientific practices and concepts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to investigate the idea of a unified and objective world. Drawing on readings from Defoe, Austen, Scott, and many others, Lee demonstrates how bodies, human and non-human, behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot, and how they are subject to causes and consequences that can occur independently of individual action, social forces, or metaphysical destiny. This interest in representing and exploring how things happen sets the novel apart from other literary genres, and makes the history of science integral to the understanding of the history and theory of the novel, and of narrative. Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.

Dilemmas of Enlightenment

Oscar Kenshur
Dilemmas of Enlightenment Book PDF

Author : Oscar Kenshur
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2023-12-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780520913462

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Dilemmas of Enlightenment by Oscar Kenshur Pdf

Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory. While striving to resolve "dilemmas" occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls "intellectual co-optation." In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.

Invisible Hands

Jonathan Sheehan,Dror Wahrman
Invisible Hands Book PDF

Author : Jonathan Sheehan,Dror Wahrman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2022-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226824048

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Invisible Hands by Jonathan Sheehan,Dror Wahrman Pdf

A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency. Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.

Forces of Nature

Adrian Renner,Frederike Middelhoff
Forces of Nature Book PDF

Author : Adrian Renner,Frederike Middelhoff
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 9783110783827

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Forces of Nature by Adrian Renner,Frederike Middelhoff Pdf

Um 1800 diskutierte man über Naturkräfte in verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Zusammenhängen: Anziehung und Abstoßung, Lebenskräfte und elektrische Ströme, der "Bildungstrieb" und biologische Organismen wurden als Kräfte untersucht, die sich auf „natürliche" Prozesse zurückführen lassen. Literatur, Wissenschaft und Philosophie der deutschsprachigen Romantik von Schelling bis zu Günderrode und Hölderlin arbeiteten sich an Konzepten von Kräften ab, die als dynamisch und in beständiger Tätigkeit begriffen wurden – Kräfte, die auch menschliche Handlungen, soziale Strukturen und kulturelle Entwicklungen einzuschließen schienen. Der Band erkundet Vor- und Darstellungen von Naturkräften in der Romantik an der Schnittstelle von Naturwissenschaft und kulturellen Vorstellungswelten.

Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century

Keith Michael Baker,Jenna M. Gibbs
Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century Book PDF

Author : Keith Michael Baker,Jenna M. Gibbs
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2016-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442630246

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Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century by Keith Michael Baker,Jenna M. Gibbs Pdf

Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century is a unique reappraisal of Enlightenment thought on nature, biology, and the organic world.

Divining Science

Warren Dym
Divining Science Book PDF

Author : Warren Dym
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2010-09-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004188716

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Divining Science by Warren Dym Pdf

The patronage of dowsers by mining administrations through the eighteenth century challenges common assumptions about the Enlightenment. Rather than decline in importance like alchemy and astrology, dowsing transformed from a study of mineral vapors into an experimental branch of geophysics.

God in the Enlightenment

William J. Bulman,Robert G. Ingram
God in the Enlightenment Book PDF

Author : William J. Bulman,Robert G. Ingram
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2016-04-25
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780190267094

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God in the Enlightenment by William J. Bulman,Robert G. Ingram Pdf

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.

Mapping Leopardi

Emanuela Cervato,Mark Epstein,Giulia Santi
Mapping Leopardi Book PDF

Author : Emanuela Cervato,Mark Epstein,Giulia Santi
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 503 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2019-02-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781527530324

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Mapping Leopardi by Emanuela Cervato,Mark Epstein,Giulia Santi Pdf

Are you curious about the private laboratory of Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s greatest modern lyrical poet? Interested in using expert maps to explore it, while deepening your acquaintance with one of the most creative materialist thinkers? This collection of essays makes very original use of the new translation of Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri and investigates its connections to all his other works. Whether your primary interest lies in Italian literature and criticism, linguistics and poetics, the origins of genres such as the fantastic, or in philosophical queries regarding materialism and hedonism, this collection offers original research that will challenge the reader to view this outstanding intellectual in a new light. Offering some of the earliest reflections against anthropocentrism, championing the artist’s interest in the natural sciences, and questioning humanity’s purpose(s) in this world, Leopardi’s work is presented in this volume as an indispensable tool to understand the complexity of Italy’s cultural transformations between the 18th and the 19th centuries.

A Common Sky

A.D. Nuttall
A Common Sky Book PDF

Author : A.D. Nuttall
Publisher : University of California Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2021-01-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780520361775

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A Common Sky by A.D. Nuttall Pdf

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.