Download or read book A Subtle and Mysterious Machine written by Emily Booth and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-01-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Charleton is an intriguing character—he flits through the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, the correspondence of Margaret Cavendish, and his texts appear in the libraries of better-known contemporaries. We catch sight of him 1 conversing with Pepys about teeth, arguing with Inigo Jones about the origin of 2 Stonehenge, being lampooned in contemporary satire, stealing from the Royal Society, and embarrassing himself in anatomical procedures. While extremely active in a broad range of Royal Society investigations, his main discovery there seems to have been that tadpoles turned into frogs. As a practising physician of limited means, Walter Charleton was reliant for his living upon patrons and his medical practice—in addition he had the m- fortune to live in an era of dramatic political change, and consequently of unpredictable fortune. His achievements were known on the Continent. Despite his embarrassments in Royal Society anatomical investigation he was offered the prestigious chair of anatomy at the University of Padua. He turned down this extraordinary opportunity, only to die destitute in his native country a couple of decades later. The lugubrious doctor is without doubt an enigma. Charleton’s Anglicanism and staunch Royalism were unwavering throughout his career. The latter caused difficulties for him when he attempted to gain membership of the College of Physicians during the interregnum. His religious views were a source of concern when he was offered the position at Padua.
Download or read book Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England Debates about the Nature of the Soul written by L. Linker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did writers understand the soul in late seventeenth-century England? This book considers depictions of the soul in literary texts that engage with Lucretius's Epicurean philosophy in De rerum natura or through the writings of the most important natural philosopher to disseminate Epicurean atomism in England, Walter Charleton (1619-1707).
Download or read book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines written by Minsoo Kang and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas written by Paul Salzman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas explores how women in England participated in the considerable intellectual and cultural diversity which characterised the 'late' early modern period, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century. This collection looks particularly at early modern women philosophers, playwrights and novelists, and considers how they engaged with ideas and debates over philosophical and scientific ideas, as well as literary innovations. This volume extends our understanding of the philosophical ideas and literary innovations of the early modern period and presents an exciting collection of women writers vigorously engaged with the intellectual debates that were occurring in the rapidly changing post-Restoration society.
Download or read book Regimens of the Mind written by Sorana Corneanu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Regimens of the Mind, Sorana Corneanu proposes a new approach to the epistemological and methodological doctrines of the leading experimental philosophers of seventeenth-century England, an approach that considers their often overlooked moral, psychological, and theological elements. Corneanu focuses on the views about the pursuit of knowledge in the writings of Robert Boyle and John Locke, as well as in those of several of their influences, including Francis Bacon and the early Royal Society virtuosi. She argues that their experimental programs of inquiry fulfill the role of regimens for curing, ordering, and educating the mind toward an ethical purpose, an idea she tracks back to the ancient tradition of cultura animi. Corneanu traces this idea through its early modern revival and illustrates how it organizes the experimental philosophers’ reflections on the discipline of judgment, the study of nature, and the study of Scripture. It is through this lens, the author suggests, that the core features of the early modern English experimental philosophy—including its defense of experience, its epistemic modesty, its communal nature, and its pursuit of “objectivity”—are best understood.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics written by Tom L. Beauchamp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-17 with total page 997 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and R.G. Frey.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century written by Peter R. Anstey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-six new essays by experts on seventeenth-century thought provide a critical survey of this key period in British intellectual history. These far-reaching essays discuss not only central debates and canonical authors from Francis Bacon to Isaac Newton, but also explore less well-known figures and topics from the period.
Download or read book Mechanism written by Domenico Bertoloni Meli and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mechanical philosophy first emerged as a leading player on the intellectual scene in the early modern period—seeking to explain all natural phenomena through the physics of matter and motion—and the term mechanism was coined. Over time, natural phenomena came to be understood through machine analogies and explanations and the very word mechanism, a suggestive and ambiguous expression, took on a host of different meanings. Emphasizing the important role of key ancient and early modern protagonists, from Galen to Robert Boyle, this book offers a historical investigation of the term mechanism from the late Renaissance to the end of the seventeenth century, at a time when it was used rather frequently in complex debates about the nature of the notion of the soul. In this rich and detailed study, Domenico Bertoloni Melifocuses on strategies for discussing the notion of mechanism in historically sensitive ways; the relation between mechanism, visual representation, and anatomy; the usage and meaning of the term in early modern times; and Marcello Malpighi and the problems of fecundation and generation, among the most challenging topics to investigate from a mechanistic standpoint.
Download or read book The Beauty of Melancholy and British Women Writers 1670 1720 written by Laura Alexander and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers melancholy language in representative works by several British women writers in late Stuart England. To understand how these women writers understood and reframed the discussion about melancholy and women’s experience of suffering in their art, it turns to the twentieth-century French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, whose radical work on melancholy in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) provides an alternative psychoanalytic perspective for considering melancholy discourse created by women experiencing alienation, depression, and anguish in earlier periods. Kristeva offers a theoretical lens for understanding loss as a significant and ongoing perspective on life experience that finds expression through art and language. This text argues that early women writers created a new expressive mode, revising existing models to account for their own losses during a time of cultural and political transitioning in England. These writers provide a melancholy aesthetic in their works or depict depressed female figures reflecting artistic angst and a new discourse within language for articulating pain.
Download or read book Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers written by David S. Sytsma and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Baxter, one of the 17th century's most famous Puritans, is known as an author of devotional literature. But he was also skilled in medieval philosophy. In this work, David Sytsma draws on largely unexamined works to present a chronogolical and thematic account of Baxter's relation to the people and concepts involved in the rise of mechanical philosophy in late-17th-century England
Download or read book The Philosophy of Kenelm Digby 1603 1665 written by Laura Georgescu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the philosophical and scientific achievements of Sir Kenelm Digby, a successful English diplomat, privateer and natural philosopher of the mid-1600s. Not widely remembered today, Digby is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of early modern philosophers. Among scholars, he is known for his attempt to reconcile what perhaps seem to be irreconcilable philosophical frameworks: Aristotelianism and early modern mechanism. This contributed volume offers the first full-length treatment of Digby’s work and of the unique position he occupied in early modern intellectual history. It explores key aspects of Digby’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical method, and offers a new appraisal of his contributions to early modern natural philosophy and mathematics. A dozen contributors offer their expert insight into such topics as Body, quantity, and measures in Digby's natural philosophy Ecumenism and common notions in Digby Aristotelianism and accidents in Digby's philosophy Digby on body and soul Digby on method and experiments This book volume will be of benefit to a broad audience of scholars, educators, and students of the history of early modern science and philosophy.
Download or read book Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post Restoration England written by Matthew Walker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architects, Builders, and Intellectual Culture in Restoration England charts the moment when well-educated, well-resourced, English intellectuals first became interested in classical architecture in substantial numbers. This occurred after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 and involved people such as John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and Roger North. Matthew Walker explores how these figures treated architecture as a subject of intellectual enquiry, either as writers, as designers of buildings, or as both. In four substantial chapters it looks at how the architect was defined as a major intellectual figure, how architects acquired material that allowed them to define themselves as intellectually competent architects, how intellectual writers in the period handled knowledge of ancient architecture in their writing, and how the design process in architecture was conceived of in theoretical writing at the time. In all, Walker shows that the key to understanding English architectural culture at the time is to understand how architecture was handled as knowledge, and how architects were conceived of as collectors and producers of such knowledge. He also makes the claim that architecture was treated as an extremely serious and important area of intellectual enquiry, the result of which was that by the turn of the eighteenth century, architects and architectural writers could count themselves amongst England's intellectual and cultural elite.
Download or read book Naturalism in the Christian Imagination written by Peter N. Jordan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling contribution to 'science and religion' debates, showing how early modern thinkers reconciled naturalism with a providential world view.
Download or read book Web of Nature Martin Lister 1639 1712 the First Arachnologist written by Anna Marie Roos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full-length biography of Dr. Martin Lister (1639-1712), vice-president of the Royal Society, Royal Physician, and the first arachnologist and conchologist, provides an unprecedented picture of a seventeenth-century virtuoso. Lister is recognized for his discovery of ballooning spiders and as the father of conchology, but it is less well known that he invented the histogram, provided Newton with alloys, and donated the first significant natural history collections to the Ashmolean Museum. Just as Lister was the first to make a systematic study of spiders and their webs, this biography is the first to analyze the significant webs of knowledge, patronage, and familial and gender relationships that governed his life as a scientist and physician.
Download or read book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.
Download or read book The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature written by Peter Remien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature traces a genealogy of ecology in seventeenth-century literature and natural philosophy through the development of the protoecological concept of 'the oeconomy of nature'. Founded in 1644 by Kenelm Digby, this concept was subsequently employed by a number of theologians, physicians, and natural philosophers to conceptualize nature as an interdependent system. Focusing on the middle decades of the seventeenth century, Peter Remien examines how Samuel Gott, Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, Samuel Collins, and Thomas Burnet formed the oeconomy of nature. Remien also shows how literary authors Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton use the discourse of oeconomy to explore the contours of humankind's relationship with the natural world. This book participates in an intellectual history of the science of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of how we understand the relationship between literature and ecology in the early modern period.
Download or read book Argument and Authority in Early Modern England written by Conal Condren and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-17 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical reappraisal of the character of moral and political theory in early modern England.
