Download or read book A Comet of the Enlightenment written by Johan C.-E. Stén and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Finnish mathematician and astronomer Anders Johan Lexell (1740–1784) was a long-time close collaborator as well as the academic successor of Leonhard Euler at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. Lexell was initially invited by Euler from his native town of Abo (Turku) in Finland to Saint Petersburg to assist in the mathematical processing of the astronomical data of the forthcoming transit of Venus of 1769. A few years later he became an ordinary member of the Academy. This is the first-ever full-length biography devoted to Lexell and his prolific scientific output. His rich correspondence especially from his grand tour to Germany, France and England reveals him as a lucid observer of the intellectual landscape of enlightened Europe. In the skies, a comet, a minor planet and a crater on the Moon named after Lexell also perpetuate his memory.

Download or read book Lady Mary Wortley Montagu written by Isobel Grundy and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to look at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's achievement as a vital figure in the women's literary tradition. Robert Halsband's book on her life, the sixth this century and published in 1956, was the first to apply scholarly techniques to establishing the facts. The inaccurateaccounts given before Halsband testify to Lady Mary's compelling interest as a woman who wrote, travelled, campaigned publicly for medical advance, gossiped, and was involved in high-profile literary quarrels. Knowledge of her life has made considerable gains since Halsband, as understanding of theissues involved in trying to move between the roles of proper lady and woman writer has increased enormously. This life fruitfully exploits the tension between literary history and feminist reading. Isobel Grundy highlights Montagu's adolescent longing for literary fame, her growing understandingof the implications of this for gender and class imperatives, the frustrations and concessions involved in her collaborations with male writers, the punitive responses of society, the gaps at every stage of her life between her ascertainable circumstances and her construction of herself in lettersand other writings. The book situates those writings in relation to her own theorizing and her very wide reading in women's texts as well as men's. Finally, it looks at a range of contemporary and near-contemporary responses.

Download or read book A Comet of the Enlightenment written by Johan C.-E. Stén and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Finnish mathematician and astronomer Anders Johan Lexell (1740–1784) was a long-time close collaborator as well as the academic successor of Leonhard Euler at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. Lexell was initially invited by Euler from his native town of Abo (Turku) in Finland to Saint Petersburg to assist in the mathematical processing of the astronomical data of the forthcoming transit of Venus of 1769. A few years later he became an ordinary member of the Academy. This is the first-ever full-length biography devoted to Lexell and his prolific scientific output. His rich correspondence especially from his grand tour to Germany, France and England reveals him as a lucid observer of the intellectual landscape of enlightened Europe. In the skies, a comet, a minor planet and a crater on the Moon named after Lexell also perpetuate his memory.

Download or read book Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet written by Pierre Bayle and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2000-05-18 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I tremble when I recall the terrible appearance [the comet] had on Saturday evening in the clear sky, when it was observed by everybody with inexpressible astonishment. It seemed as though the heavens were burning, or as if the very air was on fire...[F]rom this little star stretched out such a wonderfully long tail that even an intellectual man was overcome with trembling; one's hair stood on end as this uncommon, terrible, and indescribable tail came into view...O wonderful almighty God! The heavens show thy might and the earth thy handiwork!" — Eyewitness account of a comet which appeared over Europe on December 24, 1680 The appearance of this comet caused so many panicked inquiries to be made of Pierre Bayle, one of the Enlightenment's greatest thinkers, that he decided to formally respond to them, hence the present work, which first appeared in 1682. The book's principle task was to undermine the influence of "superstition" in political life, and it was here that Bayle made the notorious suggestion, unique in the history of political thought until then, that a decent society of atheists is possible in principle. There is no other English translation of this book in print—the only other version was printed in 1708. This translation is based on a recently revised critical edition of the complete French text and includes a substantial interpretive essay that both elucidates the arguments of the work and indicates the importance of Bayle in the history of the modern Enlightenment.

Download or read book Atlas of Great Comets written by Ronald Stoyan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the ages, comets, enigmatic and beautiful wandering objects that appear for weeks or months, have alternately fascinated and terrified humankind. The result of five years of careful research, Atlas of Great Comets is a generously illustrated reference on thirty of the greatest comets that have been witnessed and documented since the Middle Ages. Special attention is given to the cultural and scientific impact of each appearance, supported by a wealth of images, from woodcuts, engravings, historical paintings and artifacts, to a showcase of the best astronomical photos and images. Following the introduction, giving the broad historical context and a modern scientific interpretation, the Great Comets feature in chronological order. For each, there is a contemporary description of its appearance along with its scientific, cultural and historical significance. Whether you are an armchair astronomer or a seasoned comet-chaser, this spectacular reference deserves a place on your shelf.

Download or read book The Dream of Enlightenment The Rise of Modern Philosophy written by Anthony Gottlieb and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Slate’s 10 Best Books of the Year Anthony Gottlieb’s landmark The Dream of Reason and its sequel challenge Bertrand Russell’s classic as the definitive history of Western philosophy. Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb documented the first burst, which came in the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Now, in his sequel, The Dream of Enlightenment, Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short period—from the early 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution—Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and that of the birth of modern philosophy. As Gottlieb explains, all these men were amateurs: none had much to do with any university. They tried to fathom the implications of the new science and of religious upheaval, which led them to question traditional teachings and attitudes. What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and for our ideas of God? How should a government deal with religious diversity—and what, actually, is government for? Such questions remain our questions, which is why Descartes, Hobbes, and the others are still pondered today. Yet it is because we still want to hear them that we can easily get these philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think they speak our language and live in our world; but to understand them properly, we must step back into their shoes. Gottlieb puts readers in the minds of these frequently misinterpreted figures, elucidating the history of their times and the development of scientific ideas while engagingly explaining their arguments and assessing their legacy in lively prose. With chapters focusing on Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, and Voltaire—and many walk-on parts—The Dream of Enlightenment creates a sweeping account of what the Enlightenment amounted to, and why we are still in its debt.

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Ritchie Robertson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

Download or read book Enlightened in the 21st Century written by Richard Krauland and published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These past fifty years have seen incredible advances in mankind's scientific knowledge. We can now replace knees, hips, and other joints inside the human body, and we use robots to do critical parts of the surgeries. We are using retroviruses to actually rewrite the DNA within living patients, in order to make their bodies more effective in fighting diseases. We have seen subatomic particles, during their brief appearances, in our supercollider. We have captured images of the moment when two hydrogen nuclei fuse into one helium nucleus. We can speak to anyone in the world if they are in possession of a handheld cell phone. We have orbiting observatories that allow us to see galaxies that are over 13 billion lightyears away, and we have sent probes to other planets even landing one on a comet. With all this new knowledge, and much more, it's time to ask, has any of this information helped us to answer those age-old questions about the purpose of life, the existence of God, the origins of the universe, and our role within it all? In this book, the author emphatically answers yes! We now have enough scientific facts to answer most of those questions. And in a clear and easily readable way, he explains what we now know and how each of us can use these new insights, in order to improve our lives tremendously. This work in intended to improve your life. In fact, I am sure it will.

Download or read book Great Demon Kings written by John Giorno and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking, sexy memoir of a young poet making his way in 1960s New York City When he graduated from Columbia in 1958, John Giorno was handsome, charismatic, ambitious, and eager to soak up as much of Manhattan's art and culture as possible. Poetry didn't pay the bills, so he worked on Wall Street, spending his nights at the happenings, underground movie premiers, art shows, and poetry readings that brought the city to life. An intense romantic relationship with Andy Warhol—not yet the global superstar he would soon become—exposed Giorno to even more of the downtown scene, but after starring in Warhol's first movie, Sleep, they drifted apart. Giorno soon found himself involved with Robert Rauschenberg and later Jasper Johns, both relationships fueling his creativity. He quickly became a renowned poet in his own right, working at the intersection of literature and technology, freely crossing genres and mediums alongside the likes of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Twenty-five years in the making, and completed shortly before Giorno's death in 2019, Great Demon Kings is the memoir of a singular cultural pioneer: an openly gay man at a time when many artists remained closeted and shunned gay subject matter, and a devout Buddhist whose faith acted as a rudder during a life of tremendous animation, one full of fantastic highs and frightening lows. Studded with appearances by nearly every it-boy and girl of the downtown scene (including a moving portrait of a decades-long friendship with Burroughs), this book offers a joyous, life-affirming, and sensational look at New York City during its creative peak, narrated in the unforgettable voice of one of its most singular characters.

Download or read book New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment written by Brett C. McInelly and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-09 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

Download or read book Pirating and Publishing written by Robert Darnton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how book piracy in pre-Revolutionary France expanded the reach of the works that would inspire momentous change.

Download or read book Minerva s French Sisters written by Nina Rattner Gelbart and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating collective biography of six female scientists in eighteenth-century France, whose stories were largely written out of history "Of the 72 scientific names engraved on the Eiffel Tower, none is female. Omissions include the six Enlightenment women dubbed 'Minerva's sisters' by historian Nina Gelbart in her pioneering, evocative rescue."--Nature This book presents the stories of six intrepid Frenchwomen of science in the Enlightenment whose accomplishments--though celebrated in their lifetimes--have been generally omitted from subsequent studies of their period: mathematician and philosopher Elisabeth Ferrand, astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, field naturalist Jeanne Barret, garden botanist and illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, anatomist and inventor Marie-Marguerite Biheron, and chemist Geneviève d'Arconville. By adjusting our lens, we can find them. In a society where science was not yet an established profession for men, much less women, these six audacious and inspiring figures made their mark on their respective fields of science and on Enlightenment society, as they defied gender expectations and conventional norms. Their boldness and contributions to science were appreciated by such luminaries as Franklin, the philosophes, and many European monarchs. The book is written in an unorthodox style to match the women's breaking of boundaries.

Download or read book A Star Shall Fall written by Marie Brennan and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A second city lies beneath the streets of London: The Onyx HallNa place of intrigue and faerie enchantment. The year is 1758, and the faeries must join their magic with mortal man's science to defeat a Dragon of fire intent on destroying London.

Download or read book Enlightenment Is Sexy written by Valerie Gangas and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living life from the INSIDE OUT is the only way to roll. There is a whole world inside of you waiting to be tapped into. Once you begin paying attention to your inner world (instead of non-stop focusing on trends, fashions and TV shows), once you start identifying what's working for you and what's not, once you clarify what you really want and understand that you have a choice in whether or not and HOW you manifest it, get ready for radical change to start happening! Because nothing short of a truly magical life is your birthright....and Enlightenment Is Sexy is your guide to living it! A few years ago, the book's author, Valerie Gangas, learned Transcendental Meditation and during her first meditation, she had what some people call an awakening: She began to see EVERYTHING about life differently than she had in the past. In her own words, it was a sudden and profound shift in perception, so much so that it became crystal clear that our INNER life is what generates ALL the juice, ALL the goodies, ALL the righteous experiences any of us have ever had and will ever have. And so Valerie started living in a completely new way-from the inside out. As a result, she can now play at creating a better existence every day... more and more richly rewarding life experiences (e.g. relationships, health, job, travel, studies) every day! And what she's found is that all of us-every single person on the planet-is WAY more radiant, attractive, and yes, sexy, when that inner life is lit up like a blazing sun! This, she says, is how to lead an enlightened, magical life! Indeed, wouldn't it be amazing to have such a strong sense of self that you effortlessly attract the perfect partner, an amazing job or whatever it is your heart has longed for, but has eluded you for what seems like your whole life? And what if that same, well-developed sense of who you are would naturally bring you more happiness than you ever dreamed of? According to Ms. Gangas, not only is all of that possible; it's your birthright!

Download or read book The Shadow of Enlightenment written by Theresa Levitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the intersection of science and politics in the work of Francois Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot, the principle architects of the optical revolution of early 19th-century France. Their disagreement over the optical accessibility of the world played out across a wide range of French culture.

Download or read book The Creation of the Modern World written by Roy Porter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a critically acclaimed author comes an engagingly written and groundbreaking new work that highlights the long-underestimated British role in delivering the Enlightenment to the modern world. Porter reveals how the monumental transformation of thinking in Great Britain influenced wider developments elsewhere. of color illustrations.

Download or read book The Great Comet written by Dave Malloy and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A behind-the-scenes look at the making of an award-winning musical! Here is the official, fascinating, behind-the scenes journey of the new musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, from its inception, to Off-Off Broadway, to Off-Broadway, to its premiere at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. The musical is based on a dramatic 70-page slice of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Profusely illustrated, the book also includes an annotated script and a special CD with three songs from the Off-Broadway production and two all-new recordings for the Broadway production featuring Josh Groban with a 25-piece orchestra.