scholarly journals Reading through Galileo's Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading*

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Spiller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The World

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes what will ultimately be the modern assumption that acts of observation are also acts of reading.

The Well-Ordered Universe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Public Recognition

The prolific Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) published books on natural philosophy as well as stories, plays, poems, orations, allegories, and letters. Her mature philosophical system offered a unique vitalist materialist theory of Nature as composed of a continuous, non-atomistic, perceiving, knowing matter. In contrast to the dominant philosophical thinking of her day, Cavendish argued that all matter has free will and can choose whether or not to follow Nature’s rules. The Well-Ordered Universe explores the development of Cavendish’s natural philosophy from the atomism of her 1653 Poems, and Fancies to the vitalist materialism of her 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy and argues that her natural philosophy, her medical theories, and her social and political philosophy are all informed by an underlying concern with order, regularity, and rule-following. This focus on order reveals interesting connections among apparently disparate elements of Cavendish’s philosophical program, including her views on gender, on animals and the environment, and on sickness and health. Focusing on the role of order in Cavendish’s philosophy also helps reveal some key differences between her natural philosophy and her social and political philosophy, where Cavendish tended to be quite conservative. Cavendish thought that humans’ special desire for public recognition often leads to an unruly ambition, causing humans to disrupt society in ways not seen in the rest of Nature. The Well-Ordered Universe thus defends reading Cavendish as a royalist who endorsed absolute monarchy and a rigid social hierarchy for maintaining order in human society.

Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy

1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Schaffer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Picture ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
Work World ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls and spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century.

scholarly journals Violence in post-apartheid South Africa and the role of church and theology

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
C.F.C. Coetzee
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Church

South Africa is known as one of the most violent countries in the world. Since the seventeenth century, violence has been part of our history. Violence also played a significant role during the years of apartheid and the revolutionary struggle against apartheid. It was widely expected that violence would decrease in a post-apartheid democratic South Africa, but on the contrary, violence has increased in most cases. Even the TRC did not succeed in its goal to achieve reconciliation. In this paper it is argued that theology and the church have a great and significant role to play. Churches and church leaders who supported revolutionary violence against the apartheid system on Biblical “grounds”, should confess their unbiblical hermeneutical approach and reject the option of violence. The church also has a calling in the education of young people, the pastoral care of criminals and victims, in proclaiming the true Gospel to the government and in creating an ethos of human rights.

“A Few More or Less Make No Difference”

2018 ◽  
pp. 193-241
Author(s):  
Molly A. Warsh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
The World ◽  
Pearl Fishing ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
The City

This chapter considers how pearls’ subjective beauty, their complex and mysterious origins, and their powerful association with mastery of the seas allowed them to remain a powerful heuristic device for the expression of ideas about mutability, worth, and the nature of different places and peoples around the world. As empires moved to objectify profit and regulate the role of subjects in new ways, pearls continued to serve as a useful index (elenco in Spanish, a word Pliny the Elder employed to denote an elongated pearl but that, by the early seventeenth century, had come to stand for the very impulse to order and compartmentalize that the jewel provoked) of peoples’ highly independent and contingent calculations of worth. Through a consideration of crown-sponsored pearl-fishing interventions in the Scottish Highlands and along Swedish rivers close to the city of Gothenburg, this chapter traces how pearls continued to facilitate the expression of distinct approaches to resource husbandry at scales personal and imperial. The chapter further explores the late-seventeenth-century market for pearls in London and the jewel’s unstable political and economic value as expressed in private correspondence as well as in portraits of women and enslaved bodies whose value was considered impermanent and for purchase..

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Nicolas Malebranche ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Universe

Nicolas Malebranche, a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe.

scholarly journals Fire in the mind: changing understandings of fire in Western civilization

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1696) ◽  
pp. 20150166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Pyne
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Human History ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

For most of human history, fire has been a pervasive presence in human life, and so also in human thought. This essay examines the ways in which fire has functioned intellectually in Western civilization as mythology, as religion, as natural philosophy and as modern science. The great phase change occurred with the development of industrial combustion; fire faded from quotidian life, which also removed it from the world of informing ideas. Beginning with the discovery of oxygen, fire as an organizing concept fragmented into various subdisciplines of natural science and forestry. The Anthropocene, however, may revive the intellectual role of fire as an informing idea or at least a narrative conceit. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The interaction of fire and mankind’.

scholarly journals Chaos & Creation: Adam van Vianen's Gilt Ewer

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-215
Author(s):  
Jessica Whittle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
The World ◽  
Melting Surface ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Careful Design

With its bizarre melting surface and the solid forms emerging out of it, this seventeenth-century ewer by the goldsmith Adam van Vianen arouses curiosity and invites investigation. Commissioned in memory of his brother, Paulus van Vianen, who largely developed the auricular style perfected in it, this ewer is a work that rewards exploration – the more you investigate the more there is to see and be delighted by. The incredibly complicated construction of this piece attests to evident careful design and intent in every form in it, raising the question as to their individual meaning and the message they convey as a whole. This study answers the ewer’s call to curiosity by investigating the meanings of the individual forms and the commonalities that connect them as a group. The result is a surprising journey into the world of seventeenth-century alchemy, natural philosophy and Kunstkammers. Research into the iconographical meaning of both the visible forms and the folding surface in the context in which it was created has led the author of this analysis to conclude that the ewer functions as an allegory for the process of artistic creation, visualizing the artist bringing life into the world out of chaos.

scholarly journals Mellem Klosteret og Verden

2020 ◽  
Vol 82 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Mette Birkedal Bruun
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Notion ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The University

The article presents Armand-Jean de Rancé’s reform of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe. It positions Rancé’s ascetic programme within the wider devotional culture of seventeenth-century France, and explores in three registers the inherent dynamic between withdrawal from the world and engagement with the world. The first register concerns the abbot’s biography, the argument being that the familial, societal and ecclesiastical ircles inhabited by Rancé before and after his conversion are more closely connected than has been traditionally seen. The second is dedicated to the position of La Trappe in contemporary society and a discussion of the continuous traffic across the monastic wall of texts, guests, rumours and myths. The third involves an examination of the role of withdrawal and engagement in Rancé’s reform and its ascetic programme, showing how the abbot expounds the central notion of solitude as a place, a condition and a strategy. The article presents key insights from the author’s doctoral thesis, which was defended at the University of Copenhagen in June 2017.

Francis Bacon and His Fate in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2010–2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-220
Author(s):  
Doina-Cristina Rusu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Theory And Experiments

In this review I analyse new trends in Bacon-scholarship over the last decade. Bacon’s role in the history and philosophy of science has been the topic of debate since the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars took him to be either a key figure in the emergence of experimental sciences, or the opposite of what science is supposed to be. However, most of these bold claims were based on distortions and misunderstandings of Bacon’s programme. Starting in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, several studies offered a more nuanced account of Bacon’s philosophy and tried to refute some of the ‘unsound criticisms’. Moreover, over the last decade, we can notice a tendency to focus on Bacon’s more practical works, and not only on the more theoretical ones. In the context of these practical works, I identified several new trends: the role of the natural and experimental histories in the overall project of the Great Instauration, and their relation with natural philosophy; the function of mathematics and quantification; the employment of instruments and other devices to overcome the shortcomings of both the senses and the minds; the scientific methodology with an emphasis on the relation between theory and experiments, and the use of exploratory experiments; and finally Bacon’s use of sources and his influence on later early modern authors. As opposed to the idea that Bacon was interested either in collecting random facts or in inventing experimental reports to present his speculative ideas, Bacon is lately portrayed as a careful experimenter, meticulous in writing reports, ingenious in designing instruments and new experiments, and critical towards his own conceptions.

“Sinarum gentes … omnium sollertissimae”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thijs Weststeijn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
The World ◽  
Intermediary Role ◽  
Collaborative Efforts

This chapter presents a penetrating survey of the multilayered cultural exchanges between China and the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It highlights the intermediary role of the Low Countries in transacting cultural products between two ends of the world. The author pays particular attention to a group of leading Dutch Jesuits who travelled to China, then called the Middle Kingdom, and transferred the newly acquired knowledge of Chinese language, philosophy, arts, and history to the Dutch Republic. Their collaborative efforts in translating Confucian classics disclosed a carefully reinterpreted version of Confucianism, filtered through the Christian truth, which in turn aroused a number of later translations and commentaries bouncing between ancient Chinese wisdom and post-Renaissance humanism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document