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.

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.

Stoicism and the Natural World

2018 ◽  
pp. 676-698
Author(s):  
Teun Tieleman
Keyword(s):  
Applied Sciences ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Historical Outline ◽  
The World ◽  
Preceding Discussion ◽  
The Individual

The chapter discusses the natural philosophy of the ancient Stoics including the attitude they took towards the so-called special and applied sciences (technai). After a historical outline introducing the main facts and personalities (sec. 1), the role and status of natural philosophy within the Stoic system are explained, with special reference to the moral and theological dimension of the study of nature, that is, the Stoic view of the world as a rationally structured and providentially determined whole and what this view implies for our way of living (sec. 2). Two subsequent sections are concerned with Stoic materialist physics on both the universal (macrocosmic) and the individual (microcosmic) level respectively (sec. 3 and sec. 4). The next section is specifically devoted to exploring Stoic views on, and involvement with, applied sciences and arts such as astronomy, mathematics and medicine (sec. 5). The Epilogue sums up the main results from the preceding discussion (sec. 6).

Historical pigments, dyes and binders

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. 419-476
Author(s):  
Magdalene Gärtner
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Manufacturing Processes ◽  
Work Processes ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
Complex Knowledge ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Application Requirements

Abstract Artistic creation has accompanied the development of mankind since the beginning. Color as the appearance of things perceptible with the eye is fundamental for the creative process. For the longest time in the past, the use of color was characterized by often very complex manufacturing processes that required the greatest inventiveness and complex knowledge of comprehensive interrelationships from the user. Existing knowledge was passed on and used again and again, but the basic color materials were always further developed and sensitively adapted to the differentiated areas of application and needs. Today, paint coats and, in some cases, extensive collections of recipes provide us with evidence and ideas about these processes in previous times. In this context, it is important to understand that paint recipes were treated like valuables and secrets in the past. The present overview offers insights into the world of historical pigments, dyes and binders. However, a complete overview is not possible at this point due to the diversity of sources, the individual work processes and the different application requirements.

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.

Air, Wind, Sun, Spirit

Nuncius ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 658-682
Author(s):  
Frances Gage
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Early Modern Medicine

Guido Reni’s early critics described him as a painter of “celestial ideas,” and his artistic process has been characterized as one rooted in the fantasia and the Idea. From the seventeenth-century on, Reni’s figures were praised for the “airs of the heads,” a notion with astrological and medical connotations, while the papal physician and art critic Giulio Mancini described Reni’s manner as “spirited,” a term suggestive of the airy movement Reni so powerfully represented in his Aurora. The concept of “spirit” or “spirits” also retained important connotations in early modern medicine and natural philosophy. A reconsideration of Reni’s Aurora in the context of medical and natural philosophical investigations of generation, artistic creation and the nature of and relationship between celestial and terrestrial regions demonstrates the connections between early modern artistic reception, medicine and natural philosophy.

Reductionist Medicine and Its Cultural Authority

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph E. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Holistic Approaches ◽  
The World ◽  
General Explanation

This chapter considers why, despite important reasons to adopt more integrative approaches, medicine continue on a reductionist course. Davis frames a general explanation by considering the powerful appeal of two enduring legacies. First are the implications of seventeenth-century natural philosophy for the commitments of modern science and medicine. Second are the nineteenth-century changes that joined medicine with the physical and life sciences and gave birth to a particular constellation of ideal-types—the “biomedical model”—that have structured thinking about disease and treatment ever since. As Davis shows, the problem for integrative, holistic approaches arises from these two legacies together. As interwoven with central contemporary values, these legacies have given reductionist medicine a distinct cultural authority: the authority to “name the world.”

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 263-276
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Project ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Taking Responsibility

This concluding chapter returns to modernity’s defining problematique: ordering, understood coextensively as an epistemological and a political project. It discusses the extent to which the body operated as the great naturaliser of history—working to stabilise political construction, and notably the racialised and gendered figures that entered into the making of the modern category of ‘the human’ from the onset. The chapter also considers the two sets of processes, of putting together and of dividing up, that took the body as their referent and produced, respectively, the state and the individual who bears rights. It then examines the relations between construction, constitution, and another kind of corporeal agency altogether: generation (giving birth). Generation, as the distinctive agentic capacity that indexes only one kind of body, the female one, functioned throughout the seventeenth century as the ‘other’ to constitution, to the agency that was being expended and experimented with to craft the state and the subject of rights. Finally, the chapter looks at the duty of critique, considering it in its relation to agency and to the urgency of taking responsibility for the world in which people live, and therefore for changing it.

scholarly journals NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN PERSONALITY’S WORLDVIEW

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-59
Author(s):  
Halyna Berehova
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Intellectual Discourse ◽  
World Outlook ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
The Way

The article claims that the assimilation of knowledge from the natural philosophy should help future professionals to form worldviews in the range of "man - nature", namely: to grasp the integrity of nature and its fundamentality rationally, to comprehend nature as a general, limiting concept that explains the scheme of understanding individual things; as a regulatory idea that allows us to understand all things and all objects in their unity and in different forms, to build a rational scientific picture of the world, by filling in the data of natural science and discovering the internal principles of interconnection and determination of things, to reveal different levels of nature as a whole – from inorganic nature to life in general and human life in particular. It is a fragment of a pragmatist-instrumentalist philosophicaleducational system, which consists in effective purposeful influence on the individual through a specific tool - philosophical knowledge. Here, natural philosophy becomes an instrument of intellectual discourse of the individual, and its study is a pragma (action) on the way to forming the world outlook of the individual and the universal picture of the world. It is the natural and philosophical knowledge that shapes the worldviews of the new (modern) personality, helping to understand the totality of the objective conditions of humanity's existence and to define its survival as a pressing problem of the present.

New walls to keep the bad out: populism and the totalitarian psyche

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Coline Covington
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychic Development ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 and marked the end of the Cold War. As old antagonisms thawed a new landscape emerged of unification and tolerance. Censorship was no longer the principal means of ensuring group solidarity. The crumbling bricks brought not only freedom of movement but freedom of thought. Now, nearly thirty years later, globalisation has created a new balance of power, disrupting borders and economies across the world. The groups that thought they were in power no longer have much of a say and are anxious about their future. As protest grows, we are beginning to see that the old antagonisms have not disappeared but are, in fact, resurfacing. This article will start by looking at the dissembling of a marriage in which the wall that had peacefully maintained coexistence disintegrates and leads to a psychic development that uncannily mirrors that of populism today. The individual vignette leads to a broader psychological understanding of the totalitarian dynamic that underlies populism and threatens once again to imprison us within its walls.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

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