A Bastard Kind of Reasoning

A Bastard Kind of Reasoning PDF Author: Andrew M. Cooper
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438493231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
What do Einsteinian relativity, eighteenth-century field theory, Neoplatonism, and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's geometry—the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating, inventive new study, Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art, literature, physics, and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not, as others have assumed, materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul, of matter and Heaven, and even probes what it is to understand understanding, reason, and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian, Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still, Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space, time, and Man for ourselves.

A Bastard Kind of Reasoning

A Bastard Kind of Reasoning PDF Author: Andrew M. Cooper
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438493231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 437

Get Book

Book Description
What do Einsteinian relativity, eighteenth-century field theory, Neoplatonism, and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's geometry—the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating, inventive new study, Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art, literature, physics, and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not, as others have assumed, materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul, of matter and Heaven, and even probes what it is to understand understanding, reason, and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian, Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still, Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space, time, and Man for ourselves.

A Bastard Kind of Reasoning

A Bastard Kind of Reasoning PDF Author: Andrew M. Cooper
Publisher: Suny Press
ISBN: 9781438493213
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ranges widely and deeply across William Blake's oeuvre to show how his post-Newtonian vision of space-time anticipates Einsteinian relativity.

Ibn al-ʿArabī's Barzakh

Ibn al-ʿArabī's Barzakh PDF Author: Salman H. Bashier
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484343
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This book explores how Ibn al-'Arabi (1165–1240) used the concept of barzakh (the Limit) to deal with the philosophical problem of the relationship between God and the world, a major concept disputed in ancient and medieval Islamic thought. The term "barzakh" indicates the activity or actor that differentiates between things and that, paradoxically, then provides the context of their unity. Author Salman H. Bashier looks at early thinkers and shows how the synthetic solutions they developed provided the groundwork for Ibn al-'Arabi's unique concept of barzakh. Bashier discusses Ibn al-'Arabi's development of the concept of barzakh ontologically through the notion of the Third Thing and epistemologically through the notion of the Perfect Man, and compares Ibn al-'Arabi's vision with Plato's.

The Argument of the Action

The Argument of the Action PDF Author: Seth Benardete
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826430
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
This volume brings together Seth Benardete’s studies of Hesiod, Homer, and Greek tragedy, eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The Argument of the Action spans four decades of Seth Benardete’s work, documenting its impressive range. Benardete’s philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground, guided by the key he found in the Platonic dialogue: probing the meaning of speeches embedded in deeds, he uncovers the unifying intention of the work by tracing the way it unfolds through a movement of its own. Benardete’s original interpretations of the classics are the fruit of this discovery of the “argument of the action.”

Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 4.1-5 and 10-14

Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 4.1-5 and 10-14 PDF Author: J.O. Urmson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780934254
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This companion to J. O. Urmson's translation in the same series of Simplicius' Corollaries on Place and Time contains Simplicius' commentary on the chapters on place and time in Aristotle's Physics book 4. It is a rich source for the preceding 800 years' discussion of Aristotle's views. Simplicius records attacks on Aristotle's claim that time requires change, or consciousness. He reports a rebuttal of the Pythagorean theory that history will repeat itself exactly. He evaluates Aristotle's treatment of Zeno's paradox concerning place. Throughout he elucidates the structure and meaning of Aristotle's argument, and all the more clearly for having separated off his own views into the Corollaries.

The Empty Too

The Empty Too PDF Author: Arthur Broomfield
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443863009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
This engaging and often controversial study of Beckett’s works argues that, for Beckett, pure language is reality. Taking its title from a sentence in Worstward Ho, this rigorous reading of Beckett’s key texts claims that what we perceive in the existential world can never be proved to exist, while language survives scrutiny, and will ‘go on’ to become the real, once it has been divested of its connection to the corporeal. This book draws on the major philosophers to support this thesis, but in so doing argues that Beckett’s thinking surpasses all of theirs, because Beckett’s art is his philosophy and his philosophy is his art. For Beckett, pure language is beyond the text, it is the unpresentable presence, Hamm’s ‘life to come’.

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben PDF Author: Kevin Attell
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823262065
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Agamben’s thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book complicates and expands that constellation by showing how throughout his career Agamben has consistently and closely engaged (critically, sympathetically, polemically, and often implicitly) the work of Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor. The book begins by examining the development of Agamben’s key concepts—infancy, Voice, potentiality—from the 1960s to approximately 1990 and shows how these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts of Derrida. The second part examines the political turn in Agamben’s and Derrida’s thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.

Fractured Goodness

Fractured Goodness PDF Author: Christopher Shields
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198915713
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Aristotle offers a searing rejection of Plato's commitment to a Form of the Good; core among his complaints is that goodness is not univocal, that is, that there is no single essence-specifying account of goodness covering all the many varieties of goodness there are. Aristotle's anti-Platonic arguments have been variously received: many of his readers regard them as wholly successful while many others maintain they are abject failures. This volume reconstructs and assesses these arguments afresh and asks a simple question: if they are sound, what is left for Aristotle? In particular, what principles does he have to vouchsafe the commensurability of the good things he himself regards as commensurable?

Evagrius and Gregory

Evagrius and Gregory PDF Author: Kevin Corrigan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317138856
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Evagrius of Pontus and Gregory of Nyssa have either been overlooked by philosophers and theologians in modern times, or overshadowed by their prominent friend and brother (respectively), Gregory Nazianzus and Basil the Great. Yet they are major figures in the development of Christian thought in late antiquity and their works express a unique combination of desert and urban spiritualities in the lived and somewhat turbulent experience of an entire age. They also provide a significant link between the great ancient thinkers of the past - Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Clement and others - and the birth and transmission of the early Medieval period - associated with Boethius, Cassian and Augustine. This book makes accessible, to a wide audience, the thought of Evagrius and Gregory on the mind, soul and body, in the context of ancient philosophy/theology and the Cappadocians generally. Corrigan argues that in these two figures we witness the birth of new forms of thought and science. Evagrius and Gregory are no mere receivers of a monolithic pagan and Christian tradition, but innovative, critical interpreters of the range and limits of cognitive psychology, the soul-body relation, reflexive self-knowledge, personal and human identity and the soul’s practical relation to goodness in the context of human experience and divine self-disclosure. This book provides a critical evaluation of their thought on these major issues and argues that in Evagrius and Gregory we see the important integration of many different concerns that later Christian thought was not always able to balance including: mysticism, asceticism, cognitive science, philosophy, and theology.

Gersonides

Gersonides PDF Author: Seymour Feldman
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789624800
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The philosopher, astronomer, and biblical exegete known both as Gersonides and Ralbag (1288-1344) wrote a veritable library of works that testify not only to the breadth of his intellectual concerns but to his attempt to forge a synthesis between the secular sciences and Judaism. This is the first English-language study to assess his place and significance for Jewish thought, and it offers a comprehensive picture of his philosophy that is both descriptive and evaluative.