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Author: Roy Willis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000183599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Mainstream science has long dismissed astrology as a form of primitive superstition, despite or perhaps even because of its huge popular interest. From daily horoscopes to in-depth and personalized star forecasts, astrology, for many, plays a crucial role in the organization of everyday life. Present-day scholars and scientists remain baffled as to why this pseudo-science exercises such control over supposedly modern, rational and enlightened individuals, yet so far they have failed to produce any meaningful analysis of why it impacts on so many lives and what lies behind its popular appeal. Moving beyond scientific scepticism, Astrology, Science and Culture finally fills the gap by probing deeply into the meaning and importance of this extraordinary belief system. From the dawn of pre-history, humankind has had an intimate connection with the stars. With its roots in the Neolithic culture of Europe and the Middle East, astrology was traditionally heralded as a divinatory language. Willis and Curry argue that, contrary to contemporary understanding including that of most astrologers astrology was originally, and remains, a divinatory practice. Tackling its rich and controversial history, its problematic relationship to Jungian theory, and attempts to prove its grounding in objective reality, this book not only persuasively demonstrates that astrology is far more than a superstitious relic of years gone by, but that it enables a fundamental critique of the scientism of its opponents. Groundbreaking in its reconciliation of astrologys ancient traditions and its modern day usage, this book impressively unites philosophy, science, anthropology, and history, to produce a powerful exploration of astrology, past and present.
Author: Roy Willis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000183599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book Here
Book Description
Mainstream science has long dismissed astrology as a form of primitive superstition, despite or perhaps even because of its huge popular interest. From daily horoscopes to in-depth and personalized star forecasts, astrology, for many, plays a crucial role in the organization of everyday life. Present-day scholars and scientists remain baffled as to why this pseudo-science exercises such control over supposedly modern, rational and enlightened individuals, yet so far they have failed to produce any meaningful analysis of why it impacts on so many lives and what lies behind its popular appeal. Moving beyond scientific scepticism, Astrology, Science and Culture finally fills the gap by probing deeply into the meaning and importance of this extraordinary belief system. From the dawn of pre-history, humankind has had an intimate connection with the stars. With its roots in the Neolithic culture of Europe and the Middle East, astrology was traditionally heralded as a divinatory language. Willis and Curry argue that, contrary to contemporary understanding including that of most astrologers astrology was originally, and remains, a divinatory practice. Tackling its rich and controversial history, its problematic relationship to Jungian theory, and attempts to prove its grounding in objective reality, this book not only persuasively demonstrates that astrology is far more than a superstitious relic of years gone by, but that it enables a fundamental critique of the scientism of its opponents. Groundbreaking in its reconciliation of astrologys ancient traditions and its modern day usage, this book impressively unites philosophy, science, anthropology, and history, to produce a powerful exploration of astrology, past and present.
Author: Nicholas Campion
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443895482
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Astrology is the practice of relating the heavenly bodies to lives and events on earth, and the tradition that has thus been generated. Many cultures worldwide have practised it in some form. In some it is rudimentary, in others complex. Culture and scholarship have categorised it as both belief and science, as a form of magic, divination or religious practice – but in many ways it defies easy categorisation. The chapters in this volume make a significant contribution to our understanding of astrology across a range of periods of cultures. Based on papers presented at the annual conference of the Sophia Centre held in 2012, the contributions range from China and Japan, through India, the ancient Near East, the classical world and early modern Europe, to Madagascar and Mesoamerica. The different topics include ritual and religion, magic and science, calendars and time, and questions of textual transmission and methodology. Astrology in Time and Place is essential reading for all interested in the history of humanity’s relationship with the cosmos.
Author: H Darrel Rutkin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030107795
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 591
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Book Description
This book explores the changing perspective of astrology from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era. It introduces a framework for understanding both its former centrality and its later removal from legitimate knowledge and practice. The discussion reconstructs the changing roles of astrology in Western science, theology, and culture from 1250 to 1500. The author considers both the how and the why. He analyzes and integrates a broad range of sources. This analysis shows that the history of astrology—in particular, the story of the protracted criticism and ultimate removal of astrology from the realm of legitimate knowledge and practice—is crucial for fully understanding the transition from premodern Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy to modern Newtonian science. This removal, the author argues, was neither obvious nor unproblematic. Astrology was not some sort of magical nebulous hodge-podge of beliefs. Rather, astrology emerged in the 13th century as a richly mathematical system that served to integrate astronomy and natural philosophy, precisely the aim of the “New Science” of the 17th century. As such, it becomes a fundamentally important historical question to determine why this promising astrological synthesis was rejected in favor of a rather different mathematical natural philosophy—and one with a very different causal structure than Aristotle's.
Author: Helaine Selin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401141797
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 678
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Book Description
Astronomy Across Cultures: A History of Non-Western Astronomy consists of essays dealing with the astronomical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Polynesian, Egyptian and Tibetan astronomy, among others, the book includes essays on Sky Tales and Why We Tell Them and Astronomy and Prehistory, and Astronomy and Astrology. The essays address the connections between science and culture and relate astronomical practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both the history of science and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
Author: Percy Seymour
Publisher: St Martins Press
ISBN: 9780312077952
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
Offering evidence for the validity of astrology in everyday life, an astronomer presents a new theory on the relationship between science and astrology, and arguing for a connection between the cosmos and the mysteries of human personality
Author: Alexander Boxer
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039363485X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
An illuminating look at the surprising history and science of astrology, civilization’s first system of algorithms, from Babylon to the present day. Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is the universe’s grandest pattern-matching game. In this refreshing work of history and analysis, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines classical texts on astrology to expose its underlying scientific and mathematical framework. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a monumental data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history’s most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. Thousands of years ago, astrologers became the first to stumble upon the powerful storytelling possibilities inherent in numerical data. To correlate the configurations of the cosmos with our day-to-day lives, astrologers relied upon a “scheme of heaven,” or horoscope, showing the precise configuration of the planets at a particular instant in time as viewed from a particular place on Earth. Although recognized as pseudoscience today, horoscopes were once considered a cutting-edge scientific tool. Boxer teaches us how to read these esoteric charts—and appreciate the complex astronomical calculations needed to generate them—by diagramming how the heavens appeared at important moments in astrology’s history, from the assassination of Julius Caesar as viewed from Rome to the Apollo 11 lunar landing as seen from the surface of the Moon. He then puts these horoscopes to the test using modern data sets and statistical science, arguing that today’s data scientists do work similar to astrologers of yore. By looking back at the algorithms of ancient astrology, he suggests, we can better recognize the patterns that are timeless characteristics of our own pattern-matching tendencies. At once critical, rigorous, and far ranging, A Scheme of Heaven recontextualizes astrology as a vast, technological project—spanning continents and centuries—that foreshadowed our data-driven world today.
Author: Thomas Karl Dietrich
Publisher: Hillcrest Publishing Group
ISBN: 1935098756
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
This book explores astronomy's impact on the world today, delving into the histories of many civilizations to explain the world as we know it and to raise new questions about what the future holds. -- from back cover.
Author: Nicholas Campion
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814708420
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
When you think of astrology, you may think of the horoscope section in your local paper, or of Nancy Reagan's consultations with an astrologer in the White House in the 1980s. Yet almost every religion uses some form of astrology: some way of thinking about the sun, moon, stars, and planets and how they hold significance for human lives on earth. Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions offers an accessible overview of the astrologies of the world's religions, placing them into context within theories of how the wider universe came into being and operates. Campion traces beliefs about the heavens among peoples ranging from ancient Egypt and China, to Australia and Polynesia, and India and the Islamic world. Addressing each religion in a separate chapter, Campion outlines how, by observing the celestial bodies, people have engaged with the divine, managed the future, and attempted to understand events here on earth. This fascinating text offers a unique way to delve into comparative religions and will also appeal to those intrigued by New Age topics.
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191563919
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 574
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Book Description
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.
Author: Monica Azzolini
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 479
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Book Description
This study is the first to examine the important political role played by astrology in Italian court culture. Reconstructing the powerful dynamics existing between astrologers and their prospective or existing patrons, The Duke and the Stars illustrates how the “predictive art” of astrology was a critical source of information for Italian Renaissance rulers, particularly in times of crisis. Astrological “intelligence” was often treated as sensitive, and astrologers and astrologer-physicians were often trusted with intimate secrets and delicate tasks that required profound knowledge not only of astrology but also of the political and personal situation of their clients. Two types of astrological predictions, medical and political, were taken into the most serious consideration. Focusing on Milan, Monica Azzolini describes the various ways in which the Sforza dukes (and Italian rulers more broadly) used astrology as a political and dynastic tool, guiding them as they contracted alliances, made political decisions, waged war, planned weddings, and navigated health crises. The Duke and the Stars explores science and medicine as studied and practiced in fifteenth-century Italy, including how astrology was taught in relation to astronomy.
