On Language, Theology, and Utopia

On Language, Theology, and Utopia PDF Author: Francis Lodwick
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191576115
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Francis Lodwick FRS (1619-94) was a prosperous merchant, bibliophile, writer, thinker, and member of the Royal Society. He wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental philosophy, most of it too controversial to be safely published during his lifetime. This edition includes the first publication of his unorthodox religious works alongside groundbreaking writings on language. Following an extensive introduction by the editors the book is divided into three parts. Part One includes A Common Writing (1647), the first English attempt at an artificial language, and the equally pioneering phonetic alphabet set out in An Essay Towards an Universal Alphabet (1686). Part Two contains a series of linked short treatises on the nature of religion and divine revelation, including 'Of the Word of God' and 'Of the Use of Reason in Religion', in which Lodwick argues for a new understanding of the Bible, advocates a rational approach to divine worship, and seeks to reinterpret received religion for an age of reason. The final part of the book contains his unpublished utopian fiction, A Country Not Named: here he creates a world to express his most firmly-held opinions on language and religion, and in which his utopians found a church that bans the Bible. The book gives new insights into the religious aspects of the scientific revolution and throws fresh light on the early modern frame of mind. It is aimed at intellectual and cultural historians, historians of science and linguistics, and literary scholars - indeed, at all those interested in the interplay of ideas, language, and religion in seventeenth-century England

On Language, Theology, and Utopia

On Language, Theology, and Utopia PDF Author: Francis Lodwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199225915
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
This is the first complete edition of the writings of the merchant, scholar, and F.R.S. Francis Lodwick (1619-94). He wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental philosophy, much of it too controversial to be published during his lifetime. This edition includes an introduction, a commentary, and primary and secondary bibliographies.

Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction

Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Lyman Tower Sargent
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191614424
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
There are many debates about utopia - What constitutes a utopia? Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? This Very Short Introduction explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history. Lyman Sargent discusses the role of utopianism in literature, and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity utopia is labelled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others Sargent introduces and summarizes the debates over the utopia in literature, communal studies, social and political theory, and theology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

On Language, Theology, and Utopia

On Language, Theology, and Utopia PDF Author: Francis Lodwick
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191576115
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book Here

Book Description
Francis Lodwick FRS (1619-94) was a prosperous merchant, bibliophile, writer, thinker, and member of the Royal Society. He wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental philosophy, most of it too controversial to be safely published during his lifetime. This edition includes the first publication of his unorthodox religious works alongside groundbreaking writings on language. Following an extensive introduction by the editors the book is divided into three parts. Part One includes A Common Writing (1647), the first English attempt at an artificial language, and the equally pioneering phonetic alphabet set out in An Essay Towards an Universal Alphabet (1686). Part Two contains a series of linked short treatises on the nature of religion and divine revelation, including 'Of the Word of God' and 'Of the Use of Reason in Religion', in which Lodwick argues for a new understanding of the Bible, advocates a rational approach to divine worship, and seeks to reinterpret received religion for an age of reason. The final part of the book contains his unpublished utopian fiction, A Country Not Named: here he creates a world to express his most firmly-held opinions on language and religion, and in which his utopians found a church that bans the Bible. The book gives new insights into the religious aspects of the scientific revolution and throws fresh light on the early modern frame of mind. It is aimed at intellectual and cultural historians, historians of science and linguistics, and literary scholars - indeed, at all those interested in the interplay of ideas, language, and religion in seventeenth-century England

Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry

Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry PDF Author: Jason Lagapa
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319552848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
This book explores the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and the ways in which experimental poets formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology, which proposes using negative statements as a means of attesting to the superior, unrepresentable being of God. With individual chapters on works by such poets as Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Charles Bernstein, and Alice Notley, this book illustrates how a strategy of negation similarly proves optimal for depicting the subject of utopia in literary works. Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations contends that negative statements in experimental poetry illustrate the potential for utopian social change, not by portraying an ideal world itself but by revealing the very challenge of representing utopia directly.

Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English Utopian Literature

Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English Utopian Literature PDF Author: Dan Mills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000732002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Theoretically informed scholarship on early modern English utopian literature has largely focused on Marxist interpretation of these texts in an attempt to characterize them as proto- Marxist. The present volume instead focuses on subjectivity in early modern English utopian writing by using these texts as case studies to explore intersections of the thought of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both Lacan and Foucault moved back and forth between structuralist and post-structuralist intellectual trends and ultimately both defy strict categorization into either camp. Although numerous studies have appeared that compare Lacan’s and Foucault’s thought, there have been relatively few applications of their thought together onto literature. By applying the thought of both theorists, who were not literary critics, to readings of early modern English utopian literature, this study will, on the one hand, describe the formation of utopian subjectivity that is both psychoanalytically (Oedipal and pre-Oedipal) and socially constructed, and, on the other hand, demonstrate new ways in which the thought of Lacan and Foucault inform and complement each other when applied to literary texts. The utopian subject is a malleable subject, a subject whose linguistic, psychoanalytical subjectivity determines the extent to which environmental and social factors manifest in an identity that moves among Lacan’s Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.

Black Mass

Black Mass PDF Author: John Gray
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429922982
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
For the decade that followed the end of the cold war, the world was lulled into a sense that a consumerist, globalized, peaceful future beckoned. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas—most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In Black Mass, celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and indeed coming to define the political center. Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches. Black Mass is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain's leading political thinkers.

Perhaps the Stars

Perhaps the Stars PDF Author: Ada Palmer
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 146685877X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 854

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Book Description
From the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best Writer, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars is the final book of the Hugo Award-shortlisted Terra Ignota series. World Peace turns into global civil war. In the future, the leaders of Hive nations—nations without fixed location—clandestinely committed nefarious deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could only last so long. The comforts of effortless global travel and worldwide abundance may have tempered humanity's darkest inclinations, but conflict remains deeply rooted in the human psyche. All it needed was a catalyst, in form of special little boy to ignite half a millennium of repressed chaos. Now, war spreads throughout the globe, splintering old alliances and awakening sleeping enmities. All transportation systems are in ruins, causing the tyranny of distance to fracture a long-united Earth and threaten to obliterate everything the Hive system built. With the arch-criminal Mycroft nowhere to be found, his successor, Ninth Anonymous, must not only chronicle the discord of war, but attempt to restore order in a world spiraling closer to irreparable ruin. The fate of a broken society hangs in the balance. Is the key to salvation to remain Earth-bound or, perhaps, to start anew throughout the far reaches of the stars? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Age of Utopia

The Age of Utopia PDF Author: John Strickland
Publisher: Ancient Faith Publishing
ISBN: 9781955890052
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Continuing the epic of Christendom told in earlier volumes, The Age of Paradise and The Age of Division, the author explains how, between the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century and the Russian Revolution of the twentieth, secular humanism displaced Christianity to become the source of modern culture. The result was some of the most illustrious music, science, philosophy, and literature ever produced. But the cultural reorientation from paradise to utopia-from an experience of the kingdom of heaven to one bound exclusively by this world-all but eradicated the traditional culture of the West, leaving it at the beginning of the twentieth century without roots in anything transcendent.

Seeking Truth: Roger North's Notes on Newton and Correspondence with Samuel Clarke c.1704-1713

Seeking Truth: Roger North's Notes on Newton and Correspondence with Samuel Clarke c.1704-1713 PDF Author: Jamie C. Kassler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317057767
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
In the early 1690s Roger North was preparing to remove from London to Rougham, Norfolk, where he planned to continue his search for truth, which for him meant knowledge of nature, including human nature. But this search was interrupted by three events. First, between c.1704 and the early part of 1706, he read Newton’s book on rational (quantitative) mechanics and, afterwards, his book on optics in Clarke’s Latin translation. Second, towards the latter part of 1706, he and Clarke, a Norfolk clergyman, corresponded about matters relating to Newton’s two books, after which Clarke removed to London and the correspondence ceased. Third, in 1712 North received a letter from Clarke, requesting him to read and respond to his new publication on the philosophy of the Godhead. As Kassler details, each of these events presented a number of challenges to North’s values, as well as the way of philosophising he had learned as a student and practitioner of the common law. Because he never made public his responses to the challenges, her book also includes editions of North's notes on reading Newton’s books, as well as what now remains of the 1706 and later correspondence with Clarke. In addition, she presents analyses of some of North’s ’second thoughts’ about the issues raised in the notes and 1706 correspondence and, from an examination of Clarke’s main writings, provides a context for understanding the correspondence relating to the 1712 book.

“See and Read All These Words”

“See and Read All These Words” PDF Author: Chad L. Eggleston
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575064030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Unusually for the Hebrew Bible, the book of Jeremiah contains a high number of references to writers, writing, and the written word. The book (which was primarily written during the exilic period) demonstrates a key moment in the ongoing integration of writing and the written word into ancient Israelite society. Yet the book does not describe writing in the abstract. Instead, it provides an account of its own textualization, thereby blurring the lines between the texts in the narrative and the texts that constitute the book. Scrolls in Jeremiah become inextricably intertwined with the scroll of Jeremiah. To authenticate the book of Jeremiah as the word of YHWH, its tradents present a theological account of the chain of transmission from the divine to the prophet and then to the scribe and the written page. Indeed, the book of Jeremiah extends the chain of transmission beyond the written word to include the book of Jeremiah itself and, finally, a receiving audience. To make the case for this chain of transmission, See and Read’s three exegetical chapters attend to writers (YHWH, prophets, and scribes), the written word, and the receiving audience. The first exegetical chapter describes the standard chain of transmission from the divine to the prophet to the scribe, demonstrating that all three agents in this chain are imagined as writers and that writing was increasingly understood as a suitable conduit for the divine word. The second exegetical chapter attends to the written word in Jeremiah, especially Jeremiah’s self-references (e.g., “in this book”, “all these words”) as a pivotal element in the extension of the chain of transmission beyond the words in the text to the words of the text. Finally, the third exegetical chapter considers the construction of the audience in the book of Jeremiah, concluding that the written word, as Jeremiah imagines it, is to be received by a worshiping audience through public reading but delivered via textual intermediaries.