Infinite Variety

Infinite Variety PDF Author: Wolfram Schmidgen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812299906
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and beauty. Voluntarism, Wolfram Schmidgen contends, provided both theological framework and aesthetic license. In Infinite Variety, he reconstructs this voluntarist tradition of literary invention. Once one accepted that creation was willful and order arbitrary, Schmidgen argues, existing hierarchies of kind lost their normative value. Literary invention could be radicalized as a result. Acknowledging that the will drives creation, such writers as Blackmore and Locke inverted the rules of composition and let energy dominate structure, matter create form, and parts be valued over the whole. In literary, religious, and philosophical works, voluntarism authorized the move beyond the natural toward the deformed, the infinite, and the counterfactual. In reclaiming ontology as an explanatory context for literary invention, Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of an aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite. It is a book that articulates how religious belief shaped modern literary practices, including novelistic realism, and one that will be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy.

Infinite Variety

Infinite Variety PDF Author: Wolfram Schmidgen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812299906
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and beauty. Voluntarism, Wolfram Schmidgen contends, provided both theological framework and aesthetic license. In Infinite Variety, he reconstructs this voluntarist tradition of literary invention. Once one accepted that creation was willful and order arbitrary, Schmidgen argues, existing hierarchies of kind lost their normative value. Literary invention could be radicalized as a result. Acknowledging that the will drives creation, such writers as Blackmore and Locke inverted the rules of composition and let energy dominate structure, matter create form, and parts be valued over the whole. In literary, religious, and philosophical works, voluntarism authorized the move beyond the natural toward the deformed, the infinite, and the counterfactual. In reclaiming ontology as an explanatory context for literary invention, Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of an aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite. It is a book that articulates how religious belief shaped modern literary practices, including novelistic realism, and one that will be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy.

The Works of the Learned and Reverend John Scott, D.D., Sometime Rector of St. Giles's in the Fields

The Works of the Learned and Reverend John Scott, D.D., Sometime Rector of St. Giles's in the Fields PDF Author: John Scott
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sermons, English
Languages : en
Pages : 608

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Christian Life ... The Ninth Edition

The Christian Life ... The Ninth Edition PDF Author: John SCOTT (D.D., Canon of St. Paul's.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 730

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Works of ... John Scott. To which is Added a Sermon Preached at His Funeral by Z. Isham

The Works of ... John Scott. To which is Added a Sermon Preached at His Funeral by Z. Isham PDF Author: John SCOTT (D.D., Canon of St. Paul's.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 600

Get Book Here

Book Description


The works of ... John Scott. To which is added, a sermon preached at his funeral, by Z. Isham

The works of ... John Scott. To which is added, a sermon preached at his funeral, by Z. Isham PDF Author: John Scott
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Last Frontier

The Last Frontier PDF Author: Karl S. Guthke
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745875
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Get Book Here

Book Description
The existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life has been a subject of debate since the dawn of recorded history. The Last Frontier, originally published in German in 1983 and now available in Helen Atkins's sensitive English translation, traces the development of the idea that Earth is not the only planet inhabited by intelligent beings, but that there might be a plurality or even an infinity of "worlds" with human or humanoid life. Focusing on the seventeenth to the twentieth century and taking into account theological, philosophical, scientific, popular, and literary writings from American, British, French, and German sources, Karl S. Guthke demonstrates the continuing importance of this question to the process of human self-definition.

European Physico-Theology (1650-C. 1760) in Context

European Physico-Theology (1650-C. 1760) in Context PDF Author: Kaspar von Greyerz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019286436X
Category : Creation
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
Physico-theology celebrated the observation of nature as a way toward recognising God as Creator, demonstrating the compatibility of the biblical record with new science. This is an English-language monograph which studies the impact of physico-theology on the intellectual and socio-cultural establishment in Europe from the mid-17th century.--

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity PDF Author: Catherine Wilson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191553522
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. .

Aesthetic Science

Aesthetic Science PDF Author: Alexander Wragge-Morley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668105X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

The Excellencies of Robert Boyle

The Excellencies of Robert Boyle PDF Author: Robert Boyle
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1551114666
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Get Book Here

Book Description
Robert Boyle, one of the most important intellectuals of the seventeenth century, was a gifted experimenter, an exceptionally able philosopher, and a dedicated Christian. In Boyle’s two Excellencies, The Excellency of Theology Compared with Natural Philosophy and About The Excellency and Grounds of the Mechanical Hypothesis, he explains and justifies his new philosophy of science while reconciling it with Christian theology. These pioneering works of early science and theology are now available in a modernized and accessible new edition. This Broadview edition brings spelling and punctuation into line with current conventions and includes notes and references to set the works in their historical and philosophical context. The appendices include works by Boyle’s predecessors in the philosophy of science, other philosophical writings by Boyle, and an appendix of the other figures mentioned in the texts.