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Author: Norman Cohn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Author: Norman Cohn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book Here
Book Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Author: Heidi C. M. Scott
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271065389
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.
Author: Barry R. Parker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1489933700
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
'he year was 1889. The French physicist-mathematician Henry T Poincare could not believe his eyes. He had worked for months on one of the most famous problems in science-the problem of three bodies moving around one another under mutual gravita tional attraction-and what he was seeing dismayed and trou bled him. Since Newton's time it had been assumed that the problem was solvable. All that was needed was a little ingenuity and considerable perseverance, but Poincare saw that this was not the case. Strange, unexplainable things happened when he delved into the problem; it was not solvable after all. Poincare was shocked and dismayed by the result-so disheartened he left the problem and went on to other things. What Poincare was seeing was the first glimpse of a phe nomenon we now call chaos. With his discovery the area lay dormant for almost 90 years. Not a single book was written about the phenomenon, and only a trickle of papers appeared. Then, about 1980 a resurgence of interest began, and thousands of papers appeared along with dozens of books. The new science of chaos was born and has attracted as much attention in recent years as breakthroughs in superconductivity and superstring theory.
Author: Laura Nenzi
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485389X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a self-described "base-born nobody" who tried to change the course of Japanese history. Kurosawa Tokiko (1806–1890), a commoner from rural Mito domain, was a poet, teacher, oracle, and political activist. In 1859 she embraced the xenophobic loyalist faction (known for the motto "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians") and traveled to Kyoto to denounce the shogun's policies before the emperor. She was arrested, taken to Edo's infamous Tenmachō prison, and sentenced to banishment. In her later years, having crossed the Tokugawa-Meiji divide, Tokiko became an elementary school teacher and experienced firsthand the modernizing policies of the new government. After her death she was honored with court rank for her devotion to the loyalist cause. Tokiko's story reflects not only some of the key moments in Japan's transition to the modern era, but also some of its lesser-known aspects, thereby providing us with a fresh narrative of the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the shogunate, and the rise of the Meiji state. The peculiar combination of no-nonsense single-mindedness and visionary flights of imagination evinced in her numerous diaries and poetry collections nuances our understanding of activism and political consciousness among rural nonelites by blurring the lines between the rational and the irrational, focus and folly. Tokiko's use of prognostication and her appeals to cosmic forces point to the creative paths some women constructed to take part in political debates and epitomize the resourcefulness required to preserve one's identity in the face of changing times. In the early twentieth century, Tokiko was reimagined in the popular press and her story was rewritten to offset fears about female autonomy and to boost local and national agendas. These distorted and romanticized renditions offer compelling examples of the politicization of the past and of the extent to which present anxieties shape historical memory. That Tokiko was unimportant and her loyalist mission a failure is irrelevant. What is significant is that through her life story we are able to discern the ordinary individual in the midst of history. By putting an extra in the spotlight, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko offers a new script for the drama that unfolded on the stage of late-Tokugawa and early Meiji history.
Author: Sidney Greidanus
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 143355500X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
"I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things." Isaiah 45:7 When God created the world, he brought perfect order out of what was "without form and void." But with human rebellion against God leading to God's curse, disorder was introduced into creation—disorder that we still see all around us today. Tracing the chaos to cosmos theme from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, pastor-scholar Sidney Greidanus reveals how God is restoring his creation through Jesus Christ, who has already begun to shine light into the darkness and will one day return to bring peace, order, and restoration once and for all. With discussion questions at the end of each chapter and a fourteen-session reading plan, this book is ideal for small groups as well as individual study.
Author: Elisabet Sahtouris
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The first popularly written explanation of the scientific theory galvanizing both New Age and scientific circles: the GAIA Hypothesis.
Author: Elaine Walker
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 1457543583
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Matter Over Mind begins with a thought-provoking journey through the Cosmos to illustrate the startling contrast between nature’s chaotic but rich processes, and the human mind’s organized but under performing habits. This book reveals how humanity could achieve even greater heights if we allow ourselves to rethink how we think. Chaos theory, which is wonderfully explained in this book, is a foundational recipe in nature and large group behavior. Abstract thinking is the opposite force that leads to frustrating inconsistencies in society and even limitations in technology. Viewing the world through both lenses illuminates the deeper dynamics of the world and a better way forward for humanity.
Author: Susan Niditch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
Author: Karen Ann Lang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801488559
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos, Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany--the period from the 1880s to 1940--she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena--chaos--into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry.Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur.Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge.
Author: Paris Arnopoulos
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781590339671
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
New transdisciplinary studies have been appearing not only in such established areas as biochemistry or social psychology; there are presently emerging inter-scientific fields such as sociobiology, econophysics and last but not least sociophysics. The latter is a renewed attempt to combine the latest natural and social science theories and come up with significant generalisations for both. Using the powerful physics metaphor as an inertial guidance system, sociophysics emphasises the underlying similarities between all systems. This new scientific hybrid is raising much controversy as well as revealing great promise; for this reason, it has been chosen to provide the core and focus for this book. The holistic scope of this book makes it an appropriate reference work in many courses, such as: Global Ecology; Evolutionary Biology; Macroeconomics; Sociological Theory; Philosophy of Social Science; Theoretical Physics; Thermodynamics; Macro-history; Behavioural Science; General Systems Theory; and Interdisciplinary Studies.
