Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things

Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things PDF Author: John Forrester
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047406486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 791

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Book Description
An annotated translation of Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things (1542). A major innovatory work in Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine, and a crucially important source for understanding the notion of occult qualities, with a scholarly introduction.

Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things

Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things PDF Author: John Forrester
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047406486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 791

Get Book Here

Book Description
An annotated translation of Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things (1542). A major innovatory work in Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine, and a crucially important source for understanding the notion of occult qualities, with a scholarly introduction.

Plague and Music in the Renaissance

Plague and Music in the Renaissance PDF Author: Remi Chiu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108240526
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Plague, a devastating and recurring affliction throughout the Renaissance, had a major impact on European life. Not only was pestilence a biological problem, but it was also read as a symptom of spiritual degeneracy and it caused widespread social disorder. Assembling a picture of the complex and sometimes contradictory responses to plague from medical, spiritual and civic perspectives, this book uncovers the place of music - whether regarded as an indispensable medicine or a moral poison that exacerbated outbreaks - in the management of the disease. This original musicological approach further reveals how composers responded, in their works, to the discourses and practices surrounding one of the greatest medical crises in the pre-modern age. Addressing topics such as music as therapy, public rituals and performance and music in religion, the volume also provides detailed musical analysis throughout to illustrate how pestilence affected societal attitudes toward music.

Jesuit Science and the End of Nature's Secrets

Jesuit Science and the End of Nature's Secrets PDF Author: Mark A. Waddell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317111109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Jesuit Science and the End of Nature’s Secrets explores how several prominent Jesuit naturalists - including Niccolò Cabeo, Athanasius Kircher, and Gaspar Schott - tackled the problem of occult or insensible causation in the seventeenth century. The search for hidden causes lay at the heart of the early modern study of nature, and included phenomena such as the activity of the magnet, the marvelous powers ascribed to certain animals and plants, and the hidden, destructive forces churning in the depths of the Earth. While this was a project embraced by most early modern naturalists, however, the book demonstrates that the Jesuits were uniquely suited to the study of nature’s hidden secrets because of the complex methods of contemplation and meditation enshrined at the core of their spirituality. Divided into six chapters, the work documents how particular Jesuits sought to reveal and expose nature’s myriad secrets through an innovative blending of technology, imagery, and experiment. Moving beyond the conventional Aristotelianism mandated by the Society of Jesus, they set forth a vision of the world that made manifest the works of God as Creator, no matter how deeply hidden those works were. The book thus not only presents a narrative that challenges present-day assumptions about the role played by Catholic religious communities in the formation of modern science, but also captures the exuberance and inventiveness of the early modern study of nature.

Nutrition and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle and Aristotelianism

Nutrition and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle and Aristotelianism PDF Author: Giouli Korobili
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110690551
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its actual manifestation in living bodies (plants, animals, humans) in Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According to Aristotle, apart from nutrition, the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for or interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms, such as digestion, growth, reproduction, sleep, and the innate heat. After Aristotle, these concepts were used and further developed by a great number of Peripatetic philosophers, commentators on Aristotle and Arabic thinkers until early modern times. This volume is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth survey of the development of this rather philosophical concept from Aristotle to early modern thinkers. It is of key interest to scholars working on classical, medieval and early modern psycho-physiological accounts of living things, historians and philosophers of science, biologists with interests in the history of science, and, generally, students of the history of philosophy and science.

Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy

Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy PDF Author: Henrik Lagerlund
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317672623
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 661

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Book Description
Sixteenth century philosophy was a unique synthesis of several philosophical frameworks, a blend of old and new, including but not limited to Scholasticism, Humanism, Neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. Unlike most overviews of this period, The Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy does not simplify this colorful era by applying some traditional dichotomies, such as the misleading line once drawn between scholasticism and humanism. Instead, the Companion closely covers an astonishingly diverse set of topics: philosophical methodologies of the time, the importance of the discovery of the new world, the rise of classical scholarship, trends in logic and logical theory, Nominalism, Averroism, the Jesuits, the Reformation, Neo-stoicism, the soul’s immortality, skepticism, the philosophies of language and science and politics, cosmology, the nature of the understanding, causality, ethics, freedom of the will, natural law, the emergence of the individual in society, the nature of wisdom, and the love of god. Throughout, the Companion seeks not to compartmentalize these philosophical matters, but instead to show that close attention paid to their continuity may help reveal both the diversity and the profound coherence of the philosophies that emerged in the sixteenth century. The Companion’s 27 chapters are published here for the first time, and written by an international team of scholars, and accessible for both students and researchers.

Phantasmatic Shakespeare

Phantasmatic Shakespeare PDF Author: Suparna Roychoudhury
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726579
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Representations of the mind have a central place in Shakespeare’s artistic imagination, as we see in Bottom struggling to articulate his dream, Macbeth reaching for a dagger that is not there, and Prospero humbling his enemies with spectacular illusions. Phantasmatic Shakespeare examines the intersection between early modern literature and early modern understandings of the mind’s ability to perceive and imagine. Suparna Roychoudhury argues that Shakespeare’s portrayal of the imagination participates in sixteenth-century psychological discourse and reflects also how fields of anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history jolted and reshaped conceptions of mentality. Although the new sciences did not displace the older psychology of phantasms, they inflected how Renaissance natural philosophers and physicians thought and wrote about the brain’s image-making faculty. The many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams scattered throughout Shakespeare’s works exploit this epistemological ferment, deriving their complexity from the ambiguities raised by early modern science. Phantasmatic Shakespeare considers aspects of imagination that were destabilized during Shakespeare’s period—its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature—reading these in concert with canonical works such as King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Shakespeare, Roychoudhury shows, was influenced by paradigmatic epistemic shifts of his time, and he in turn demonstrated how the mysteries of cognition could be the subject of powerful art.

On Pestilence

On Pestilence PDF Author: Girolamo Mercuriale
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812298179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
In the spring of 1576, the Health Office of Venice, fearful of a growing outbreak of plague, imposed a quarantine upon the city. The move was controversial, with some in power questioning the precise nature of the disease and concerned about the economic and political impact of the closure. A tribunal of physicians was summoned by the Doge, among them Girolamo Mercuriale, professor of medicine in nearby Padua and perhaps the most famous physician in all of Europe. Whatever the disease was that was affecting Venice, Mercuriale opined, it was not and could not be plague, for it was neither fast-moving nor widespread enough for that diagnosis. Following Mercuriale's advice and against the objections of the Health Office of the Republic, the quarantine was lifted. The rejoicing of the Venetian populace was short-lived. By July 1577, when the outbreak had run its course, the plague had killed an estimated 50,000 Venetians, or approximately a third of the city's population. In January 1577, in the midst of a plague he now recognized he had misdiagnosed, Mercuriale offered a series of lectures from his seat in Padua. Published under the title On Pestilence, the work surveyed past epidemics, including the Justinianic Plague of the sixth century and the Black Death of the fourteenth, and accounts of plague in Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and other sources. Plague, Mercuriale pronounced, was characterized by its lethal nature and the rapidity with which it spread. He contended it was primarily airborne and was not caught through microbial transmission, but because the air itself became pestiferous and promoted putrefaction. Using his observations, he evaluated recently developed theories of contagion and concluded that pestiferous vapors could also emanate from the diseased bodies of its victims, and that one might also contract the disease from the contaminated clothing or bedding of the ill. In Craig Martin's translation, On Pestilence appears for the first time in English, accompanied by an introduction that places the work within the context of sixteenth-century Italy, the history of medicine, and our own responses to epidemic disease.

Shakespeare, Tragedy and Menopause

Shakespeare, Tragedy and Menopause PDF Author: Victoria L. McMahon
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031272048
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Shakespeare was not only aware of the socio-cultural fears and anxieties generated by the older woman’s body but with the characterization of his tragic ageing females, Shakespeare becomes the first literary giant to explore the physiological and psychosocial condition that we have come to know as ‘menopause’. Although ‘menopause’ was not defined as a medical, physiological or sociocultural event for the early moderns, this book argues that such a medical and cultural transition can, in fact, be identified by sub-textual clues distinguished by various embodied anxieties. It explores several ageing women of the Shakespearean tragedies as they transition through this liminal menopausal period. Theoretically underscored by humoral theory, the analysis is metonymically centered upon the womb as the seat of menopausal anxiety. These menopausal undercurrents, not only permeate the dramatic action of each play, but also emanate outward to reflect the medical, physiological, cultural, social, and religious concerns generated by the ageing woman of the early modern period at large.

Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern Natural Philosophy

Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern Natural Philosophy PDF Author: Charles T. Wolfe
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031070364
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories.

Losing Touch with Nature

Losing Touch with Nature PDF Author: Mary Thomas Crane
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421415321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The rise of modern science stirred up a mix of unease and exhilaration that profoundly influenced early modern English literature. During the scientific revolution, the dominant Aristotelian picture of nature, which cohered closely with common sense and ordinary perceptual experience, was completely overthrown. Although we now take for granted the ideas that the earth revolves around the sun and that seemingly solid matter is composed of tiny particles, these concepts seemed equally counterintuitive, anxiety provoking, and at odds with our ancestors’ embodied experience of the world. In Losing Touch with Nature, Mary Thomas Crane examines the complex way that the new science’s threat to intuitive Aristotelian notions of the natural world was treated and reflected in the work of Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and other early modern writers. Crane breaks new ground by arguing that sixteenth-century ideas about the universe were actually much more sophisticated, rational, and observation-based than many literary critics have assumed. The earliest stages of the scientific revolution in England were most powerfully experienced as a divergence of intuitive science from official science, causing a schism between embodied human experience of the world and learned explanations of how the world works. This fascinating book traces the growing awareness of that epistemological gap through textbooks and natural philosophy treatises to canonical poetry and plays, presciently registering and exploring the magnitude of the human loss that accompanied the beginnings of modern science.