Pseudo-Paracelsus

Pseudo-Paracelsus PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004503382
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
With its innovative studies and its extensive catalogue of texts erroneously attributed to Paracelsus (1493/4-1541), this volume explores largely overlooked aspects of the Paracelsian movement in Renaissance and early modern medicine, science, natural philosophy, theology and religion.

Pseudo-Paracelsus

Pseudo-Paracelsus PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004503382
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
With its innovative studies and its extensive catalogue of texts erroneously attributed to Paracelsus (1493/4-1541), this volume explores largely overlooked aspects of the Paracelsian movement in Renaissance and early modern medicine, science, natural philosophy, theology and religion.

Promethean Ambitions

Promethean Ambitions PDF Author: William R. Newman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226577139
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.

It All Depends on the Dose

It All Depends on the Dose PDF Author: Ole Peter Grell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315521083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This is the first volume to take a broad historical sweep of the close relation between medicines and poisons in the Western tradition, and their interconnectedness. They are like two ends of a spectrum, for the same natural material can be medicine or poison, depending on the dose, and poisons can be transformed into medicines, while medicines can turn out to be poisons. The book looks at important moments in the history of the relationship between poisons and medicines in European history, from Roman times, with the Greek physician Galen, through the Renaissance and the maverick physician Paracelsus, to the present, when poisons are actively being turned into beneficial medicines. Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Genesis Redux

Genesis Redux PDF Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226720837
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms. Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect. Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.

Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Jennifer Spinks
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004299017
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
This volume brings together some of the most exciting new scholarship on these themes, and thus pays tribute to the ground-breaking work of Charles Zika. Seventeen interdisciplinary essays offer new insights into the materiality and belief systems of early modern religious cultures as found in artworks, books, fragmentary texts and even in Protestant ‘relics’. Some contributions reassess communal and individual responses to cases of possession, others focus on witchcraft and manifestations of the disordered natural world. Canonical figures and events, from Martin Luther to the Salem witch trials, are looked at afresh. Collectively, these essays demonstrate how cultural and interdisciplinary trends in religious history illuminate the experiences of early modern Europeans. Contributors: Susan Broomhall, Heather Dalton, Dagmar Eichberger, Peter Howard, E. J. Kent, Brian P. Levack, Dolly MacKinnon, Louise Marshall, Donna Merwick, Leigh T.I. Penman, Shelley Perlove, Lyndal Roper, Peter Sherlock, Larry Silver, Patricia Simons, Jennifer Spinks, Hans de Waardt and Alexandra Walsham.

Representing and Intervening

Representing and Intervening PDF Author: Ian Hacking
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521282468
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism.

Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present

Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present PDF Author: Georgiana D. Hedesan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030679063
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
This collection explores the role of innovation in understanding the history of esotericism. It illustrates how innovation is a mechanism of negotiation whereby an idea is either produced against, or adapted from, an older set of concepts in order to respond to a present context. Featuring contributions from distinguished scholars of esotericism, it covers many different fields and themes including magic, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Tarot, apocalypticism and eschatology, Mesmerism, occultism, prophecy, and mysticism.

The Holistic Inspirations of Physics

The Holistic Inspirations of Physics PDF Author: Val Dusek
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813526355
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
While many books have claimed parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophy, none have dealt with the historical influences of both Chinese traditional thought and non-mechanistic, holistic western thought on the philosophies of the scientists who developed electromagnetic field theory. In The Holistic Inspirations of Physics, R. Valentine Dusek asks: to what extent is classical field theory a product of organic and holistic philosophies and frameworks? Electromagnetic theory has been greatly influenced by holistic worldviews, Dusek posits, and he highlights three alternative scientific systems that made the development of electromagnetic theory possible: medieval Chinese science, Western Renaissance occultism, and the German romantic traditions. He situates these "alternative" approaches in their social context and background, and traces their connection with components of "accepted" physical science in relation to a number of social movements and philosophical theories. Readers will learn of specific contributions made by these alternative traditions, such as the Chinese inventing the compass and discovering the earth's magnetic field and magnetic declination. Western alchemical ideas of active forces and "occult" influences contributed to Newton's theory of gravitation force as action at a distance, rather as a result of purely mechanical collisions and contact action. Dusek also describes the extent to which women's culture supplied (often without credit) the philosophical background ideas that were absorbed into mainstream field theory.

Reformation, Revolution, Renovation

Reformation, Revolution, Renovation PDF Author: Lyke de Vries
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004249397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
At the centre of the Rosicrucian manifestos was a call for ‘general reformation’. In Reformation, Revolution, Renovation, the first book-length study of this topic, Lyke de Vries demonstrates the unique position of the Rosicrucian call for reform in the transformative context of the early seventeenth century. The manifestos, commonly interpreted as either Lutheran or esoteric, are here portrayed as revolutionary mission statements which broke dramatically with Luther’s reform ideals. Their call for reform instead resembles a variety of late medieval and early modern dissenting traditions as well as the heterodox movement of Paracelsianism. Emphasising the universal character of the Rosicrucian proposal for change, this new genealogy of the core idea sheds fresh light on the vexed question of the manifestos’ authorship and helps explain their tumultuous reception by both those who welcomed and those who deplored them.

University Magazine

University Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description