Testimonies: States of Mind and States of the Body in the Early Modern Period
Testimonies: States of Mind and States of the Body in the Early Modern Period

Author: Gideon Manning

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-04-06

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 3030393755

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This book reconnects health and thought, as the two were treated together in the seventeenth century, and by reuniting them, it adds a significant dimension to our historical understanding. Indeed, there is hardly a single early modern figure who took a serious interest in one but not the other, with their attitudes toward body-mind interaction often revealed in acts of self-diagnosis and experimentation. The essays collected here specifically reveal the way experiment and especially self-experiment, combined with careful attention to the states of mind which accompany states of body, provide a new means of assessing attitudes to body-mind interactions just as they show the abiding interest and relevance of source material typically ignored by historians of science and historians of philosophy. In the surviving records of such experimenting on one’s own body, we can observe leading figures like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, deliberately setting out to repeat pleasurable, or intellectually productive moods and states of mind, by applying the same medicine on successive occasions. In this way we can witness theories of the working of the human mind being developed by key members of an urban culture (London; interregnum Oxford) who based those theories in part on their own regular, long-term use of self-administered, mind-altering substances. It is hardly an overstatement to claim that there was a significant drug culture in the early modern period linked to self-experimentation, new medicines, and the new science. This is one of the many things this volume has to teach us.

Health
Health

Author: Peter Adamson

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 019991642X

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From antiquity to the early modern period, many philosophers also studied anatomy and medicine, or were medical doctors themselves -- yet the history of philosophy and of medicine are pursued as separate disciplines. This book departs from that practice, gathering contributions by both historians of philosophy and of medicine to trace the concept of health from ancient Greece and China, through the Islamic world and to modern thinkers such as Descartes and Freud. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Health demonstrates the synchronicity and overlapping histories of these two disciplines. From antiquity to the Renaissance, contributors explore the Chinese idea of qi or circulating "vital breath," ideas about medical methodology in antiquity and the middle ages, and the rise and long-lasting influence of Galenic medicine, with its insistence that health consists in a balance of four humors and the proper use of six "non-naturals" including diet, exercise, and sex. In the early modern period, mechanistic theories of the body made it more difficult to explain what health is and why it is more valuable than other physical states. However, philosophers and doctors maintained an interest in the interaction between the good condition of the mind and that of the body, with Descartes and his followers exploring in depth the idea of "medicine for the mind" despite their notorious mind-body dualism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientific improvements in public health emerged along with new ideas about the psychology of health, notably with the concept of "sensibility" and Freud's psychoanalytic theory. The volume concludes with a critical survey of recent philosophical attempts to define health, showing that both "descriptive," or naturalistic, and "normativist" approaches have fallen prey to objections and counterexamples. As a whole, Health: A History shows that notions of both physical and mental health have long been integral to philosophy and a powerful link between philosophy and the sciences.

Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading
Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading

Author: Anthony Grafton

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2024-01-08

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1800081685

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Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s seminal ‘Studied for Action’ (1990), a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods and ambitions of Harvey’s encounters with his books ignited the History of Reading, an interdisciplinary field which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world’s libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations in turn illuminate past worlds. Three decades on, Harvey’s example and Jardine’s work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the History of Reading. By uniting ‘Studied for Action’ with published and unpublished studies on Harvey by Jardine, Grafton and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton’s original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading.

World Soul
World Soul

Author: James Wilberding

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0190913479

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Many philosophers and scientists over the course of history have held that the world is alive. It has a soul, which governs it and binds it together. This suggestion, once so wide-spread, may strike many of us today as strange and antiquated--in fact, there are few other concepts that, on their face, so capture the sheer distance between us and our philosophical inheritance. But the idea of a world soul has held so strong a grip upon philosophers' imaginations for over 2,000 years, that it continues to underpin and even structure how we conceive of time and space. The concept of the world soul is difficult to understand in large part because over the course of history it has been invoked to very different ends and within the frameworks of very different ontologies and philosophical systems, with varying concepts of the world soul emerging as a result. This volume brings together eleven chapters by leading philosophers in their respective fields that collectively explore the various ways in which this concept has been understood and employed, covering the following philosophical areas: Platonism, Stoicism, Medieval, Indian or Vedântic, Kabbalah, Renaissance, Early Modern, German Romanticism, German Idealism, American Transcendentalism, and contemporary quantum mechanics and panpsychism theories. In addition, short reflections illuminate the impact the concept of the world soul has had on a small selection of areas outside of philosophy, such as harmony, the biological concept of spontaneous generation, Henry Purcell, psychoanalysis, and Gaia theories.

Political Theory on Death and Dying
Political Theory on Death and Dying

Author: Erin A. Dolgoy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 614

ISBN-13: 100045178X

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Political Theory on Death and Dying provides a comprehensive, encyclopedic review that compiles and curates the latest scholarship, research, and debates on the political and social implications of death and dying. Adopting an easy-to-follow chronological and multi-disciplinary approach on 45 canonical figures and thinkers, leading scholars from a diverse range of fields, including political science, philosophy, and English, discuss each thinker’s ethical and philosophical accounts on mortality and death. Each chapter focuses on a single established figure in political philosophy, as well as religious and literary thinkers, covering classical to contemporary thought on death. Through this approach, the chapters are designed to stand alone, allowing the reader to study every entry in isolation and with greater depth, as well as trace how thinkers are influenced by their predecessors. A key contribution to the field, Political Theory on Death and Dying provides an excellent overview for students and researchers who study philosophy of death, the history of political thought, and political philosophy.

Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy
Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy

Author: Felicity Henderson

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2024-11-12

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1789149886

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A critical biography of the seventeenth-century scientist’s expansive life and work. Robert Hooke was England’s first professional scientist and a pioneer of science communication. He was also one of the earliest to write a guide for how others might become “experimental philosophers” like himself. In this new biography, Felicity Henderson takes Hooke’s scientific method as a starting point for an expedition into what Hooke himself saw as key aspects of a scientific life. Tracing this expansive life, the story draws readers through marketplaces, bookshops, construction sites, and coffee houses—even into the King’s royal presence at Whitehall Palace. Henderson explains how Hooke’s observations and conversations with the workmen, colleagues, craftsmen, and patrons he met through his work underpinned Hooke’s research in significant ways. The result is a fresh portrait of the scientist as a champion of the mundane, whose greatest gift was to help the world see even the smallest parts of everyday life with new eyes.

Ingenuity in the Making
Ingenuity in the Making

Author: Richard J. Oosterhoff

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0822988461

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Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity shaped the experience and conceptualization of materials and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts, professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature, and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which ingenuity acted in and upon the material world through skill and technique. Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the “maker’s knowledge” tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, charting the ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2000-08-15

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 0547527543

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Author: Albrecht Classen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-05-29

Total Pages: 932

ISBN-13: 3110285428

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Older research on the premodern world limited its focus on the Church, the court, and, more recently, on urban space. The present volume invites readers to consider the meaning of rural space, both in light of ecocritical readings and social-historical approaches. While previous scholars examined the figure of the peasant in the premodern world, the current volume combines a large number of specialized studies that investigate how the natural environment and the appearance of members of the rural population interacted with the world of the court and of the city. The experience in rural space was important already for writers and artists in the premodern era, as the large variety of scholarly approaches indicates. The present volume signals how much the surprisingly close interaction between members of the aristocratic and of the peasant class determined many literary and art-historical works. In a surprisingly large number of cases we can even discover elements of utopia hidden in rural space. We also observe how much the rural world was a significant element already in early-medieval mentality. Moreover, as many authors point out, the impact of natural forces on premodern society was tremendous, if not catastrophic.