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Author: Barbara Fuchs Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 148753549X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres – from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing – was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.
Author: Barbara Fuchs Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 148753549X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres – from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing – was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.
Author: Susan Schreiner Publisher: OUP USA ISBN: 0195313429 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 499
Book Description
The topic of certitude is much debated today. On one side, commentators such as Charles Krauthammer urge us to achieve "moral clarity." On the other, those like George Will contend that the greatest present threat to civilization is an excess of certitude. To address this uncomfortable debate, Susan Schreiner turns to the intellectuals of early modern Europe, a period when thought was still fluid and had not yet been reified into the form of rationality demanded by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Schreiner argues that Europe in the sixteenth century was preoccupied with concerns similar to ours; both the desire for certainty -- especially religious certainty -- and warnings against certainty permeated the earlier era. Digging beneath overt theological and philosophical problems, she tackles the underlying fears of the period as she addresses questions of salvation, authority, the rise of skepticism, the outbreak of religious violence, the discernment of spirits, and the ambiguous relationship between appearance and reality.In her examination of the history of theological polemics and debates (as well as other genres), Schreiner sheds light on the repeated evaluation of certainty and the recurring fear of deception. Among the texts she draws on are Montaigne's Essays, the mystical writings of Teresa of Avila, the works of Reformation fathers William of Occam, Luther, Thomas Muntzer, and Thomas More; and the dramas of Shakespeare. The result is not a book about theology, but rather about the way in which the concern with certitude determined the theology, polemics and literature of an age.
Author: Lorraine Daston Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 9780754687320 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
This impressive volume is the first attempt to look at the intertwined histories of jurisprudence and science in early modern Europe. Taking an interdisciplinary approach these articles stimulate new debate in the areas of intellectual history and the history of philosophy, as well as the natural and human sciences in general.
Author: Pamela H. Smith Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226763293 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
Aims to bring together essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. This book looks at production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within different communities.
Author: R. Crocker Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9401597774 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
From a variety of perspectives, the essays presented here explore the profound interdependence of natural philosophy and rational religion in the `long seventeenth century' that begins with the burning of Bruno in 1600 and ends with the Enlightenment in the early Eighteenth century. From the writings of Grotius on natural law and natural religion, and the speculative, libertin novels of Cyrano de Bergerac, to the better-known works of Descartes, Malebranche, Cudworth, Leibniz, Boyle, Spinoza, Newton, and Locke, an increasing emphasis was placed on the rational relationship between religious doctrine, natural law, and a personal divine providence. While evidence for this intrinsic relationship was to be located in different places - in the ideas already present in the mind, in the observations and experiments of the natural philosophers, and even in the history, present experience, and prophesied future of mankind - the result enabled and shaped the broader intellectual and scientific discourses of the Enlightenment.
Author: Gerhild Scholz Williams Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271091037 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Scientific ideas inspired by religious, magical, and alchemical themes competed alongside traditional Aristotelian science and the emerging mechanical philosophy in the early modern era. At the center of this ferment was a quirky and creative German physician, Paracelsus, whose religious-alchemical worldview served as an inspiration for countless scientific innovators. This collection is about Paracelsus and the wide range of issues he explored, and ones taken up by many who were directly or indirectly affected by the same mental universe that sustained his thought and writings. This volume includes strong contextual studies on Paracelsianism and the larger cultural history of early modern science, including groundbreaking studies on Robert Boyle, François Rabelais, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Johannes Praetorius.
Author: Raz Chen-Morris Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 027107731X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler’s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler’s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler’s ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions. Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.
Author: Michael Stolleis Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317089774 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
This impressive volume is the first attempt to look at the intertwined histories of natural law and the laws of nature in early modern Europe. These notions became central to jurisprudence and natural philosophy in the seventeenth century; the debates that informed developments in those fields drew heavily on theology and moral philosophy, and vice versa. Historians of science, law, philosophy, and theology from Europe and North America here come together to address these central themes and to consider the question; was the emergence of natural law both in European jurisprudence and natural philosophy merely a coincidence, or did these disciplinary traditions develop within a common conceptual matrix, in which theological, philosophical, and political arguments converged to make the analogy between legal and natural orders compelling. This book will stimulate new debate in the areas of intellectual history and the history of philosophy, as well as the natural and human sciences in general.