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A Global Enlightenment

A Global Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Statman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226825744
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
A revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement. A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science. Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.

A Global Enlightenment

A Global Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Statman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226825760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
"A Global Enlightenment is a book about the idea of Western progress, told through a series of conversations about Chinese science. Its protagonists - an ex-Jesuit missionary, a French statesman, a Manchu prince, Chinese literati, European savants, and other figures of the late Enlightenment world - exchanged ideas across cultures. In telling their stories here, Alexander Statman shows how Chinese science shaped a signature legacy of the European Enlightenment: the idea of Western progress. By focusing on the orphans of the Enlightenment, those who sought to vindicate ancient wisdom as others left it behind, Statman reveals that ideas about the uniqueness of the West - and the mystery, inscrutability, or otherness of the East - did not follow from the Enlightenment idea of progress but had to be invented. The orphans of the Enlightenment believed that the knowledge of the past and the East still had value for modern Europe, and their efforts to recover and explain it, in turn, uncover an unknown story of European engagement with Chinese science. In contrast to the common view, that over the course of the Enlightenment non-Western ideas were banished from European thought, Statman found that the opposite is true. Toward the end of the Enlightenment, Europeans only grew more interested in Chinese science, and this has had lasting effects, from the eighteenth century to today"--

The Occult Mind

The Occult Mind PDF Author: Christopher Lehrich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801460549
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
"Given the historical orientation of philosophy, is it unreasonable to suggest a wider cast of the net into the deep waters of magic? By encountering magical thought as theory, we come to a new understanding of a thought that looks back at us from a funhouse mirror."-from The Occult Mind Divination, like many critical modes, involves reading signs, and magic, more generally, can be seen as a kind of criticism that takes the universe-seen and unseen, known and unknowable-as its text. In The Occult Mind, Christopher I. Lehrich explores the history of magic in Western thought, suggesting a bold new understanding of the claims made about the power of various belief systems. In closely interlinked essays on such disparate topics as ley lines, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and ritual in magical practice, and early attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, Lehrich treats magic and its parts as an intellectual object that requires interpretive zeal on the part of readers/observers. Drawing illuminating parallels between the practice of magic and more recent interpretive systems-structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics-Lehrich deftly suggests that the specter of magic haunts all such attempts to grasp the character of knowledge. Offering a radical new approach to the nature and value of occult thought, Lehrich's brilliantly conceived and executed book posits magic as a mode of theory that is intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of reason and truth. In elucidating the deep parallels between occult thought and academic discourse, Lehrich demonstrates that sixteenth-century occult philosophy often touched on issues that have become central to philosophical discourse only in the past fifty years.

Bulletin

Bulletin PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description


Empires of Knowledge

Empires of Knowledge PDF Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429867921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description
Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.

Civilization in French and Francophone Literature

Civilization in French and Francophone Literature PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004333053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
Preliminary Material /Buford Norman and James Day -- France's First Revolution: Hamlet and the "Unresolved Man" of 1589 /George Hoffmann -- On Civility: The Model of Sparta in Montaigne's "Defence de Seneque et de Plutarque" /Sue W. Farquhar -- Of Cannibals, Credo, and Custom: Jean de Léry's Calvinist View of Civilization in Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (1578) /Scott D. Juall -- Bien m'en avés rendu le conte: Redeeming economies in Yvain /Marcella Munson -- La Civilisation du goût: Savoir et saveur à la table de Louis XIV: (ou, Gastéréa et l'histoire de la cuisine française au dix-septième siècle) /Béa Aaronson -- Un idéal de la culture française entre humanisme et classicisme: "civiliser la doctrine" /Emmanuel Bury -- De la société de salon à la société de cour: l'ambivalence du processus de civilisation /Sophie Rollin -- Les traces ineffaçables de la civilisation dans Paul et Virginie /Murielle Perrier -- Work, Machines, and Vapors in Late Eighteenth-Century France /Laura Balladur -- La représentation des populations noires dans l'œuvre de Paul Morand: enjeux idéologiques et politiques /Nicolas Di Méo -- Roman et société dans la France contemporaine /Denise Brahimi -- L'image de la France dans le dialogue de Gaulle-Sirius: Suprématie politique et leadership humaniste /Liliane Ayad Toss -- Civilité: une certaine modalité du vivre-ensemble /Hélène Merlin-Kajman.

Transactions

Transactions PDF Author: Colonial Society of Massachusetts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Massachusetts
Languages : en
Pages : 582

Book Description


MEMOIRES.

MEMOIRES. PDF Author: ACADEMIE DES SCIENCES, INSCRIPTIONS ET BELLESLETTRES DE TOULOUSE.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Book Description


Catalogue of Printed Books

Catalogue of Printed Books PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 664

Book Description


Transcendental Wordplay

Transcendental Wordplay PDF Author: Michael West
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821413244
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Book Description
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of "etymology." New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay. Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened "romantic irony." Notable punsters or etymologists all, they gleefully set up as sages, creating jocular masterpieces from their zest for oracular wordplay. Their search for a primal language lurking beneath all natural languages provided them with something like a secret language that encodes their meanings. To fathom their essentially comic masterpieces we must decipher it. Interpreting Thoreau as an ironic moralist, satirist, and social critic rather than a nature-loving mystic, Transcendental Wordplay suggests that the major American Romantics shared a surprising conservatism. In this award-winning study, Professor West rescues the pun from critical contempt and allows readers to enjoy it as a serious form of American humor.

Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology

Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description