scholarly journals Cave men: Stone tools, Victorian science, and the ‘primitive mind’ of deep time

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul B. Pettitt ◽  
Mark J. White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Phases Of Development ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Archaeological Sediments

Palaeoanthropology, the study of the evolution of humanity, arose in the nineteenth century. Excavations in Europe uncovered a series of archaeological sediments which provided proof that the antiquity of human life on Earth was far longer than the biblical six thousand years, and by the 1880s authors had constructed a basic paradigm of what ‘primitive’ human life was like. Here we examine the development of Victorian palaeoanthropology for what it reveals of the development of notions of cognitive evolution. It seems that Victorian specialists rarely addressed cognitive evolution explicitly, although several assumptions were generally made that arose from preconceptions derived from contemporary ‘primitive’ peoples. We identify three main phases of development of notions of the primitive mind in the period.

Temporal Scale, The Far Future and Inhuman Times: Foresight in Wells and Woolf, Time Travel in Olaf Stapledon and Terrence Malick

2019 ◽  
pp. 166-211
Author(s):  
Charles M. Tung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Temporal Scale ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Small Frame ◽  
Far Future ◽  
Olaf Stapledon ◽  
The Way

This chapter links the period’s visions of the far future with modernism’s engagement with deep time in order to show how the big historicising that begins in the nineteenth century is not solely about the expansion of historicity but the multiplicity and alternative futurity that follows from it. While the heterochrony of modernist temporal zoom includes the dissolution characteristic of immense expansions of perspective, it is not centred solely on the absorption of a small frame into some more certain, fundamental backdrop. The incongruity between the aesthetic’s imperative to scale itself to what we care about and the immensity of things that can only be registered from far away – temporal hyperobjects, speculative outsides, far-futural risks – is valuable not only for the critique of modernity’s compressed timescapes that it enables, but also for the way it reveals the plurality of times that cannot be nested within one another. This chapter constructs a relationship between genre fiction’s scope and modernism’s long-range aesthetics – the connection between SF’s literal movement away from earthly temporal units (days,years, events, lives, the career of the human as such) and modernist attempts to picture human life from an estranging distance.

Review of the Current State and Future Development in Standardizing Natural Lighting in Interiors

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanislav Darula
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Artificial Lighting ◽  
Computer Tools ◽  
Natural Lighting ◽  
Current State ◽  
Minimum Requirements ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Window Design

Three elements mainly wind, water and sun seemed to determine in ancient ages the basic phenomena of life on Earth. Architectural history documented the importance of sun influence on urban and building construction already in layouts of Mesopotamian and Greek houses. Not only sun radiation but especially daylight played a significant role in the creation of indoor environment. Later, in the 20th century, a search of interaction between human life in buildings and natural conditions were studied considering well­being and energy conscious design recently using computer tools in complex research and more detail interdisciplinary solutions. At the same time the restricted daytime availability of natural light was supplemented by more efficient and continually cheaper artificial lighting of interiors. There are two main approaches to standardize the design and evaluation of indoor visual environment. The first is based on the determination of the minimum requirements respecting human health and visibility needs in all activities while the second emphasizes the behaviour and comfort of occupants in buildings considering year­around natural changes of physical quantities like light, temperature, noise and energy consumption. The new current standardization basis for daylight evaluation and window design criteria stimulate the study of methodology principles that historically were based on the overcast type of sky luminance pattern avoiding yearly availability of sky illuminance levels. New trends to base the daylight standardization on yearly or long­term availability of daylight are using the averages or median sky illuminance levels to characterise local climatological conditions. This paper offers the review and discussion about the principles of the natural light standardization with a short introduction to the history and current state, with a trial to focus on the possible development of lighting engineering and its standards in future.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

Systematic approaches in water management: Aquatic outlook and decision support systems combining monitoring, research, policy analysis and information technology

1996 ◽  
Vol 34 (12) ◽  
pp. 9-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. de Jong ◽  
J. T. van Buuren ◽  
J. P. A. Luiten
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Management Policy ◽  
Ecological Aspects ◽  
Management Plans ◽  
Water Management Plans ◽  
Life On Earth

Sustained developments is the target of almost every modern water management policy. Sustainability is focused on human life and on the ecological quality of our environment. Both aspects are essential for life on earth. Within a river catchment area this means that well balanced relations have to be laid between human activities and ecological aspects in the involved areas. Policy analysis is especially looking for the most efficient way to analyse and to overcome bottlenecks. In The Netherlands project “The Aquatic Outlook” all these elements are worked out in a nationwide scale, providing the scientific base and policy analysis from which future water management plans can be derived.

The Marble Faun

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Old World ◽  
American Expatriates ◽  
Art And Culture

Any narrative of human action and adventure – whether we call it history or Romance – is certain to be a fragile handiwork, more easily rent than mended.’ The fragility – and the durability – of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the ‘Marble Faun’, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy. Hawthorne's ‘International Novel’ dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the ‘authentic’ and the ‘fake’, in life as in art. The author's evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favourite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society.

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.

Time and Temporality

2020 ◽  
pp. 458-480
Author(s):  
Benedict Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Intimate Connection ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Temporal Course ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
Poetic Metaphor ◽  
Century Thought

For the nineteenth century, music was commonly characterized as the “art of time,” and provided a particularly fertile medium for articulating concerns about the nature of time and the temporal experience of human life. This chapter examines some of the debates around music and time from the period, arranged thematically around a series of conceptual issues. These include the reasons proposed for the links between music and time, and the intimate connection between our subjective experience of time and music; the use of music as a poetic metaphor for the temporal course of history; its use by philosophers as an instrument for the explication of temporal conundrums; its alleged potential for overcoming time; its various forms of temporal signification across diverse genres; and the legacy of nineteenth-century thought on these topics today.

Is God Really in History?

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (60) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
William Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Evolution Of The Universe ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Universe

The author sets out to respond to the student complaint that ‘Philosophy did not answer “the big questions”’, in particular the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The response first outlines and evaluates the most common religious answer, that human life is given a meaning by God who created us and informs us that this life is just the pilgrim way to the next eternal life in heaven. He then discusses the response that, from the point of view of post-Darwinian science and the evolution of the universe and all that is in it, human life on Earth must be afforded no more meaning than the meaning we would give to a microscopic planaria or to some creature on another planet in a distant universe. All things including human creatures on Planet Earth just exist for a time and that is that. There is no plan or purpose. In the last sections the author outlines the view that it is we humans ourselves who give meaning to our lives by our choices of values or things that are worth pursuing and through our resulting sense of achievement or the opposite. Nevertheless the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ can mean quite different things in different contexts, and so merit different if related answers. From one point of view one answer may lie in terms of the love of one human for another.

The Dictatorship of Appearance or Simulation in Present-Day "Democracies" against the Background of the Market Ecocide of the Foundations of Human Life on Earth

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Subetto
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Disaster ◽  
Environmental Destruction ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Point Of No Return ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Near Future

It is proved that the current era is characterized by many governments around the world as dictatorship of "appearance" or "simulation" of the most activities transforming politics, even the tragic events like local ecological catastrophes, local wars, "colour revolutions", the elections in a "theatre", "acting", on the background of market ecocide – really accelerating processes of the first phase of a Global Environmental Disaster, which, at the transition "point of no return" in the near future, may turn into a process of irreversible environmental destruction of all mankind. This dictatorship of "appearance" or simulation as a "curtain" market democracy, hiding the capitalism-led, process of dehumanization of man, is an indicator of the inadequacy of states and political "elites" imperative of survival of mankind, as the imperative out of the ecological impasse of history in market-capitalist format. There comes a reckoning for this departure into the " market-capitalist illusion of apparent prosperity. The societies of the world, including Rossiya, have faced a dilemma:either environmental destruction, or the Noosphere Breakthrough, which, in its essence, is a change in the social organization of social life and its reproduction – the transition from the dominance of capitalism and the market to the Noosphere Ecological Spiritual Socialism on the basis of scientific and educational society and the management of socionatural evolution.

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