Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Walker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
John Evelyn

Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England charts the moment when well-educated, well-resourced, English intellectuals first became interested in classical architecture in substantial numbers. This occurred after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 and involved people such as John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and Roger North. The book explores how these figures treated architecture as a subject of intellectual enquiry, either as writers, as designers of buildings, or as both. In four substantial chapters it looks at how the architect was defined as a major intellectual figure; how architects acquired material that allowed them to define themselves as intellectually competent architects; how intellectual writers in the period handled knowledge of ancient architecture in their writing; and how the design process in architecture was conceived of in theoretical writing at the time. In all, the book shows that the key to understanding English architectural culture at the time is to understand how architecture was handled as knowledge, and how architects were conceived of as collectors and producers of such knowledge. It also makes the claim that architecture was treated as an extremely serious and important area of intellectual enquiry, the result of which was that, by the turn of the eighteenth century, architects and architectural writers could count themselves amongst England’s intellectual and cultural elite.

The Laws of Hammurabi

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Barmash
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

The Laws of Hammurabi is one of the earliest law codes, dating from the eighteenth century BCE Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq). It is the culmination of a tradition in which scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a repertoire of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The book describes how the scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles. The scribe inserted the statutes into the structure of a royal inscription, skillfully reshaping the genre. This approach allowed the king to use the law code to demonstrate that Hammurabi had fulfilled the mandate to guarantee justice enjoined upon him by the gods, affirming his authority as king. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia, influencing biblical law and the law of the Hittite Empire and perhaps shaping Greek and Roman law. The Laws of Hammurabi is also a witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became a classic text and the subject of formal commentaries, marking a Copernican revolution in intellectual culture.

What are those without faith doing in liturgical enactments?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Way

Often there are, among those who participate in some liturgical enactment by saying the prescribed words and performing the prescribed bodily actions, some who are lacking in faith: they do not have faith that the doctrines presupposed by the prescribed acts of worship are true. Why do they nonetheless participate in the way described? And what are they doing when they participate? Are they just going through the motions? Is that possible? Or are they, for example, thanking God even though they lack faith that God exists and is worthy of being thanked? Is that possible? These are the main questions addressed in this chapter. The chapter closes with a discussion and appraisal of the sincerity movement in eighteenth-century England, whose members insisted that worshippers should only say what they feel at the moment; to act otherwise would be insincere. And insincerity is a vice.

On the Shoulders of Giants

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David D. Nolte
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Least Action ◽  
New Science ◽  
Principle Of Least Action ◽  
Parabolic Trajectory ◽  
Leonhard Euler ◽  
New Generation

Galileo’s parabolic trajectory launched a new approach to physics that was taken up by a new generation of scientists like Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley. The English Newtonian tradition was adopted by ambitious French iconoclasts who championed Newton over their own Descartes. Chief among these was Pierre Maupertuis, whose principle of least action was developed by Leonhard Euler and Joseph Lagrange into a rigorous new science of dynamics. Along the way, Maupertuis became embroiled in a famous dispute that entangled the King of Prussia as well as the volatile Voltaire who was mourning the death of his mistress Emilie du Chatelet, the lone female French physicist of the eighteenth century.

Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing.

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Barbara McCaskill ◽  
Keith A. Sandiford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The Moment

Sensor e-textiles: person centered co-design for people with late stage dementia

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Treadaway ◽  
Gail Kenning
Keyword(s):  
Design Process ◽  
Late Stage ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Sensory Properties ◽  
Content Type ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
Grounded Practical Theory ◽  
The Moment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present design research investigating the development of sensory textiles with embedded electronics to support the wellbeing of people with late stage dementia in residential care. Design/methodology/approach – The research presented is qualitative and uses a mixed method approach informed by grounded practical theory and positive design methodologies. It uses an inclusive and participatory co-design process involving people with dementia and their families with an interdisciplinary team of experts. Findings – Both the co-design process and the artefacts developed have been beneficial in supporting wellbeing. The textile artefacts have been found to soothe, distract and comfort people with dementia. They have also been shown to facilitate in the moment conversational bridges between family members and carers with persons with dementia. Research limitations/implications – The findings are based on a small cohort of participants, observational reports and descriptive accounts from family members and carers. Practical implications – The paper proposes ways in which simple hand-crafted textiles can be used beneficially to support the wellbeing of people with late stage dementia. It provides examples of how technology can be used to personalise and extend the sensory properties of the artefacts created. Social implications – It promotes an inclusive co-design methodology involving care professionals, carers and people with dementia with designers and technologists. Originality/value – The paper describes new ways of extending sensory properties of textiles through the integration of technology.

DEATH RITUAL

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 56 (6) ◽  
pp. 1013-1013
Author(s):  
Philippe Aries
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Death Ritual ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One ◽  
Hospital Team

Death in the hospital is no longer the occasion of ritual ceremony, over which the dying person presides amidst his assembled relatives and friends. Death is a technical phenomenon obtained by a cessation determined in a more or less avowed way by a decision of the doctor and the hospital team. Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person has already lost consciousness. Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning. From the end of the eighteenth century [there has been] a sentimental landslide . . . causing the initiative to pass from the dying man himself to his family . . . Today the initiative has passed from the family, as much an outside person, to the hospital team. They are the masters of death—of the moment as well as the circumstances of death.

Persuasion by Design? Design Theory Between Aesthetics and Rhetoric

Design Issues ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
Joachim Knape
Keyword(s):  
Design Process ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Design Argument ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article deals primarily with object design from a production-theoretical perspective. It is focused on the question of the rhetorical achievement of design, i.e., its persuasiveness, which was already discussed by Buchanan and Krippendorf in 1985. To this day, the relationship between aesthetic and rhetorical calculuses in the design process is controversial in theoretical discussion. The solution to the problem: Aesthetics and rhetoric combine in the appeal structure (1) at the moment of creation of design and (2) at the moment of the user's decision for an object. In these processes, the design argument results from the combination of aestheticized gestalt and rhetorical appeal of an object.

Prosaic Suffering

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-171
Author(s):  
Alex Eric Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
The Moment

This chapter examines the uses and meanings of prose in tragedy during the eighteenth century. It offers a close, comparative reading of Aaron Hill’s The Fatal Extravagance (1721) and Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753), and places the developing conventions of bourgeois tragedy in conversation with the insights of Samuel Richardson, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and the actors called upon to embody its emotion. In doing so, this chapter argues that prosaic suffering performed its grief under an illusion of immediacy, in ways that were absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted in their implications. Hence, bourgeois drama’s “natural picture” adapted the novel’s “writing to the moment” and embodied emotional practices characterized by quotidian concerns and an ambivalence about middle-rank life.

Negotiating human engagement and the fixity of computational design: Toward a performative design space for the differently-abled bodymind

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-193
Author(s):  
Sean Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Structural Optimization ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Space ◽  
Computational Design ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Cultural Entity

Computational design affords agency: the ability to orchestrate the material, spatial, and technical architectural system. In this specific case, it occurs through enhanced, authored means to facilitate making and performance—typically driven by concerns of structural optimization, material use, and responsivity to environmental factors—of an atmospheric rather than social nature. At issue is the positioning of this particular manner of agency solely with the architect auteur. This abruptly halts—at the moment in which fabrication commences—the ability to amend, redefine, or newly introduce fundamentally transformational constituents and their interrelationships and, most importantly, to explore the possibility for extraordinary outcomes. When the architecture becomes a functional, social, and cultural entity, in the hands of the idealized abled-bodied user, agency—especially for one of an otherly body or mind—is long gone. Even an empathetic auteur may not be able to access the motivations of the differently-abled body and neuro-divergent mind, effectively locking the constraints of the design process, which creates an exclusionary system to those beyond the purview of said auteur. It can therefore be deduced that the mechanisms or authors of a conventional computational design process cannot eradicate the exclusionary reality of an architectural system. Agency is critical, yet a more expansive terminology for agent and agency is needed. The burden to conceive of capacities that will always be highly temporal, social, unpredictable, and purposefully unknown must be shifted far from the scope of the traditional directors of the architectural system. Agency, and who it is conferred upon, must function in a manner that dissolves the distinctions between the design, the action of designing, the author of design, and those subjected to it.

Literary Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Fundamental Component ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Tool

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them.

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