Teleology

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.M. Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Living Thing ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Thinking ◽  
Self Organizing

Teleology is a mode of explanation in which the presence, occurrence, or nature of some phenomenon is explained by the end to which it contributes. The model of explanation is “pure mechanism” which holds that there is a single kind of stuff in the world-”matter” that exhibits a single kind of change, motion. It falls into three classes: the argument from nonactuality, the argument from intentionality, and the argument from normativity. These objections are because of early modern thinking about the natural world. These arguments rely on the Platonic model of transcendent teleology. Aristotelian teleology complements our current understanding of goal-directed, self-organizing, adaptive systems. The success of development can be explained by plasticity which is a goal-directed capacity of organisms to produce and maintain a stable, well-functioning living thing. The understanding of how evolution can be adaptive requires us to incorporate teleology.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Modern Era

In the early modern world, exceptional bodies are linked to knowledge, not as the production of knowledge of the self through the scrutiny of those who have been ‘othered’, but as a means of inducing self-scrutiny and awareness of the limitations of human understanding. Exceptional beings and phenomena entice us to consider the world beyond that which is familiar to us and raise questions concerning our knowledge systems based on notions of what is natural or, in our modern era, normal. Rather than reacting with horror, disgust or pity, we can learn to respect the variety, mobility and resilience of the natural world in our contemplation of that which we see as exceptional.

scholarly journals “None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others”: Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2024
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories

The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

‘God Hath Put such Secretes in Nature’: The Reformed Kirk, Church-Building and the Religious Landscape in Early Modern Scotland

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 260-275
Author(s):  
Andrew Spicer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Religious Landscape

Although the Reformed tradition advocated the primacy of the Word of God, the writings of Calvin and other theologians also emphasized the importance of the natural world for revealing the glory of God. As early as 1534, Calvin argued that God had raised everywhere, in all places and in all things, his ensigns and emblems, under blazons so clear and intelligible that no one can pretend ignorance in not knowing such a sovereign Lord, who has so amply exalted his magnificence; who has in all parts of the world, in heaven and on earth, written and as it were engraved the glory of his power, goodness, wisdom and eternity …

Introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Harris Sacks
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Abstract “Apocalypticism” and “Globalization” are not commonly juxtaposed to one another, with the former taken to begin in ancient times and the latter taken to be a modern phenomenon. This Forum explores the convergence of thoughts about the history of the world and the practices those thoughts engendered among the peoples of Western Europe and the Mediterranean region during the “early modern” era, roughly between 1400 and 1800. Scholars in history and the humanities commonly regard this period as a long transition in a “from-to” narrative when “pre-modern” institutions and intellectual and cultural traditions, characterized by the entanglements of the worldly with the divine, the temporal with the spiritual, the secular with the sacred, and the microcosm with the macrocosm, were transformed into “modernity” by the replacement of beliefs dependent on faith with knowledge established by reason. The essays in this Forum take a different approach by treating the development of modern understandings of the political, social and natural world as emerging from religiously-grounded discourse, debate, and practice in the early modern era.

Environment and the Natural World

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Ecology ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Term

Over the course of the early modern period, Europeans came to look at, engage with, and even transform nature and the environment in new ways, as they studied natural objects, painted landscapes, drew maps, built canals, cut down forests, and transferred species from one continent to another. The term “nature” meant many things during this period, from the inmost essence of something to those parts of the world that were nonhuman, such as the three famous “kingdoms” of nature: the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral. This article focuses on nature in this latter sense and broadens it out to include more recent understandings of the modern term “environment,” so as to encompass not only plants, animals, and rocks but also entire landscapes. Scholars from a wide variety of fields, ranging from the histories of science, art, and literature through historical geography, historical archeology, historical ecology, and landscape history, have long been interested in issues related to the environment and the natural world; more recently, they have been joined by practitioners of “environmental history” and additional branches of the environmental humanities and social sciences, who have drawn on these preexisting approaches and brought still further perspectives to the table.

Experiential Caribbean

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

This book examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative knowledge about the natural world, and particularly the body, during the long seventeenth century. It reveals a hitherto untold history about the transformation of early modern natural and human landscapes, one that unfolds outside existent analytical frameworks for the study of the Atlantic world. The book introduces some of the earliest and richest known records carrying the voices of people of African descent, including African themselves, to change our understanding of the dynamics and intellectual spaces in which early modern people produced transformative ideas about the natural world. Caribbean cultures of bodies and healing appeared through a localized epistemological upheaval based on the experiential and articulated by ritual specialists of African origin. These changes resulted from multiple encounters between actors coming from all over the globe that occurred in a social, spiritual, and intellectual realm that, even though ubiquitous, does not appear in existent histories of science, medicine, and the African diaspora. The intellectual leaders of the mostly black and free communities of the seventeenth century Caribbean defined not only how to interpret nature, but also the very sensorial landscapes on which reality could be experienced. They invented a powerful and lasting way of imagining, defining and dealing with the world.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

The Role of Women in Pursuing Scottish Criminal Actions, 1580–1650

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Stephanie Dropuljic
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
The Law ◽  
Role Of Women

This article examines the role of women in raising criminal actions of homicide before the central criminal court, in early modern Scotland. In doing so, it highlights the two main forms of standing women held; pursing an action for homicide alone and as part of a wider group of kin and family. The evidence presented therein challenges our current understanding of the role of women in the pursuit of crime and contributes to an under-researched area of Scots criminal legal history, gender and the law.

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

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