scholarly journals Deprogramming Baconianism: The meaning of desiderata in the eighteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Keller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern View ◽  
The Future ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Changing Times

The historiographical construct of the ‘Baconian programme’ rose to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. It has since shaped views of Bacon and his followers, particularly concerning Bacon's utilitarianism. It has also set expectations concerning how defined and prescriptive Bacon's vision of the future ought to be for later Baconians. Yet, neither Bacon nor those who claimed to follow him thought of his work in programmatic ways. The early modern view of Bacon's futuristic writing allowed his followers great agency in re-sketching it to fit changing times. This essay first follows the rise of a ‘Baconian programme’ in historiography. It then returns to the past to outline some of the rich vocabulary for future-oriented writing deployed by the first generation of Bacon's self-proclaimed followers. Finally, testing how Bacon's plans appeared over a longer durée, it skips forward to Peter Shaw (1694–1763) and Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). Shaw employed one of Bacon's futuristic terms ( desiderata ), dropped another ( optativa ) and developed the significance of a new category (hint). Shaw's case illustrates the creativity that even Bacon's most ardent followers expected to be within their rights. Baconianism invited future redrafting and haphazard invention, rather than adherence to a predictive programme.

Collective Memory: Between Values and Historical Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Heritage Industry ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.

Prayers

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-149
Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

This chapter studies the logic of traditional innovation by investigating a form of sanctioned Catholic practice. In the eighteenth century, a new movement flourished in many of the most important cities and towns of New Spain. Calling themselves Holy Schools of Christ, these groups combined collective piety sometimes associated with baroque Catholicism, such as the lashing of flesh, with an intense demand for self-regulation of an individual's thoughts and actions. The participants in the Holy Schools might appear as surprisingly modern in their attitude toward controlling the future and their attempts to achieve individual or collective improvement. Yet to characterize this movement as a moment of hybrid modernity in which elements of the past persisted despite a turn toward the modern would be deeply misleading. For the members and supporters of the Holy Schools, innovation required tradition. Individuals of this period, in other words, were often future-oriented without being modern.

scholarly journals EXPECTATION AND FEAR: PHILOSOPHICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRESAGES OF RUSSIAN TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanjana S. Zlotnikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
Coming Crisis ◽  
Existential Issues

The article raises the question of foreseeing moral and intellectual, aesthetic and political collisions that could occur after the expected changes at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. The philosophical and anthropological paradigm of the pre-revolutionary era is defined through metaphors and concepts that attracted the attention of Russian philosophers, representatives of the sphere of artistic creativity: «expectation» (of changes, new people and phenomena) and «fear» (of changes, the unknown). For the analysis, we selected the judgments of prominent philosophers who discovered existential issues and related existential problems of the transition era for their contemporaries: V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov and N. Berdyaev. In V. Solovyov, the problem of waiting is related to the loneliness of a person in the face of global discord. Attention is drawn to the concept of «symptom of the end», to the concepts of crisis and disaster. Loneliness is experienced by the intellectual in anticipation of changes, possibly destructive, so the expectation as a context of loneliness turns into horror. V. Rozanov emphasized the tendency to distance himself from the world, Europe, contemporaries and classics in Russia. In Rozanov's philosophical and journalistic works, the future is not discussed at all because it is impossible to construct it; the past, which might have been the refuge of ideas about the harmony and dignity of life, causes the philosopher's attitude is sometimes even more negative than the present. On the example of the great creators – A. Chekhov, V. Meyerhold, V. Komissarzhevskaya and other contemporaries of N. Berdyaev, the psychoemotional tension from the coming crisis, the horror in anticipation of the coming future is shown. Berdyaev organically raises the question of the border between longing and other conditions (boredom, horror, a sense of emptiness), and the border is existential.

scholarly journals And did those hooves: Pan and the Edwardians

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eleanor Toland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
World War ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
World War One ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

<p>A surprisingly high number of the novels, short stories and plays produced in Britain during the Edwardian era (defined in the terms of this thesis as the period of time between 1900 and the beginning of World War One) use the Grecian deity Pan, god of shepherds, as a literary motif. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Frances Hodgson Burnett and G.K. Chesterton made Pan a fictional character or alluded to the god of shepherds in more subtle ways. The mystery of why the Edwardians used an ancient Greek god as a symbol requires a profound interrogation of the early twentieth century British soul. The Edwardian era was a narrow corridor of time between the Victorian age and the birth of modernism with the First World War, a period characterised by vast social and political transition, as a generation began to comprehend change they equally feared and desired. Pan was an equivocal figure: easily portrayed as satanic due to his horns and goatish nature, but as the kindly god of shepherds, also a Christ-like figure. Such ambiguity made Pan an ideal symbol for an age unsure of itself and its future. Writers like Maugham and Machen, afraid of social and sexual revolution, portrayed Pan as diabolical, a tempter and a rapist. E.M. Forster, a homosexual man hopeful about the possibility of change, made Pan a terrifying but ultimately liberating figure for those ready to accept the freedom he represented. Kenneth Grahame, desiring the return of a Luddite, Arcadian past that had never truly existed, wrote of Pan as Jesus on the riverbank, sheltering the lost and giving mystic visions to the worthy. Pan represented a simultaneous craving in the Edwardians to flee to the past and to embrace the future, an idealism of the primitive coupled with hope for the future. What he also symbolized was anxiety about the future and the desire to not return to the horrors of the past, fears of the primitive suggested in the nightmarish atavism of Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” and the fears of what society might become expressed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops”. The Edwardian Pan eventually reached its culmination in J.M. Barrie’s twentieth-century fairy tale Peter Pan, in which the eponymous character, seeming at first so different from the ancient Greek mythological figure, became an embodiment of everything the Edwardian Pan phenomenon represented. With the nightmarish yet fascinating figure of Peter Pan, the Edwardians had created a new Pan, reborn for their age. With the beginning of World War One, the Pan figure would begin to fade into insignificance, with only one major work later published which could justifiably be called part of the phenomenon; Lord Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan, a fitting elegy for the Edwardian Age.</p>

Reviews: The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective, on the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and its Aftermath, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom?, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama, Early Modern Civil Discourses, ‘A moving Rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England, Society and Culture in Early Modern England, the English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630–1660, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, the French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, Manliness and the Boy's Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940McCullaghC. Behan, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective , Routledge, 2004, pp. viii + 212, £18.99 pbBreisachE., On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and its Aftermath , University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. vii + 236, $16.00 pb.WilliamsL. Blakeney, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past , Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 265, £40.SouthgateBeverley, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom? Routledge, 2003, pp. xi + 211, £55, £16.99 pb.BrusterDouglas, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama , University of Nebraska Press, 2001, pp. 288, £35.50.RichardsJennifer (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 206, $65.00.LuckyjChristina, ‘A moving Rhetoricke‘: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England , Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. viii + 198, £40.CressyDavid, Society and Culture in Early Modern England , Variorum Collected Studies Series, Ashgate, 2003, pp. xii + 344, £57.50.McDowellNicholas, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630–1660 , Clarendon Press, 2003, pp. x + 219, £45.BurnsWilliam E., An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727 , Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 218, £45.BergMaxine and EgerElizabeth (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xii + 259, 41 plates, £55.SweetRosemary, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain , Hambledon & London, 2004, pp. xxi + 473, £25.TaylorGeorge, The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789–1805 , Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. x + 263, £45.AttridgeSteve, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 229, £45.ColeSarah, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War , Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 297, £40FrantzenAllen J., Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War , University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 335, £24.50.BoydKelly, Manliness and the Boy's Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. x + 273, £60.

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-100
Author(s):  
Christopher Parker ◽  
David Watson ◽  
Alan Armstrong ◽  
Ben Lowe ◽  
Carrie Hintz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War

Introduction

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Enzo Traverso
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Financial Capitalism

The introduction analyzes the historical context in which left-wing melancholy arises as a prismatic frame for rethinking the past: “presentism,” a dilated present that absorbs in itself both the past and the future. It corresponds to a neoliberal temporality that replaces twentieth century utopias with a spasmodic acceleration retreated into the boundaries of financial capitalism, deprived of any projection into the future.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-147
Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Academic Dissertations

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

Reclaiming the Past, Building a Future: Māori Identity in the Plays of Hone Kouka

2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World War I ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1960S

Hone Kouka's historical plays Nga Tangata Toa and Waiora, created and produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand, one set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and the other during the great Māori urban migrations of the 1960s, provide fresh insights into the way in which individual Māori responded to the tremendous social disruptions they experienced during the twentieth century. Much like the Māori orator who prefaces his formal interactions with a statement of his whakapapa (genealogy), Kouka reassembles the bones of both his ancestors, and those of other Māori, by demonstrating how the present is constructed by the past, offering a view of contemporary Māori identity that is traditional and modern, rural and urban, respectful of the past and open to the future.

On the Applicability of Mathematics to Nature: Roger Bacon and his Predecessors

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Applicability Of Mathematics ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Roger Bacon has often been victimized by his friends, who have exaggerated and distorted his place in the history of mathematics. He has too often been viewed as the first, or one of the first, to grasp the possibilities and promote the cause of modern mathematical physics. Even those who have noticed that Bacon was more given to the praise than to the practice of mathematics have seen in his programmatic statements an anticipation of seventeenth-century achievements. But if we judge Bacon by twentieth-century criteria and pronounce him an anticipator of modern science, we will fail totally to understand his true contributions; for Bacon was not looking to the future, but responding to the past; he was grappling with ancient traditions and attempting to apply the truth thus gained to the needs of thirteenth-century Christendom. If we wish to understand Bacon, therefore, we must take a backward, rather than a forward, look; we must view him in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors; we must consider not his influence, but his sources and the use to which he put them.

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