scholarly journals A Renaissance Robot

1998 ◽  
Vol 120 (02) ◽  
pp. 80-82
Author(s):  
David Herman
Keyword(s):  
Motion Picture ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Practical Approach ◽  
Amusement Park ◽  
Shock Absorbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Dimensional Simulation ◽  
The Mind

This article focuses on a computer in downtown Manhattan that is displaying a robotics designer’s latest creation in action. Fashioned to look like an armored knight, the mechanical man in this three-dimensional simulation sits up, waves its arms, moves its head on a flexible neck, and opens and closes its hands and its jaw, all in smooth, precise motions. The robot could be used in a new motion picture, museum, or amusement park. Its original designer, however, never heard of movies, computers, or Wait Disney: The robot sprang from the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. Most Renaissance-era designers took a practical approach to mechanics, viewing each machine as a universal entity to be applied as a whole. Leonardo, however, used a revolutionary method of analysis that involved dissecting machines into individual components or “organs” and establishing how many essential parts exist; pulleys, chains, pinions, shock absorbers, springs, and friction bearings were just some of the elements he discovered to be common in many different machines. Leonardo’s studies have influenced and inspired Rossheim greatly in his current robotics designs. Leonardo followed the Renaissance ideal of “man as the measure,” the standard for which the world was designed.

“That Free Play of Human Affection”: The Humanist Ethics of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 486-521
Author(s):  
Thomas Albrecht
Keyword(s):  
Da Vinci ◽  
Free Play ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Fundamental Freedom ◽  
Secular Humanism ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Ethical Vision

Thomas Albrecht, “‘That Free Play of Human Affection’: The Humanist Ethics of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance” (pp. 486–521) This essay aims to refute received, persistent misconceptions of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and of aestheticism generally, as an asocial and amoral sensualism, and as a deliberate separating of art from human lives and the world. Contrary to these misconceptions, it finds a humanist ethical vision in The Renaissance, specifically in the essays Pater devotes to Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Drawing on an established post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic tradition of Victorian secular humanism, Pater defines this vision in terms of human sympathies for the feelings and suffering of other persons. And he defines it in aesthetic terms, in terms of art’s unique capacity to depict human feelings and suffering, and thereby to arouse sympathies in the viewer. At the same time, the essay contends that Pater in The Renaissance also defines his ethical vision in a more unprecedented, radical way. Beyond the solicitation of human sympathies, he frames it in terms of a fundamental uncertainty and unpredictability, a fundamental freedom and singularity, of human ethical relationships and responses. For Pater, this uncertainty and freedom are the qualities that make an ethics genuinely ethical. Pater finds these qualities, and this kind of genuine ethics, epitomized in the unpredictability and freedom of human aesthetic responses, including his own, to art and beauty.

scholarly journals Zmysły i edukacja. O roli doświadczenia, wiedzy oraz selekcji (refleksja filozoficzna w edukacji)

1970 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Sławomir Futyma
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Process ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The One

Sensory experience leads to the initiation of a complex process of thinking about the world. The result of this process are the images of what surrounds us. We definethis action as education. Because looking at the world from the perspective of sensual experience is the potential ability of every human being (Hannah Arendt), education becomes a tool enabling the simulation of the existing world and the one that may appear in the future. About who we are and where we are, who we will decide, the quality of the senses. The quality of the senses translates into the value of the cognitive process. The consequence of the quality of the cognitive process is the collection of information and knowledge. This sensual logic inscribes the action that classifiesus people according to predisposition or ava-ilable information that results from the quality of sensual functioning. As Leonardo da Vinci saw it: “Experience, the intermediary between creative nature and the human race, teaches what nature uses among mortals, that before the necessity of necessity one cannot act differently than reason, his teaching works.”

Leonardo da Vinci's Struggles with Representations of Reality

Leonardo ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Wade ◽  
Hiroshi Ono ◽  
Linda Lillakas
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Monocular Vision

Virtual reality systems seek to simulate real scenes so that they will be seen as three-dimensional. The issues at the heart of virtual reality are old ones. Leonardo da Vinci struggled with the differences between the perception of a scene and a painting of it, which he reduced to the differences between binocular and monocular vision. He could not produce on canvas what, in the terminology of Ames, was an equivalent configuration. This was provided 300 years after Leonardo by Wheatstone's stereoscope. Modern approaches to virtual reality that can incorporate moving viewpoints would have fascinated Leonardo

LEONARDO
LEONARDO DA VINCI. THE FLIGHTS OF THE MIND

The Art Book ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-59
Author(s):  
Gabriele Neher
Keyword(s):  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
The Mind

scholarly journals Global Prague: Renaissance and Reformation Crossroads

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Howard Louthan
Keyword(s):  
Fruits And Vegetables ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emory University ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Reading these articles in our AHY Forum brought back a flood of memories to my last days as a university undergraduate at Emory University when I first encountered Emperor Rudolf II and Renaissance Prague in a course taught by the late James Allen Vann. What captivates us about the past? What prompts naive undergraduates to take that fateful step and pursue a PhD in history? For me, it was simply Rudolf. I was not alone. The quizzical emperor ensconced in his castle high above the city has intrigued the imaginations of many. There is certainly irony in this, for Rudolf as an emperor was no success. He ended his reign an ineffective ruler browbeaten by his own brother to abdicate as king of Bohemia. But if he failed politically, there were lasting triumphs elsewhere. Rudolf's contemporary, the Flemish painter and theoretician Karel van Mander, famously pointed to Prague and the emperor as the “greatest art patron in the world.” And what emperor can boast that his most acclaimed “likeness” was a collage of fruits and vegetables, a portrait executed by a student of Leonardo da Vinci?

scholarly journals Sustained representation of perspectival shape

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (26) ◽  
pp. 14873-14882 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Morales ◽  
Axel Bax ◽  
Chaz Firestone
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Empirical Test ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Paradigm Case ◽  
Foundational Principle ◽  
The World ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
Dual Character ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Objective Shape

Arguably the most foundational principle in perception research is that our experience of the world goes beyond the retinal image; we perceive the distal environment itself, not the proximal stimulation it causes. Shape may be the paradigm case of such “unconscious inference”: When a coin is rotated in depth, we infer the circular object it truly is, discarding the perspectival ellipse projected on our eyes. But is this really the fate of such perspectival shapes? Or does a tilted coin retain an elliptical appearance even when we know it’s circular? This question has generated heated debate from Locke and Hume to the present; but whereas extant arguments rely primarily on introspection, this problem is also open to empirical test. If tilted coins bear a representational similarity to elliptical objects, then a circular coin should, when rotated, impair search for a distal ellipse. Here, nine experiments demonstrate that this is so, suggesting that perspectival shapes persist in the mind far longer than traditionally assumed. Subjects saw search arrays of three-dimensional “coins,” and simply had to locate a distally elliptical coin. Surprisingly, rotated circular coins slowed search for elliptical targets, even when subjects clearly knew the rotated coins were circular. This pattern arose with static and dynamic cues, couldn’t be explained by strategic responding or unfamiliarity, generalized across shape classes, and occurred even with sustained viewing. Finally, these effects extended beyond artificial displays to real-world objects viewed in naturalistic, full-cue conditions. We conclude that objects have a remarkably persistent dual character: their objective shape “out there,” and their perspectival shape “from here.”

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