Esperienza, Teacher of All Things

Nuncius ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Fix
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Mathematical Theory ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Renaissance Music ◽  
Instrumental Practice

Abstract This paper reexamines the music and experimental science of Vincenzo Galilei through the lens of artisanal epistemology. Where previous scholars have questioned the veracity of Vincenzo’s experiments, I unpack how Vincenzo himself understood and utilized esperienza. Arguing against Cohen and Prins especially, I assert that Vincenzo’s esperienza functioned as a rational-empirical way of studying nature. I then show how esperienza played analogous roles in his science and practice. By treating his music as artisanal epistemology, I portray Vincenzo’s musical composition, like his experimentalism, as a form of natural knowledge-making. He deployed esperienza in science to capture knowledge of consonance and in art to express knowledge of music’s effects on passions. Finally, I situate Vincenzo within broader humanistic and artistic trends and consider his influence on Galileo. This study explores Renaissance music at the nexus of mathematical theory and empirical and instrumental practice while reinterpreting the early modern concept of esperienza.

Spiritualité, Spirituality, and Espiritualidad

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-525
Author(s):  
Rady Roldán-Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Academic Study

Abstract This article offers a corrective to the widely held idea that the modern concept of spirituality is traceable to the seventeenth century French notion of spiritualité. Instead, the argument is made that the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish terms spiritual and spiritualidad are earlier expressions of the modern concept of spirituality. The article opens with an examination of the place of spirituality in the academic study of religion and proceeds to a discussion of the premises of conceptual history and modern lexicography. In the closing section, the author analyses a plethora of lexicographical and other primary source material from the medieval to the early modern periods that demonstrate the usage of the terms spirital and espiritualidad in Spain as well as in colonial Latin America. Among the sources examined are Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611); Fernando de Valverde, Vida de Jesu Christo nuestro señor (Lima: Luis de Lyra, 1657); and Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: En la imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1726–1739).

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 262-264
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
The Mind

By discussing the works of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant, this book presented a number of case studies that endorse the idea that the kind of experience that is at play in many early modern accounts is best thought of as embodied. To acknowledge that the body plays this role matters not only because it helps us to correct a misconception of what the early modern concept of experience stands for, by highlighting that this concept cannot be comprehended if understood in purely subjectivist terms. It also enables us to break free from an overly narrow focus on epistemic questions that are typically investigated when conceiving of experience as something that captures the nature of one’s own thinking and feeling, but not how things outside the mind really are....

Translating Sorrow

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Central European ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Italian Music

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.

scholarly journals Through the Walls of Time: A Short Reflection on Writing Early Modern Intellectual History

Zutot ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Irene Zwiep
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
History Of

This short piece takes a longstanding problem from the history of ideas, viz. the use of contemporary concepts in descriptions of past phenomena, and discusses its implications for broader intellectual history. Scholars have argued that being transparent about anachronism can be a first step towards solving the issue. I would argue, however, that it may actually interfere with proper historical interpretation. As a case study, we shall explore what happens when a modern concept like ‘culture’ is applied to pre-modern intellectual processes. As the idea of cultural transfer is prominent in recent Jewish historiography, we will focus on exemplary early modern intermediary Menasseh ben Israel, and ask ourselves whether his supposed ‘brokerage’ (a notion taken from twentieth-century anthropology) brings us closer to understanding his work. As an alternative, I propose ‘bricolage,’ again a central analytical tool in modern anthropology but, as I hope to show, one with unexpected hermeneutical potential.

Foreigners in Pre-Modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-135
Author(s):  
Peter Strohschneider ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Meaning Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
Heating Up

The essay draws on the concept of ‘asymmetric counter-concepts’ as developed by Reinhart Koselleck starting with twin-formulas such as ‘the familiar and the unfamiliar’ which are generally used to establish collective des­ignations of the self and others and which institutionalize the axiological and the epistemological. These counter-concepts can have different semantic temperatures. The focus is on the underlying meaning-production schemes which produce value-asymmetries. The essay tries to show that a process of heating up these value-asymmetries is only one side of the history of such asymmetric counter-concepts from medieval to modern times. Simultaneously a cooling down can be observed in written texts from different periods; examples include the 12th century Rolandslied and the 16th century Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Full negation eliminates uncertainties and value insecurities. But the complexities and contingencies that emerge since Early Modern times then lead to losses of negatability (Negierbarkeitsverluste), which in turn render gains in unfamiliarity. The modern experience of the foreign is indeterminate otherness instead of determined negation that characterized pre-modern alterity. Modern societies therefore need to mediate between validity and contingency under the circumstances of plurality. Interpretational demands and uncertainty about the relevant interpretive frames increase. Foreignness is then experienced as unfamiliarity. This presupposes intellectual attitudes like irritability, curiosity, and willingness to learn. The modern concept of ‘culture’ then is proposed as a comparative pattern where only unavoidable structural asymmetry remains. It explains cultural differences and the experience of foreignness through heterogeneity. Using this specifically modern pattern, there is no longer a legitimate value slope between one’s own position and its negation. The distinction is then between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

From Valla to Viète: The Rhetorical Reform of Logic and its Use in Early Modern Algebra

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Cifoletti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Mathematical Theory ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Mathematical Education ◽  
Core Knowledge ◽  
Limit Case ◽  
Modern Algebra ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
Mathematical Sciences

AbstractLorenzo Valla's rhetorical reform of logic resulted in important changes in sixteenth-century mathematical sciences, and not only in mathematical education and in the use of mathematics in other sciences, but also in mathematical theory itself. Logic came to be identified with dialectic, syllogisms with enthymemes and necessary truth with the limit case of probable truth. Two main ancient authorities mediated between logical and mathematical concerns: Cicero and Proclus. Cicero's 'common notions' were identified with Euclid's axioms, so that mathematics could be viewed as core knowledge shared by all humankind. Proclus' interpretation of Euclid's axioms gave rise to the idea of a universal human natural light of reasoning and of a mathesis universalis as a basic mathematics common to both arithmetic and geometry and as an art of thinking interpretable as algebra.

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