Between Machine and Man: The Question of Creation in the Transmission of Western Mechanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century China (A Case Study)

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-174
Author(s):  
Wenfei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries

Abstract This paper aims to explore how the Jesuit missionaries and their Chinese supporters negotiated the tension between mechanical knowledge, along with its embedded theological implications and the Chinese worldview by examining the Yuanxi qiqi tushuo luzui 遠西奇器圖說錄最 and the biography of a Chinese inventor Huang Lüzhuang 黃履莊 in the context of the polemical debates on Christianity in seventeenth century China. Centring on the concept of creation, I demonstrate how the understanding of machine or automata relates to broader questions regarding the natural world and human agency at the juncture of intellectual transformations in both Europe and China: While some European thinkers, inspired by machines, promoted the worldview of a passive nature analogous to machine, concepts of unity and spontaneity provided the Chinese with an opportunity to account for the autonomy of the machine as something operating in accordance with the self-generating natural world.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

“The Greatest Speech-Makers on Earth”

2019 ◽  
pp. 357-415
Author(s):  
Céline Carayon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Embodied Communication ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries

This chapter considers some of the ways in which nonverbal repertoires that had been painstakingly created over two centuries of interaction were creatively mobilized by Indigenous and French individuals in the long seventeenth century to produce culturally-hybrid performances. Opening with the Great Peace of Montreal (1701), the chapter describes the epistemological differences that caused misunderstandings even as Jesuit missionaries and Indian orators skilfully blended visual and verbal metaphors and registers to reach their audiences during religious and diplomatic exchanges. The highly adaptable and multimedia nature of Indigenous verbal art is compared with the efforts of the Jesuits to insert select Indigenous gestures within their orations. Ambivalent feelings towards the unauthentic nature of theatrical performances and competition with Indian jongleurs (shamans) limited the missionaries’ ability to harvest the power of Indian oratory. As the French expanded westward and down the Mississippi valley in the second half of the century, they were forced to confront the limits of some of their nonverbal strategies, as demonstrated through the case-study of the calumet. After two centuries of embodied communication, it had become harder to tell “French” apart from “Native” nonverbal devices.

Philosophical and Physical Opinions

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
David Cunning
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Motion Perception ◽  
Structural Integrity ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter features a selection of excerpts from Cavendish’s book, Philosophical and Physical Opinions. The passages treat a number of topics and issues: whether or not there are inherent capability differences between men and women; gender; atomism; whether or not goodness and badness are objective qualities in the natural world; empty space and the impossibility of vacuum; the struggle for creatures to maintain their structural integrity; striving; individuation; creation; annihilation; chance; causation; teleology; knowledge; motion; perception; mental illness and the brain; and physicians and disease. The chapter begins with a note that Cavendish writes “To the Two Universities” in which she says that the main reason for differences in the skills and capacities of women and men is that men have put into place structures that make it impossible for women to develop and flourish. She also looks ahead to a future time when different structures will be in place and the self-same work that she has produced in the seventeenth century will have an opportunity to secure a foothold.

Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
CYNTHIA TALBOT
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractThe Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

Placing plants on paper: Lists, herbaria, and tables as experiments with territorial inventory at the mid-seventeenth-century Gotha court

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Administrative Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Paper Technology

Over the past several decades, historians of science have come increasingly to focus on the role of so-called “paper technologies,” reorganizing and transforming information through the use of paper and pen, in the emergence of modern science. Taking as a case study an effort by administrators in the seventeenth-century German princely state of Saxe-Gotha to enlist foresters and herb-women to catalog the medicinal plants of the territory, this article analyzes the varied forms of paperwork produced in the process, including an extremely unusual table, and argues that the table represented an effort to produce a synoptic visualization, akin to but not identical to a map, of the location of the territory’s herbs. While this table may not have ultimately succeeded as a viable paper technology, due to problems of incommensurability, it demonstrates the role of administrative practices and state actors in experimenting with information about the natural world during the early modern period.

AAC Collaboration Using the Self-Anchored Rating Scales (SARS): An Aphasia Case Study

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 136-143
Author(s):  
Lynn E. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Augmentative And Alternative Communication ◽  
Rating Scales ◽  
Rating Scale ◽  
Therapeutic Process ◽  
Family Counseling ◽  
The Self ◽  
Alternative Communication ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Solution Focused

Abstract The self-anchored rating scale (SARS) is a technique that augments collaboration between Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) interventionists, their clients, and their clients' support networks. SARS is a technique used in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, a branch of systemic family counseling. It has been applied to treating speech and language disorders across the life span, and recent case studies show it has promise for promoting adoption and long-term use of high and low tech AAC. I will describe 2 key principles of solution-focused therapy and present 7 steps in the SARS process that illustrate how clinicians can use the SARS to involve a person with aphasia and his or her family in all aspects of the therapeutic process. I will use a case study to illustrate the SARS process and present outcomes for one individual living with aphasia.

Transmission of Renaissance herbal images to China: the Beitang copy of Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides and its annotations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Library ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Animal Names ◽  
National Library Of China ◽  
Made In

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.

The Chalosse Rebellion: A Case Study in Seventeenth Century French Revolts

1970 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Robert W. Poetschke ◽  
George A. Rothrock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century

The Nonconformist Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
John Owen

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.

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