scholarly journals Exercising Musical Minds: Phrenology and Music Pedagogy in London circa 1830

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
David Trippett
Keyword(s):  
Music Pedagogy ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Dynamical Nature ◽  
Loss Of Contact ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Cost

The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques in which pedagogy and the life of the mind were implicated, but to what extent was education in music composition influenced by this? A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment of the London Phrenological Society (1823), and its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association (1838). They placed the creative imagination, music, and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse around music and materialism. The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of naturer … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man's soul” (Carlyle), but the concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism. These confliciting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as paradigm and rallying cry, are here situated in the context of music pedagogy during the second quarter of the century, with particular reference to amateur musicians and the popular appeal of phrenological “exercise,” and of devices such as Johann Bernhard Logier's “chiroplast.”

scholarly journals The case of W.B. Yeats: Mind, Nation and Literary Landscape

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemarie Rowley
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Loss Of Contact ◽  
The Mind

The emergence of the nation states was one of the fruits of Romanticism, and each reborn country needed to rediscover its identity: in Ireland, identity was very much tied to the landscape and what remained of the Irish language, place-names playing a special role in the evocation of national desires.   A study of these key texts of Yeats’ shows how his dedication to the life of the mind   mirrored the loss of contact with the natural world.  This is true of its landscapes and its mythological figures.  I hope to show that in an early poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” that in developing an antithetical self, Yeats was at significant times not only opposed to Nature intellectually and spiritually, but also emotionally. The privileging of the life of the mind over the animal self has played in his own life and in his influence what may have been a costly division.    La aparición de los estados nación  fue uno de los frutos del Romanticismo, y cada país que renacía necesitaba redescubrir su identidad. En Irlanda, la identidad estaba muy ligada al paisaje y a lo que quedaba de la lengua irlandesa, por ello los topónimos desempeñaron un papel especial en la evocación de deseos nacionales.   Un análisis de estos textos clave de Yeats muestra cómo su dedicación a la vida de la mente reflejaba la pérdida de contacto con el mundo natural. Esto es cierto en el caso de los paisajes y las figuras mitológicas. Espero mostrar que en uno de sus primeros poemas “La canción de Aengus el Errante” al desarrollar un ser antitético, en momentos significativos Yeats estaba no sólo opuesto a la Naturaleza intelectual y espiritualmente, sino también emocionalmente. Privilegiar la vida de la mente sobre el ser animal ha jugado en su propia vida y en su influencia lo que podría haber sido una división costosa.  

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOSEPH SCALIGER?

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-271
Author(s):  
MICHAEL O’BRIEN
Keyword(s):  
Cost Effective ◽  
New Order ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Creative People ◽  
The Past ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Workload Allocation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The University

It is said we are in trouble, we humanists. “The humanities are under pressure all over the world, Rens Bod begins (xii). James Turner ends, “Without question, the humanities now face greater flux than they have routinely endured in the past century” (385). The trouble and the flux seem to take two forms. There is the usual business of intellectual disciplines forming and re-forming, of new paradigms restructuring institutions, a process that one might regard as discomforting but sometimes healthy. But there is the other business of universities being governed by anti-intellectuals, aficionados of the spreadsheet, counted beans, and the alumni dinner. These predators roam campuses, sneer at libraries, abolish departments, and plan the day when, the cost-effective triumphant, scholarship will be little more than a digital ghost. At the University of Essex, lately Marina Warner was coldly informed of this new order, defined by a “Tariff of Expectations” (seventeen targets to be met) and a “workload allocation” handed down from on high. There was an indifference to what had gone before, what creative people had once hoped for for Colchester. “That is all changing now,” the executive dean for humanities briskly explained. “That is over.” The past, that is. Fed up, Warner resigned, hearing too loudly “the tick of the deathwatch beetle” in the fabric of the house she wished to inhabit, a university that valued scholarship and the life of the mind, as it once had.

scholarly journals A Historical Perspective on AA Boesak as Organic Intellectual Par Excellence: On Social-analytical and Hermeneutic Mediation in Theology

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nico Botha
Keyword(s):  
Black Church ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Context Analysis ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Organic Intellectual ◽  
The Mind

Allan Aubrey Boesak has—over the past five years or so—been honoured from diverse perspectives by South Africans in festschrifts and journal articles, and particularly in a thesis. One would, however, look in vain for a study on his prowess as an organic intellectual. The objective of this article is to offer a historical perspective on his legacy of embodying, in an integrated fashion, the connectedness of the life of the mind and the struggles of the poor and the oppressed. His legacy is assessed in terms of the first three steps of the praxis cycle, namely insertion, context analysis, and theological reflection. The article shows that based on his rootedness in the black church, the Belydende Kring, the Alliance of Black Reformed Churches in Southern Africa and the United Democratic Front, he emerged as an organic intellectual par excellence. In accentuating his theological legacy, issues like identifying God as the God of the oppressed, human rights, and justice are highlighted. The article concludes with a brief attempt at capturing Boesak’s intellectual legacy

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt ◽  
Barbara Graziosi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Site ◽  
Entire Volume ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Made In

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

Academe ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Brice Heath ◽  
Gerald Graff
Keyword(s):  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

The Place of Myth in Philosophy

Philosophy ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 11 (42) ◽  
pp. 131-145
Author(s):  
W. R. Inge
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
The Real ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Fact ◽  
The Mind

My subject is the place of myth in philosophy, not in religion. If I were dealing with the philosophy of religion, I should, of course, have much to say on the place of myth in theology; and what I have to say may have some bearing on this subject; but I am not dealing with particular dogmas of Christianity or of any other religion. My thesis is that when the mind communes with the world of values its natural and inevitable language is the language of poetry, symbol, and myth. And, further, that philosophy has to deal with a number of irreducible surds which cannot be rationalized. They must be accepted as given material for reason to work upon. For example, we do not know why there is a world; we cannot unify the world of what we call facts and the world of values; there are antinomies in space and time which do not seem to disappear when we put a hyphen between them. Our reason–some would say reason itself— has reached its limits. We are driven to mythologize, confessing that we have left the realm of scientific fact. We give rein to the imagination, not exactly claiming with Wordsworth that it is reason in her most exalted mood, but hoping that the creative imagination may reveal to us some of the real meaning of questions which we cannot answer.

The real banality of evil

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Regine Lamboy
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The Real ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his utter thoughtlessness. This raised the questins of whether there might be a connection between thinking and abstaining from evil doing, which she explored in her last book The Life of the Mind. If there is indeed such a connection, there may be a class of people who might be led to abstain from evil doing if they can be persuaded to engage in thinking. This dissertation examines Arendt's success in establishing such a connection. Overall, her project does not really succeed. Her overly formal analysis of thinking wavers between a highly abstract and obscure conceptualization of thinking and a more down to earth definition. Ultimately she winds up stripping thinking of all possible content. .

The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

SynopsisGoodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness

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