“In Every Drop of Dew”: Imagination and the Rhetoric of Assent in English Natural Religion

1994 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-325
Author(s):  
David Foster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Discourse Community ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Argument From Design

Abstract: Seventeenth-century “natural religion” in England included the work of many theologians and scientists who comprised a close-knit discourse community shaped by a common theology and many similarities in intellectual outlook. They developed a complex rhetoric compounded of probabilistic reasoning and a wide range of figurative conventions for the argument from design. These writings offer a rich intertext of discursive practices which are more classically rooted, more intuitive and imaginative in appeal, and simultaneously more probabilistic and less demonstrative in reasoning, than has generally been assumed. This essay focuses on the imaginative, figurative dimensions of this work, identifying its primary classical sources and its sanctions in the rhetorical theory of the time.

Part Eight

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Fogelin
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Formation ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
Argument From Design

Philo expands on the nature of his objections to the natural religion of Cleanthes: far-fetched comparisons are dismissed in matters of common life, but are appropriate objections when we rise to the level of abstruse and remote reasoning. He offers a counterargument to the design-designer hypothesis, citing Epicurus. Constancy and change are discussed; cloud formation is one example. Philo’s critique of Cleanthes’ argument from design moves through stages, with striking similarity to Agrippa’s suspension of belief as presented by Sextus Empiricus.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Grethlein ◽  
Luuk Huitink ◽  
Aldo Tagliabue
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Individual

This volume aims to pursue a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies, focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative and triangulating ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches. The introductory chapter offers an overview of the theoretical frameworks in play and briefly encapsulates how each chapter seeks to contribute to a multifaceted picture of narrative and aesthetic experience. Immersion and embodiment emerge as central concepts and common threads throughout, helping to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory, though the individual chapters tackle a wide range of narrative genres, broadly understood, from epic, historiography, and the novel to tragedy and early Christian texts, and other media, such as dance and sculpture.

Constructing the digital self in the Global South

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Campbell ◽  
Nell Haynes
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
Global South ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Self ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Self Formation

Abstract The papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South “construct the self” in online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.

Reformation without end

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.

Claims to legitimate authority and discursive attacks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Iñiguez de Heredia
Keyword(s):  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Popular Classes

This chapter examines the discursive realm. Discourses are not taken as truths; they convey elements of how power and resistance operate. The chapter examines public and private statements by statebuilders (both national and international) as well as from a wide range of popular sectors (peasant cooperatives, NGOs, journalists, university professors, and street and market sellers). The chapter first examines statebuilding discourses developed as a claim to authority. The chapter then concentrates on mockery, denigration, slandering and subversion of meaning articulated by popular classes. They constitute discursive practices of resistance that deny the claims to legitimate authority and deference.

Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism

PMLA ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 1130-1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Chew
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Ethical Point ◽  
Rule Of Life ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Thomas Browne ◽  
The Universe

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” and says that he enthusiastically preached the “Neo-Stoic brand of theology” to which Sir Thomas Browne objected. This theology maintained that “to follow ‘right reason’ was to follow nature, which was the same thing as following God.” Smith goes on to say that “what most attracted seventeenth-century Christian humanists like Bishop Hall was the fact that Stoicism attempted to frame a theory of the universe and of the individual man which would approximate a rule of life in conformity with an ‘immanent cosmic reason‘”—though in the same paragraph he also mentions the point “that Neo-Stoic divines of the seventeenth century were interested in Stoicism almost exclusively from the ethical point of view.” He cites Lipsius to show how a Christian might reach an approximation between the Stoic Fate and Christian Providence, leaving the reader to assume that Hall might also have made this approximation. He says that “the natural light of reason, as expounded by the Stoic philosophers, became, for seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics, the accepted guide to conduct” and that “religious and moral writers endeavored to trace a relationship between moral and natural law which in effect resulted in the practical code of ethical behavior commonly associated with Neo-Stoicism.”

scholarly journals Involving the Public: Parliament, Petitioning, and the Language of Interest, 1688–1720

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Loft
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
The Public ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Control

AbstractThis article examines the nature of petitioning to the Westminster Parliament from the beginnings of the “rage of party” to the establishment of the whig oligarchy. It uses the largely unused archive of the House of Lords, which survived the parliamentary fire in 1834, to provide systematic evidence of public subscription to petitions produced in response to legislation. A total of 330 “large responsive petitions,” signed by fifty-six thousand people, were presented to the Lords between 1688 and 1720. This enabled a wide range of social and geographical groups to lobby Parliament. Parliamentarians actively sought to direct the public into voicing opinion through petitioning on matters of policy. The intervention of the language of “interest” from the mid-seventeenth century helped to legitimize and control public involvement in politics in the eyes of elites, and offered an alternative to political mobilization based on party allegiances and conceptions of society organized by ranks or sorts. The participation of the public through a regulated process of petitioning ensured that the whig oligarchy was porous and open to negotiation, despite the passage of the Septennial Act and declining party and electoral strife after 1716.

Italian Renaissance Plays in the University of Toronto Library: Supplement III

1974 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 512-532
Author(s):  
Beatrice Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Passion Plays ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The University

The Editorial Board of Renaissance Quarterly is most kindly continuing its tradition in Renaissance News by allowing me to publish the third supplement to the Catalogue of Italian Plays 1500-1700 in theUniversity of Toronto Library (University of Toronto Press, 1961). Previous supplements appeared in RN16 (1963), 298-307, and 19 (1966), 219-228. The plays listed below illustrate a wide range of theatrical tastes, from Latin and Italian passion plays, medieval in tradition, to the later dominant vogue for musical dramas. In editions of the latter it became customary early in the seventeenth century to record architects, costumers, and performers, so that the printed plays are a valuable source for stage history. Scenery for four of these dramas was designed by Ferdinando and Francesco Galli di Bibbiena, then at the outset of their careers.

The invention of hunter-gatherers in seventeenth-century Europe

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Pluciennik
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Green Movement ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Neolithic Transition ◽  
University Courses ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Development Agencies ◽  
Academic Conferences

AbstractWhy do we still speak of foragers and farmers? The division of societies into categories including ‘savage’ hunter-gatherers and ‘civilised’ farmers has its roots in seventeenth-century northwestern Europe, but has implications for archaeologists and anthropologists today. Such concepts still provide the frameworks for much intellectual labour including university courses, academic conferences and publications, as well as providing the basis for moral and political evaluations of contemporary societies and practices for a wide range of people, from governments to development agencies, ‘alternative’ archaeologies and parts of the Green movement. This paper examines some of the currents which contributed towards their establishment, and argues that writing ‘across’ such deep-seated categories may be the only way to challenge their hegemony and develop new questions. As an example recent trends in data and interpretation of the ‘mesolithic-neolithic transition’ in western Europe are discussed.

Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory

PMLA ◽  
1944 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter J. Ong
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Reading History ◽  
The Middle Ages

The disputes centering about the oratorical value of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation in England have hinged mostly upon a study of printed tests current in Elizabethan times or shortly after. Professor Charles C. Fries, in a monograph surveying the whole of the discussion about Shakespeare's punctuation, notes that “some significance attaches to the fact ”that all of the five Elizabethan and Jacobean grammarians whose theories he adduces to help settle the dispute “refer to the use of these terms, comma, colon, and period, in classical rhetorical theory. ” And yet, in considering the question of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation, no one has investigated the systems of pointing which were associated with classical rhetorical theory and which may have been carried with that theory through the Middle Ages into Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Until an investigation of this matter is made, we are likely to be guilty once more of the pernicious practice of reading history backwards, understanding phenomena in terms of what succeeded them instead of what preceded, and explaining in terms already at hand for us phenomena which are not reducible to these terms.

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