scholarly journals Johann Scheffler (Angelus Silesius): The Silesian Mystic as a Boethian Thinker. Universal Insights, Ancient Wisdom, and Baroque Perspectives

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Challenging Question ◽  
Angelus Silesius

This paper offers an analysis of a number of the fascinating, thought-provoking, and yet often deeply puzzling epigrams by the German Baroque poet Johann Scheffler (Angelus Silesius), and illustrates how his enigmatic mystical concepts were influenced, to some extent, by the philosophical thoughts offered by the late antique statesman and thinker Boethius (d. 525). While recent research has already reached new insights into the long-term reception history of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae well into the modern age, including by Scheffler, we still face the critical desideratum to determine the meaning of Scheffler’s spiritual insights in direct correlation with Boethius’s fundamental teachings, and hence, to answer the intriguing and challenging question of why Scheffler, along with Boethius, continues to speak to us today, and this perhaps more than ever before. Even though Scheffler pursued deeply religious questions typical of his time, he obviously greatly profited from Boethius’s musings about the meaning of the absolute Goodness, the vagaries of fortune, and the instability of all material existence in the quest for happiness. Many times we observe that Scheffler offers paradoxical and also apophatic statements, but those make surprisingly astounding sense if we read them, especially in light of Boethius’s teachings, as perceived in the seventeenth century. The epigrams thus prove to be the prolific outcome of universal cross-fertilizations and demonstrate the continued impact of antiquity on the modern world and the growing need today to accept the notion of “world literature” not only in a contemporary, transcultural perspectives, but also in terms of universal interactions throughout time.

The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem

2020 ◽  
pp. 301-315
Author(s):  
Hans Blumenberg
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Human Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reflects on Hans Blumenberg's “The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem” (1951), a reception history of technē. Technology has historically constituted itself as applied natural science — as a constructive extension of nature — and this structural continuity would seem to determine the character and methodology of its problems once and for all. The historical reality of human life with technology has failed to confirm this basic assumption, however. Technology, as an objective domain within the modern world, has more and more visibly separated itself from its functional continuity with nature and has entered into new constellations that are sui generis and, indeed, diametrical opposites to natural reality. From the mere use of nature for eking out a living through to the increasing exploitation of nature as a reservoir of energy and natural resources, the development of technical consciousness and the technical will tend toward making a claim for the radical and total transformation of nature as mere materia prima for the exercise of human power.

The limits of comparison: institutional mortality rates, long-term confinement and causes of death during the early twentieth century

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waltraud Ernst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Modern World ◽  
British India ◽  
Psychiatric Institution ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material

This article presents a case study of institutional trends in a psychiatric institution in British India during the early twentieth century. It focuses on mortality statistics and long-term confinement rates as well as causes of death. The intention is two-fold: first, to provide new material that potentially lends itself to comparison with the few existing institutional case studies that have explored this particular period; second, to highlight some of the problems inherent in the status of the statistics and the conceptual categories used, and to consider the challenges these pose for any intended comparative and transnational assessment. Furthermore, it is suggested that historians working on the history of western institutions ought to look beyond the confining rim of Eurocentric self-containment and relate their research to other institutions around the world. It is important for social historians to abstain from uncritically reproducing hegemonic histories of the modern world in which western cultures and nations are posited by default as the centre or metropolis and the rest as peripheries whose social and scientific developments may be seen to be of exotic interest, but merely derivative and peripheral.

Old and New Rights

2009 ◽  
pp. 20-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Di Meglio ◽  
Enrico Gargiulo
Keyword(s):  
16Th Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Phase ◽  
Effective Instrument ◽  
Different Levels

This chapter offers a long-term perspective on citizenship, questioning one of the basic assumptions of most of the literature on this topic, that is, the nation-state as unit of analysis. Through the adoption of a world-systemic perspective, two basic aspects of the history of citizenship stand out. Firstly, the fundamentally exclusive nature of this category, as it emerged and developed over the history of the modern world-system, since at least the “long 16th Century”. And, secondly, that well before the so-called “information revolution” of the last decades, “technology” has shaped the Western social imagination, acting, in various and changing historical forms, as an effective instrument of control and supremacy, producing asymmetric and inegalitarian effects, and providing a yardstick of the different “levels of development” of Western and non-Western peoples. In this view, the most recent phase of the history of citizenship, his e-form, seems to replicate, in new ways, the explanations of the gap existing both between and within countrie—now conceptualized as “digital divide”—and, at the same time, the illusory universalistic promise of an expansion of the citizenship and the rights associated to it.

Three Ages of ''Patina'' in Painting

2002 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-115
Author(s):  
Randolph Starn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Writing ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Look

THIS ARTICLE TRACES THE HISTORY of a byword for the look of age since the early seventeenth century in art writing, the museum, the restorer's studio, and the art market. The seemingly material fact of patina has a career in the history of taste in Old Master painting through its old regime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was much prized as an effect of time and as an artifice; in its modern age beginning with the formation of national museums, patina becomes an object of contention in the ''cleaning controversies'' that revolve around the obligations of the present toward the cultural legacy of the past. Postmodern patina has come to register the complex and precarious effects of age on old pictures in ways that should enable us to appreciate and to care for them more knowingly than we have been able to do before.

Al-Bīrūnī on Hermetic Forgery

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-66
Author(s):  
Kevin van Bladel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hermes Trismegistus

AbstractIn Central Asia in the early eleventh century, the Chorasmian scholar Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī recognized that the Arabic works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were inventions of recent centuries falsely written in the name of the ancient sage of legend. He did, however, accept the existence of a historical Hermes and even attempted to establish his chronology. This article presents al-Bīrūnī’s statements about this and contextualizes his view of the Arabic Hermetica as he derived it from Arabic chronographic sources. Al-Bīrūnī’s argument is compared with the celebrated seventeenth-century European criticism of the Greek Hermetica by Isaac Casaubon. It documents a hitherto unknown but significant event in the reception history of the Hermetica and helps to illustrate al-Bīrūnī’s attitude toward the history of science.

Rhabdomyosarcoma of the trachea: first reported case treated with proton beam therapy

2012 ◽  
Vol 126 (9) ◽  
pp. 966-969 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Exley ◽  
J M Bernstein ◽  
B Brennan ◽  
M P Rothera
Keyword(s):  
Proton Beam ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Proton Beam Therapy ◽  
Term Outcome ◽  
Long Term Outcome ◽  
Conventional Radiotherapy ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Uk

AbstractObjective:We report a case of rhabdomyosarcoma of the trachea in a 14-month-old child, and we present the first reported use of proton beam therapy for this tumour.Case report:A 14-month-old girl presented acutely with a seven-day history of biphasic stridor. Emergency endoscopic debulking of a posterior tracheal mass was undertaken. Histological examination revealed an embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma with anaplasia. Multimodality therapy with surgery and chemotherapy was administered in the UK, and proton beam therapy in the USA.Conclusion:Only three cases of rhabdomyosarcoma of the trachea have previously been reported in the world literature. This is the first reported case of treatment of this tumour with proton beam therapy. Compared with conventional radiotherapy, proton beam therapy may confer improved long-term outcome in children, with benefits including reduced irradiation of the spinal cord.

The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China

1998 ◽  
Vol 156 ◽  
pp. 733-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Elvin
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Modern World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Environmental Legacy ◽  
Flood Defence ◽  
Cereal Cultivation

China's long-term history – social, economic, political, and intellectual – has been interwoven from the start with its environment. In counterposed fashion, the history of the Chinese environment has been entwined with that of anthropogenic forces. The Chinese landscape was one of the most transformed in the pre-modern world as the result of its reshaping for cereal cultivation, re-engineering by hydraulic works for drainage, irrigation and flood-defence, and deforestation for the purposes of clearance and the harvesting of wood for fuel and construction.

The Desperation of Deianira: Heroides 9 and Early Modern Translation

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Female Literacy

This essay charts the ways in which the story of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira was received in early modern Europe. In particular, it traces the reception history of the ninth of Ovid's Heroides, in which Deianira writes a letter of complaint, about her husband's sexual violence, and her disastrous attempt to reclaim his affections. Responses to Ovid's poem ranged from outrage – male poets angrily refuted Deianira's accusations – to vernacular translations that, in the hands of the Tudor writer George Turberville, sympathetically conveyed the anguish of the abused wife, but in the hands of Turberville's seventeenth-century successors, muted or silenced Deianira's complaints. The essay locates this reception history in the context of debates about domesticity, sexual (mis)conduct, and female literacy.

scholarly journals Historical Demography and the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne E. C. McCants
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Population Expansion ◽  
European Population ◽  
Historical Demography ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Shift

The seventeenth century, broadly conceived, marks an important turning point in the history of European population movements. Long cycles characterized, first, by population expansion and subsequently by mortality contractions due to famine or disease held long-term population growth largely in check. The subsistence and mortality crises of the middle decades of the seventeenth century and the fundamental shift in the capacity of the European population to grow after 1750 together suggest that the case for a “general crisis of the seventeenth century” has strong demographic support.

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