Faculties of the Soul: Response to Dominik Perler

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pyle
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Mind

This chapter seeks to do three things. It raises a few remaining difficulties for Perler's account of the soul and its faculties in Suarez and Descartes. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the early modern critique of faculties and suggests a modest response for the defender of faculty-talk. Faculty-talk, it argues, may serve two modest but useful taxonomic roles in our thinking both about nature and about the mind. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Malebranche's critique of the notion of faculties of the mind, and his contention that the supposed faculties of intellect and will are really distinct neither from one another nor from the substance of the mind itself.

Liberty of Mind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Political Liberty ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Mary Astell ◽  
The Mind

This chapter demonstrates how early modern male and female thinkers alike were concerned not only with ethical, religious, and political liberty, but also with the liberty to philosophize, or libertas philosophandi. It is argued that while men’s interests in this latter kind of liberty tended to lie with the liberty to philosophize differently from their predecessors, women were more concerned with the liberty to philosophize at all. For them, the idea that women should be free to think was foundational. This chapter shows how some women thinkers of the period, such as Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658–1708) and Mary Astell (1666–1731), followed through on the general trend of thinking about liberty in terms of freedom of the mind, to thinking about liberty for women in wider ethical and political terms. To support this point, the chapter explores their views on education, female rationality, and moral philosophy.

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....

scholarly journals Body of Knowledge: Renaissance Armor and the Engineering of Mind = Cuerpos del conocimiento: armaduras del Renacimiento y la ingeniería de la mente

2018 ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Felix Jäger
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Personal Authority ◽  
Historia Natural ◽  
The Mind

This essay charts the role of armor in Renaissance practices of knowledge. Since the advent of gunpowder warfare, armor was largely unfit for combat, yet still became a centerpiece of princely representation and was prominently displayed in early collection spaces. Rather than illustrating chivalric virtues or antiquarian taste, such suits in my reading signal a shift towards a physiological fashioning of learning. Through juxtaposing two key sets of armor – one ‘gothic’ suit situated in the studiolo, the other a ‘grotesque’ garniture for a chamber of curiosities –, my paper traces how these embodied settings conflated epistemological with political sensibilities. While the earlier ensemble acted as a mnemonic ‘prosthesis’ that enhanced the mind of the wearer, the latter evoked natural history imagery to remap the order of things around personal authority. Objects of armor thus spotlight the interplay of material and political culture in engineering the early modern subject.El presente ensayo traza el papel de las armaduras en las costumbres renacentistas del conocimiento. Desde la aparición de las armas de pólvora, las armaduras dejaron de ser apropiadas para el combate, si bien todavía constituyeron una pieza central de representaciones principescas y fueron ampliamente expuestas en espacios de colección. En lugar de ilustrar las virtudes caballerescas o los estilos como antigüedades, estas vestimentas señalan, a mi entender, un giro hacia el conocimiento fisiológico de la moda. A través de la yuxtaposición de dos conceptos clave de las armaduras –uno como vestimenta gótica emplazada en el studiolo (taller de arte), otro como decoración «grotesca» en una sala de curiosidades – mi texto indaga cómo estos elementos ajustados al cuerpo confrontaban las sensibilidades epistemológicas y políticas. Mientras que las primeras actuaban como una prótesis que fortalece la mente del que las usa, las segundas evocan la imaginería de la historia natural para recolocar el orden de las cosas alrededor de la autoridad personal. Las armaduras enfocan de este modo la interacción entre la cultura material y la política en el desarrollo del sujeto moderno.

Doubt

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-61
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Mind ◽  
New View

Chapter 1 draws a connection between critical inquiry and the feeling of trust among scholars. It argues that a new relationship between doubting and reasoning can be found in the early modern period of Sanskrit logic that allowed for new forms of critical inquiry to be employed by scholars. Specifically, the chapter recovers a new conception of doubt called “doubt from speech” (śābda-saṃśaya) in contrast to an older conception called “doubt in the mind” (mānasa-saṃśaya). Yet, when scholars accepted the arguments for this new conception of doubt, they displayed themselves to be not only intellectually competent but also emotionally competent with respect to “the new,” enabling a feeling of trust to emerge between scholars who accepted the new view on doubt and its role in critical inquiry.

European Calvinism: history, providence, and martyrdom

1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Andrew Pettegree
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Church

For students of the Reformation one of the main conceptual problems is undoubtedly the distance between the mind-set of our age and theirs. We look at the Reformation as a new beginning, the moment when the Church fragmented into competing Churches, and one of the fundamental developments of the Early Modern Age: a term which in itself presents a view of progress and change as one of the determining characteristics of the age.Contemporaries, however, had a very different perception; they saw the movement for evangelical reform as one of renovation and renewal. They believed that they were attempting to recover what was best in the past of the Church, which had since become hopelessly corrupted. With others of their contemporaries they despised innovation. One can surely only understand Martin Luther if one recognizes the depth of his conservatism; that his personal crusade was to a large extent fuelled by a sense of moral outrage and indignation at what the papacy had done to his Church.

scholarly journals Soul searching: a brief history of the mind/body debate in the neurosciences

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Neuroscience ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
The Way

✓Anatomical and physiological understandings of the structure and function of the brain have worked to establish it as the “seat of the soul.” As an organ of reflection, meditation, and memory, the brain becomes synonymous with what defines the “self” through the existence of consciousness—of mind. Thus, the brain has been associated with a range of transcendent concepts—the soul, spirit, mind, and consciousness—that all relate in fundamental ways to each other both in terms of their perceived location within the brain and because of the way each works ultimately to define the person to whom the brain belongs. In this article, the author provides a brief exploration of how interrelated these categories have been when seen in the context of ancient, Renaissance, early modern, and modern philosophical and medical concerns; how the brain has variously been perceived as home to these intimate states of being; and how practitioners from the neurosciences have reflected on these questions. The author provides novel insights into the interrelationships of philosophy, theology, and medicine by examining these issues through the lens of the history of neuroscience.

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