Parodies of pompous knowledge: treatises on farting

2018 ◽  
pp. 191-208
Author(s):  
Guilhem Armand
Keyword(s):  
New Physics ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

This chapter analyses parodic treatises on winds, imagined as productions of the Rabelaisian tradition and of the new science of the Enlightenment. As science became more popular, this new popularity had its drawbacks: innumerable books, often pseudo-scientific ones, were written on every subject, and long before the advent of positivism, new scientists proclaimed the new physics had an explanation for everything. If the veneer of science allowed any subject to be turned into vain and pompous writings, then flatulence could also be an object of interest. Treatises or eulogies, these texts combine the parodies of several literary genres to form their own unique genre. From Pierre Hurtaut to Mercier de Compiègne or Swift, their authors rely on satirical winds to write on more serious matters.

Reflections into the Spirit of the Islamic Corpus of Knowledge and the Rise of the New Science

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Dhaouadi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Third World ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Primary Reference

There is no question that contemporary western civilization has beendominant in the field of science since the Renaissance. Western scientificsuperiority is not limited to specific scientific disciplines, but is rather anovetall scientific domination covering both the so-called exact and thehuman-social sciences. Western science is the primary reference for specialistsin such ateas as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics,psychology, and sociology. It is in this sense that Third World underdevelopmentis not only economic, social, and industrial; it also suffersfrom scientific-cultutal underdevelopment, or what we call "The OtherUnderdevelopment" (Dhaouadi 1988).The imptessive progress of western science since Newton and Descartesdoes not meari, however, that it has everything tight or perfect. Infact, its flaws ate becoming mote visible. In the last few decades, westernscience has begun to experience a shift from what is called classical scienceto new science. Classical science was associated with the celestialmechanics of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, the new physics of Galileo,and the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes introduced a radical divisionbetween mind and matter, while Newton and his fellows presented a newscience that looked at the world as a kind of giant clock The laws of thisworld were time-reversible, for it was held that there was no differencebetween past and future. As the laws were deterministic, both the pastand the future could be predicted once the present was known.The vision of the emerging new science tends to heal the division betweenmatter and spirit and to do away with the mechanical dimension ...

scholarly journals Making the States’ Translation (1637): Orthodox Calvinist Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

In the study of the history of biblical scholarship, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize biblical philology as a force which, together with the new philosophy and the new science of the seventeenth century, caused the erosion of universal scriptural authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. A case in point is Jonathan Israel's impressive account of how biblical criticism in the hands of Spinoza paved the way for the Enlightenment. Others who have argued for a post-Spinozist rise of biblical criticism include Frank Manuel, Adam Sutcliffe, and Travis Frampton. These scholars have built upon longer standing interpretations such as those of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Hazard. However, scholars in the past two decades such as Anthony Grafton, Scott Mandelbrote and Jean-Louis Quantin have altered the picture of an exegetical revolution inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712). These heterodox philosophers in fact relied on philological research that had been largely developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such research was carried out by scholars who had no subversive agenda. This is to say that the importance attached to a historical and philological approach to the biblical text had a cross-confessional appeal, not just a radical-political one.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....

The Mach-Planck debate revisited: democratization of science or elite knowledge?

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayo Siemsen
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
Popularization Of Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First World

Is scientific knowledge the domain of the intellectual elite or is it everyman’s concern, thus making the popularization of science a democratic activity integrally required of science itself? This is a question whose history extends back even longer than the enlightenment period. As technology starts to permeate every inch of daily life, the issues involved for our future development become more pressing and a matter of socio-political development. Dostoyevsky brought this to the point in a fictional dispute between a Great Inquisitor and Christ. This was also the subject of fierce scientific debates, the most prominent of which was probably the debate between Ernst Mach and Max Planck at the turn of the century, before the first world war, when the new Physics (quantum theory and relativity) was discovered and its relevance for our view of the world and our place in it was hotly discussed. For Mach, the job of popularization should rest with science - an informed public cannot be manipulated as easily by ‘pop science’. This article focuses on the mostly neglected political epistemological level of the debate, its sporadic later flare-ups in different places with different protagonists (Wagenschein, Wittenberg), and its relevance for the popularization of science today.

Girolamo Cardano

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marialuisa Baldi
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Complex Image ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Cardan Joint ◽  
Humanistic Tradition

Cardano (Girolamo, Gerolamo, b. 1501–d. 1576) is an Italian polymath, one of the most prominent authors of the Renaissance. He was not only a physician, mathematician, and astrologer but also a philosopher and a curious researcher of nature, interested in all areas of human knowledge and experience. At the end of his life, he was brought to trial by the Catholic Inquisition, and all his works, except the medical ones, were condemned. Yet his writings in the philosophy of nature, especially the encyclopedic De subtilitate and De rerum varietate, were frequently read until the Enlightenment. For the general public, his name is renowned for some inventions and discoveries as the solution of cubic equations. What we call Cardan joint is named after him. His fascinating autobiography has been translated in many languages. Scholars read him as a radical thinker, crypto-Reformer critic of religions, and a forerunner of the new science still immersed in magic. A more complex image of Cardano has now been emerging, thanks to recent editions and translations of his works. Cardano sensed the crisis of the humanistic tradition in the age of the Counter-Reformation. As then, he still offers tools for understanding what is continuously transforming, and getting closer to the truth.

The Figure of Moses in Modern Hebrew Poetry

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Malka Shaked
Keyword(s):  
Israeli Society ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Hebrew

From its inception in the Enlightenment to this day, modern Hebrew poetry conveys a deep connection to the Bible that manifests itself in a variety of ways. An in-depth understanding of this connection—including its various expressions in content and language, its causes, its purposes, and its manifestations in all the literary genres, in each generation and for each individual writer—would require extensive research that could profitably occupy a large number of scholars. Nonetheless, even with the limited research that I have conducted, focusing on the place of the Bible in Hebrew poetry from the generation of national renaissance to the present time, the substantial anthology of poems that I am preparing for this purpose demonstrate clearly that modern Hebrew poetry constantly returns to the Bible, and that the Bible's oft-lamented decline in stature in Israeli society is nowhere to be seen.

The Setting

2019 ◽  
pp. 6-32
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

This chapter discusses the concept of space during the Enlightenment. Between 1500 and 1700, Westerners discovered two new worlds: one in the heavens, the other on earth. These discoveries coincided with and helped further a vast expansion of commerce that brought yet more peoples and places into the Western orbit. Celestial and terrestrial space were reconfigured. Christianity had to rise to the intellectual challenge presented by the new spatial reality. The findings of the new science displaced the earth from the center of the universe and thereby raised doubts about all traditional explanations. The discovery of new continents and peoples had an even more immediate effect. The Greek and Roman authorities long revered in Europe had not the slightest inkling of the existence of the Americas. Western peoples could no longer rely on the coherence and order long provided by Christian theology. In this way, the new spatial realities provided the setting wherein enlightened ideas first emerged.

Summing Up

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-266
Author(s):  
Rajan Gurukkal
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Particle Physics ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Social

This chapter summarizes the main discussions in the preceding chapters and provides a brief account of the history and theory of knowledge production, in Asia as well as Europe, from the earliest times to the rise of new physics, largely following the theoretical perspective of Social Formation and depending on the secondary works, except for analysing the homology between the Social Formation and the knowledge form, in the third chapter, where the illustrations are drawn from the primary source. In that sense the role of the primary source is supplementary and confined to the study of specific instances of the concepts, designs, and methodology of Indian knowledge production. Tracing through a variety of thoughts, the birth of science, the making of new science, the book ends up with consciousness as a problem of particle physics. Roger Penrose, dismissing the matter–mind dichotomy, declares that laws of new science about the quantum gravity seem to govern consciousness too.

The Clergy and the Enlightenment in Latin America: An Analysis

1959 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-391
Author(s):  
Karl Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Primary Obstacle ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Special Studies

Several currents of “enlightened” doctrine ran swiftly and strongly through Latin America by the end of the eighteenth century. Scholarly work of the past two decades obviates the need to prove that the new philosophy, the new science, and the new politics found acceptance in the Spanish world. Forbidden books made their way into Latin America with relative ease, the Inquisition proved ineffective in preventing the spread of new ideas, and the Spanish crown itself not only promoted useful knowledge but encouraged “ modern ” philosophical studies. Aside from special studies on the Enlightenment, however, the more general histories of Latin America too frequently take the position, implicit if not explicit, that the Catholic clergy, monolithic in their obscurantism, constituted the primary obstacle to the complete victory of “enlightened” ideas. It appears to me that this point of view is somewhat inaccurate. This paper holds as a thesis, rather, that the clergy were seriously split on practically all aspects of the Enlightenment. Some supported, some opposed, and many were indifferent to or ignorant of “ enlightened ” notions. The degree of support or opposition varied, and not all who opposed or supported the movement, supported or opposed it in toto.

Bodies, Rest, and Motion: from Cosmic Dance to Biodance

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-218
Author(s):  
Cara Gargano
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Chaos Theory ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Atomic Level ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Universe

Ancient myth and modern science share a common, cosmic perception of dance as the formulating principle of the universe – whether through metaphor, in the perception of a ‘biodance of life’, or in the closeness to actuality of the ‘dance of the electrons’ at a sub-atomic level. A line of articles in NTQ has explored such connections, with theatrical examples deriving from and illuminating the scientific theory under discussion – but with dance, strangely, relatively neglected as a source of such examples. Here, Cara Gargano takes a number of major modern dance events from the span of the twentieth century to show the interaction between dance and scientific theory, from Loïe Fuller's work at its beginning to Maguy Marin's Coppélia towards its end. The latter, she argues, ‘brings quantum mechanics and chaos theory into the sociological realm’ as it demonstrates ‘how consciousness and social relations are tied to the new physics’. Cara Gargano is Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has published in Modern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, and Dance and Research. In New Theatre Quarterly, her earlier contributions on plays which construct their world to reflect the new science were published in NTQ51 and NTQ54.

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