Margaret Cavendish

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cunning
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
First Century ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Universe

Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth-century philosopher, scientist, poet, playwright, and novelist, went to battle with the great thinkers of her time, and in many cases arguably got the better of them, but she did not have the platform that she would have had in the twenty-first century. She took a creative and systematic stand on the major questions of philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. She defends a number of theses across her corpus: for example, that human beings and all other members of the created universe are wholly material; that matter is eternal; that the universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies; that matter is generally speaking knowledgeable and perceptive and that non-human creatures like spiders, plants, and cells exhibit wisdom and skill; that motion is never transferred from one body to another, but bodies always move by motions that are internal to them; that sensory perception is not via impressions or stamping; that we can have no ideas of immaterials; and that creatures depend for their properties and features on the behavior of the beings that surround them. Cavendish uses her fictional work to further illustrate these views, and in particular to illustrate the view that creatures depend on their surroundings for their social and political properties. For example, she crafts alternative worlds in which women are not seen as unfit for roles such as philosopher, scientist, and military general, and in which they flourish. This volume of Cavendish’s writings provides a cross-section of her interconnected writings, views, and arguments.

The Maya: A Very Short Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Restall ◽  
Amara Solari
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Maya Civilization ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
City States ◽  
The Universe

The Maya: A Very Short Introduction examines the history and evolution of Maya civilization, explaining Maya polities or city-states, artistic expression, and ways of understanding the universe. Study of the Maya has tended to focus on the 2,000 years of history prior to contact with Europeans, and romantic ideas of discovery and disappearance have shaped popular myths about the Maya. However, they neither disappeared at the close of the Classic era nor were completely conquered by Europeans. Independent Maya kingdoms continued until the seventeenth century, and while none exists today, it is still possible to talk about a Maya world and Maya civilization in the twenty-first century.

Imagining Sound as the Absolute

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Saam Trivedi
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
The Universe

Saam Trivedi ponders the Sangita Ratnakara by the Ayurveda physician Sarangadeva. In this thirteenth-century manuscript, Sarangadeva asserts that Sound, identical to the Absolute, is the only fundamental thing in the universe and that all other things are illusory or, at best, some derivative or other manifestation of Sound. While the twenty-first century, non-monist Trivedi is critical of this claim, he finds much to be fascinated by, and, in his dissection of the main points of the Sangita Ratnakara, he offers the reader an imagining of sonic monism that, while far-removed from the orthodoxy of today’s acoustics and natural sciences, might one day come to be seen as inspiration for the latest scientific ideas concerning sound.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Judovitz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Viewer Response ◽  
Artistic Legacy

The epilogue presents a reassessment of La Tour’s reception and pictorial impact in light of his unique and inexplicable disappearance from the annals of art history. His pictorial legacies to both the seventeenth century and to the twenty-first century are considered insofar as they provide a platform for engaging in broader reflections on the nature of vision, the visible, and viewer response. The importance and endurance of La Tour’s artistic legacy is summed up in terms of his conceptual approach which calls the very nature of painting into question.

Darien, the Golden Dream

2021 ◽  
pp. 130-185
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Isthmus Of Panama ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk

This chapter focuses on literary and cultural works dealing with Scotland's attempt to colonize Darien, at the Isthmus of Panama, in the 1690s. It establishes Darien as a central trope in Scottish literature by analyzing works from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including novels, poetry, drama, songs, and political treatises by William Paterson, William Burnaby, Eliot Warburton, Douglas Galbraith, David Nicol, Alistair Beaton, and anonymous female authors. It illustrates how these depictions interact with other political and ideological trajectories in Scotland and the UK, including Jacobitism, Anglo-Scottish relations, and revisionist historical writing. The chapter establishes images of Darien gold and material possession as central structuring devices of Scottish colonial literature, which stand in conflict with depictions of Scotland's alleged kindness towards the indigenous populations of Panama. The chapter argues that narratives of benevolence together with narratives of gold and material possessions turn the colonial utopian tradition into a full-fledged myth of the Scottish Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth century. The mythologization of the colonial sphere together with the mythologization of the Scottish settlers functions as an aesthetic instrument to enter the competition over power in the late-seventeenth-century Atlantic.

Liberal Order in the Twenty-First Century: Searching for Eunomia Once Again

2019 ◽  
Vol 139 (2-4) ◽  
pp. 271-284
Author(s):  
Amichai Magen
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Liberty ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Good Order ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Unique Potential

Adherents of economic and political liberty are again compelled to ask fundamental questions about the nature and prospects of good order (or Eunomia). This article: (1) offers a quaternary definition of the concept of “order;” (2) contends that Eunomia is essentially about the creation, adaptation, and protection of the conditions necessary for human beings to live lives that are free from fear so as to maximize each individual’s unique potential for human flourishing; and (3) outlines an evolutionary understanding of Eunomia, whereby contemporary liberal orders represent the cumulative outcome of three sets of elite-selected “wins” over illiberal ones. To survive and thrive in the twenty-first century liberalism must once again contest and defeat rival orders.

The Poetic Power of Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Alexander Kluge
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
Second Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract The roots of theory lie in the spirit of resistance and “essential powers” that Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant ascribed to human beings. The poetic power of social life seeks and finds counter-algorithmic expression through narrative capacities of differentiation, and the poetic power of theory operates as a political alliance out of which emancipation of any kind becomes subjectively possible, without being subjectively controlled. What twenty-first-century forms of theoretical practice, sensory intelligence, and storytelling allow for the courage of cognition in a world dominated by Silicon Valley? If one dissolves the word power into the labor contained in it, petrified concepts are secretly changed, and heterogeneous “second-order” experience is made.

LOCKE AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Think ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (24) ◽  
pp. 67-71
Author(s):  
Terence Moore
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
First Century ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Twenty First Century

The seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, transported to the twenty-first century, has been discussing with Terence Moore, a twenty-first century student of language, questions concerning words, meanings and understanding. In this conversation Moore tackles Locke on the role he assigns to happiness in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

scholarly journals Becoming-After: The Lives and Politics of Quinine’s Remains

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Townsend Middleton
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria’s only remedy—and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. Crumbling quinine factories and overgrown cinchona may evoke ruination, but these remains are not dead. They have instead become the site of urgent efforts—and a periodically charged politics—to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. This essay develops an analytics of becoming-after to ask not only, how do empires and human beings become-with world-historical substances like quinine but also, what do we make of life after they run their course?

scholarly journals Recorder Use in Sacred Music during the Spanish Siglo de Oro: Archival Evidence, Historical Practices, and Applications in Performance - Audio_Files

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Miller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Siglo De Oro ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Historical Practices

This article presents findings and conclusions from a recently completed Ph.D. project which researched the use of recorders in performing sacred music in Spanish cathedrals and churches during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This study also examined interactions of the historical findings with artistic questions arising in twenty-first-century performance of sacred music repertoire. Paradoxically, while numerous sets of recorders were purchased by ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth century, most contemporary compositions did not specifically call for their use. As well, surviving sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century documentation is highly fragmentary regarding the participatory role of recorders in sacred repertoire of this period. Scholarly research and writing had not addressed this issue, and many questions persisted regarding any role of recorders in this repertoire. Sacred music of this era offers the modern musician an extensive and rich potential repertoire of supreme quality and beauty. Therefore, in seeking an historically informed basis for performance, this project asked if recorders were used in such works in Spanish ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and, if so, how.

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