Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to what (...) extent formal conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

In this review we deal with open quantum systems within the Bohmian mechanics framework which has the advantage to provide a clear picture of quantum phenomena in terms of trajectories, originally in configuration space. The gradual decoherence process is studied from linear and nonlinear Schrödinger equations through Bohmian trajectories as well as by using the so-called quantum-classical transition differential equation through scaled trajectories. This transition is governed by a continuous parameter, the transition parameter, covering these two extreme open dynamical regimes. (...) Thus, two sources of decoherence of different nature are going to be considered. Several examples will be presented and discussed in order to illustrate the corresponding theory behind each case, namely: the so-called Brownian–Bohmian motion leading to quantum diffusion coefficients, dissipative diffraction in time, dissipative tunnelling for a parabolic barrier under the presence of an electric field and stochastic early arrivals for the same type of barrier. In order to simplify the notations and physical discussion, the theoretical developments will be carried out in one dimension throughout all this wok. One of the main goals is to analyze the gradual decoherence process existing in these open dynamical regimes in terms of trajectories, leading to a more intuitive way of understanding the underlying physics in order to gain new insights. (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted (...) fantasy, and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

On the basis of a theoretical framework derived from grounded cognition and with reference to the available archaeological data concerning early art, this talk/article proposes an evolutionary conception of the aesthetic emotions, considered as an indispensable means that favored the emergence of the ordinary emotions in their modern version.

The earliest art collections of Finland’s National Gallery came into being when, as the Grand Duchy of Finland, it was an autonomous part of imperial Russia. The prevailing view of Finnish museum studies, however, sees the Finnish Art Society, the precursor of the Finnish National Gallery, as being modelled on exclusively European cultural institutions. The history of the Society and its collections have thus been seen as resistant to any alien eastern influences, and as an attempt to differentiate Finnish culture (...) from Russian art collecting practices. Drawing on the theoretical shift in cultural studies from the conception of stable, clearly demarcated cultural identities of nation states toward less rigidly defined identities, the aim of this essay is to reconstruct the hidden Russian presence in Finnish museum historiography. Based on original unpublished sources, my study shows that the earliest support of Finland’s cultural infrastructure was given by the Romanov patrons Nicholas.. (shrink)

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This book reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that Romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists (...) drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of Romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy, and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of Romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them. (shrink)

Apin's cabinet of printed curiosities -- Thinking through plural images of logic -- The visible order of student lecture notebooks -- Visual thinking in logic notebooks and Alba amicorum -- The generation of art as the generation of philosophy.

The essays assembled here are all very early and differ in a number of ways from Bakhtin's previously published work.

From the late-fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works - which often take surprisingly modern-sounding positions - grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. In this book, based on the Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, Anthony Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight - and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually (...) forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr’s celebrated and icononclastic Trevelyan Lectures on What Is History?, and will appeal to a broad readership of students, scholars and historical enthusiasts. Anthony Grafton is one of the most celebrated historians writing in English today, and What Was History? is a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. (shrink)

Art is a human communicative system that relies on referential cognition of thoughts, emotions, and experiences through symbolic meanings, which explains why only humans have art and why it is ubiquitously present throughout human societies. Archaeological evidence for early material art signals presence of symbolic and abstract cognition. In early human life in Africa the symbolism afforded by group dance formation would have been more advantageous for survival than individual artistic expression, but it would not leave archaeological physical (...) traces. Slipping into synchronized movements is a natural form of expressing interpersonal unity and symbolically signaling the members' affiliation to the group. In sharp contrast, production of material art encourages individual virtuosity in talent, something only a select few would possess, and in this regard it is not as inclusive as group dance. It is proposed here that the early Homo sapiens relied on symbolic expressions of intermember unity through group dance. (shrink)

Enriching Arts Education through Aesthetics examines the use of aesthetic theory as the foundation to design and implement arts activities suitable for integration in school curricula in pre-school and primary school education. This book suggests teaching practices based on the connection between aesthetics and arts education and shows that this kind of integration promotes enriched learning experiences. -/- The book explores how the core ideas of four main aesthetic approaches – the representationalist, the expressionist, the formalist, and the postmodernist – (...) translate into respective ways of designing and implementing experiential aesthetics-based activities. Containing relevant examples of interventions used in classes, it analyzes the ways in which the combination of different aesthetic approaches can support varied, multifaceted, multimodal and balanced teaching situations in school. (shrink)

This article examines the potential of art and archaeological remains for the study of women's social history in early Christianity. Part I considers important sources for art and archaeological data; the received method and classification criteria for the discipline of early Christian art and archaeology; and the types of problems both earlier and contemporary approaches to the material remains present for scholars. Part II proposes an approach to understanding early Christian art and material culture as part of (...) a larger ongoing social discourse in the ancient Mediterranean world where cultural representations take part in the lively social and aural culture of life lived in close proximity to others. This approach places art and archaeological evidence in the foreground and documentary sources in the background as corroborative evidence. (shrink)

From his earliest writings as a student in the Evangelical Stift in Tübingen to the last years of his life as a professor in Berlin, art played a major role in Hegel’s various philosophical formulations. It is important to note, however, that although Hegel remained convinced of the general importance of art for his own philosophical endeavors, the particular details of his interpretation of its significance changed quite markedly over the years as he developed his own unique philosophical position and (...) as his firsthand experience of works of art increased. In this paper I will concentrate on some of Hegel’s earliest efforts toward developing his own philosophical system, and will show how this development is reflected in a fundamental transformation of his interpretation of the significance of art. More specifically, I will establish in what follows that one major consequence of Hegel’s evolving systematic philosophy is an “impoverishment” of the artistic in the sense that art comes to lose a certain fertility which it had had in his earlier views. This impoverishment is in effect the price exacted if art is to assume a place within Hegel’s system, precisely because the role and significance of art now come to be defined by and expressed in terms of its place in that system. Although this paper will be concerned with only the first stages in a process of development which continues all the way up to his Berlin lectures on beautiful art, it will nonetheless become apparent that Hegel’s early understanding of art has to have been radically altered for such a development even to begin. (shrink)

The most popular English arithmetic of the 16th century was Robert Recorde’s Ground of Artes. Of the many surviving editions (15 before 1600), only two were published during Recorde’s lifetime, and a third was published shortly after his death. The first two differ materially from the latter, which was the basis of the long series of „augmented“ or „revised“ editions which appeared from 1561 to 1699. Because of their greater accessibility, discussions of 16th-century arithmetics usually cite these later editions, sometimes (...) tacitly ascribing material to the early editions which does not appear before 1558. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2018Some time ago I was at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris investigating the teaching of philosophy during Descartes’ time. Fine monographs had already been published on the various regimens and practices at Descartes’ college at La Flèche, and Jesuit institutions in general, as well as the collegiate curriculum in seventeenth-century France. But as interested as I was in the form of the teaching—how philosophy was taught, where, and when—I was more interested in its content—what was actually taught. (...) A fair number of early modern textbooks and some manuscripts of lectures and student notebooks were still available; beyond that, one could find reports of weekly or monthly disputations, condemnations of specific doctrines, various broadsheets, manifestos, and student theses and dissertations. After overcoming some administrative resistance, I found myself in a room at the Cabinet d’Estampes looking at a... (shrink)

Twenty years ago, historians complained that the art of excerpting was still a marginal topic. Ten years later, Ann Blair stated that “the history of note-taking has only begun to be written”.1 How...

L’articolo esamina alcune delle condizioni che hanno favorite lo sviluppo di una estetica del quotidiano nella filosofia contemporanea. Esso spiega il motivo per cui certe posizioni dell'estetica del ventesimo dovevano essere contrastate in modo da tenere adeguatamente in considerazione l'arte contemporanea, e dimostra che due delle principali caratteristiche della estetica del ventesimo secolo che dovevano essere superate sono una specifica forma di estetismo e di antropocentrismo. Fornendo alcuni esempi (o modelli) di come quest'ultimo compito può essere realizzato, sostengo che l'attenzione (...) dell'estetica non deve più essere esclusivamente per l'arte nelle sue forme tradizionali, ma può anche indirizzarsi verso il regno di oggetti considerati come non artistici come la ambiente e, in alcuni casi estremi, anche tutto ciò che è percepibile. (shrink)

The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a (...) selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research. (shrink)

This book presents an innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism. Dee Reynolds brings this approach to bear on works by Rimbaud, Mallarme;, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. It allows her to redefine the relationship between Symbolism and abstract art, and to contribute new methodological perspectives to comparative studies of poetry and painting. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a crucial period in the emergence of new modes of representation, (...) and is currently at the forefront of critical enquiry. This is the first book to examine Symbolism and abstraction in this way, and the first to treat these poets and painters together. It is an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in art history, literary history, and comparative aesthetics. (shrink)

Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art Heinrich Wölfflingetty research institute. 2015. pp. 356. £20.00.