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Recovering the forgotten discipline of Natural Philosophy for the modern world This book argues for the retrieval of 'natural philosophy', a concept that faded into comparative obscurity as individual scientific disciplines became established and institutionalized. Natural philosophy was understood in the early modern period as a way of exploring the human relationship with the natural world, encompassing what would now be seen as the distinct disciplines of the natural sciences, mathematics, music, philosophy, and theology. The first part of the work represents a critical conversation with the tradition, identifying the essential characteristics of natural philosophy, particularly its empha...
This book explores the belief in ancient Judaism that God embedded hidden signs and visual clues in the natural world that could be read by human beings and interpreted according to complex systems.
This volume of the Erasmi Opera Omnia contains the sixth and last volume of Erasmus's Annotationes in Nouum Testamentum, viz. his annotations on the two letters to Timothy, the letter to Titos and Philemon, and the Catholic letters (James, 1. 2. Petr, 1.2.3. John, Judas); it closes with Erasmus's annotations on the Apocalypse. To the critical Latin text commentaries have been added in which the sources Erasmus used are mentioned. Moreover, explanations on relevant philological, theological and historical questions are given that are necessary for the comprehension of the Latin text. Der vorliegende Band der Erasmi Opera Omnia enthält den sechsten und letzten Teil von Erasmus' Annotationes i...
“A handy introduction to some of the more useful methodological approaches to and the previous scholarship on the subject of Greek myths.” —Phoenix Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of “myth” in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and what do they mean today? Here, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important contemporary approaches to the subject. Whether exploring myth from a historical, comparati...
Lewis Nkosi is one of South Africa’s foremost writers and critics, and one of the few survivors of the exile generation dating from the Drum era. Up until now, however, no full length study has been done on his work. This is a gap in South African literary history and criticism that this book is intended to fill. Besides his well known earlier works, Nkosi is still very much an active writer as the publication in 2002 of his novel, Underground People, shows, with his latest novel due out in 2005. The timing of Still Beating the Drum, a book which intends to highlight and evaluate his extensive and varied oeuvre, is thus appropriate. Given Lewis Nkosi’s life trajectory, this volume will a...
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was perhaps the last polymath among the great Germanic philosophers. Switching with ease and elegance between epistemic positions and fields as diverse as idealism and empiricism, fideism and rationalism, realism and nominalism, art and religion, jurisprudence and politics, psychology and occultism, Schopenhauer erected an imposing edifice bearing testimony to his universal learning. This study is an investigation into the very conclusion of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and endeavours to answer the following question: did Schopenhauer’s doctrine of salvation issue forth organically from his intellectual output or was it annexed to his philosophy as a result of his critical engagement with religion? The labyrinthine paths through which Schopenhauer arrives at the soteriological culmination of his philosophy are subjected to critical assessment; the picture that emerges is of a philosopher who seemed convinced that he had solved some of the most pressing cosmic riddles to have tormented mankind through the ages.
Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visu...
The importance of martyrdom for the spread of Christianity in the first centuries of the Common Era is a question of enduring interest. In this innovative new study, Candida Moss offers a radically new history of martyrdom in the first and second centuries that challenges traditional understandings of the spread of Christianity and rethinks the nature of Christian martyrdom itself. Martyrdom, Moss shows, was not a single idea, theology, or practice: there were diverse perspectives and understandings of what it meant to die for Christ. Beginning with an overview of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish ideas about death, Moss demonstrates that there were many cultural contexts within which early Christian views of martyrdom were very much at home. She then shows how distinctive and diverging theologies of martyrdom emerged in different ancient congregations. In the process she reexamines the authenticity of early Christian stories about martyrs and calls into question the dominant scholarly narrative about the spread of martyrdom in the ancient world.
In the midst of academic debates about the utility of the term “magic” and the cultural meaning of ancient words like mageia or khesheph, this Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic seeks to advance the discussion by separating out three topics essential to the very idea of magic. The three major sections of this volume address (1) indigenous terminologies for ambiguous or illicit ritual in antiquity; (2) the ancient texts, manuals, and artifacts commonly designated “magical” or used to represent ancient magic; and (3) a series of contexts, from the written word to materiality itself, to which the term “magic” might usefully pertain. The individual essays in this volume cover most o...
Chrysovalantis Kyriacou examines how memories of the pre-Christian past, Christian militarism, power struggles, and ethnoreligious encounters have left their long-term imprint on Cypriot culture. One of the most impressive examples of this phenomenon is the preservation and transformative adaptation of Byzantine heroic themes, motifs, and symbols in Cypriot folk songs. By combining a variety of written sources and archaeological material in his interdisciplinary examination, the author reconstructs the image of the Byzantine warrior hero in the songs, recovering the mentalities of overshadowed social protagonists and stressing the role of subaltern communities as active agents in the shaping of history.