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La Tradition Alchimique
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Book Synopsis The Secrets of Alchemy by : Lawrence Principe
Download or read book The Secrets of Alchemy written by Lawrence Principe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alchemy, the Noble Art, conjures up scenes of mysterious, dimly lit laboratories populated with bearded old men stirring cauldrons. Though the history of alchemy is intricately linked to the history of chemistry, alchemy has nonetheless often been dismissed as the realm of myth and magic, or fraud and pseudoscience. And while its themes and ideas persist in some expected and unexpected places, from the Philosopher's (or Sorcerer's) Stone of Harry Potter to the self-help mantra of transformation, there has not been a serious, accessible, and up-to-date look at the complete history and influence of alchemy until now.
Author : Publisher :Editions Bréal ISBN 13 :2749521343 Total Pages :323 pages Book Rating :4.7/5 (495 download)
Download or read book written by and published by Editions Bréal. This book was released on with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Transmutations of Chymistry by : Lawrence M. DeMartino
Download or read book The Transmutations of Chymistry written by Lawrence M. DeMartino and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reevaluates the changes to chymistry that took place from 1660 to 1730 through a close study of the chymist Wilhelm Homberg (1653–1715) and the changing fortunes of his discipline at the Académie Royale des Sciences, France’s official scientific body. By charting Homberg’s remarkable life from Java to France’s royal court, and his endeavor to create a comprehensive theory of chymistry (including alchemical transmutation), Lawrence M. Principe reveals the period’s significance and reassesses its place in the broader sweep of the history of science. Principe, the leading authority on the subject, recounts how Homberg’s radical vision promoted chymistry as the most powerful and reliable means of understanding the natural world. Homberg’s work at the Académie and in collaboration with the future regent, Philippe II d’Orléans, as revealed by a wealth of newly uncovered documents, provides surprising new insights into the broader changes chymistry underwent during, and immediately after, Homberg. A human, disciplinary, and institutional biography, The Transmutations of Chymistry significantly revises what was previously known about the contours of chymistry and scientific institutions in the early eighteenth century.
Book Synopsis Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition by : Antoine Faivre
Download or read book Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition written by Antoine Faivre and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-02-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical and interpretive study of three aspects of Western esotericism from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy by : Constantino de Pisa
Download or read book The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy written by Constantino de Pisa and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1990 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Liber secretorum alchimie" is an attempt to introduce alchemy into Aristotle's science: manipulating metals, astronomy, astrology, geography and even theology are combined in these lecture notes taken by a 13th century medical student to make a fascinating review of themes which were hotly debated in medieval Italian university circles.
Book Synopsis Constructing Tradition by : Andreas Kilcher
Download or read book Constructing Tradition written by Andreas Kilcher and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-10-30 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of constructing tradition, concepts of origin, and memory as well as techniques and practices of knowledge transmission, are central for cultures in general. In esotericism, however, such questions and techniques play an outstanding role and are widely reflected upon, in its literature. Esoteric paradigms not only understand themselves in elaborated mytho-poetical narratives as bearers of “older”, “hidden”, “higher” knowledge. They also claim their knowledge to be of a particular origin. And they claim this knowledge has been transmitted by particular (esoteric) means, media and groups. Consequently, esotericism not only involves the construction of its own tradition; it can even be understood as a specific form of tradition and transmission. The various studies of the present voume, which contains the papers of a conference held in Tübingen in July 2007, provide an overview of the most important concepts and ways of constructing tradition in esotericism.
Book Synopsis Fictionalizing heterodoxy by : Folke Gernert
Download or read book Fictionalizing heterodoxy written by Folke Gernert and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The information overload produced by the printing press and the new forms of the structuring of knowledge are echoed in fictional works. The essays assembled in this book study the textualization of problematic forms of knowledge in medieval and early modern Spanish literature. Literary Works like the Libro buen amor, La Lozana Andaluza, or the Guzmán de Alfarache are read against the backdrop of scientific developments of their times.
Book Synopsis The Spanish Hermes and Wisdom Traditions in Medieval Iberia by : Juan Udaondo Alegre
Download or read book The Spanish Hermes and Wisdom Traditions in Medieval Iberia written by Juan Udaondo Alegre and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-11-05 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating study of translation, adaptation, and intellectual cross-pollination that situates the Castilian Hermes in the center of medieval Mediterranean cultural exchange Hermes Trismegistus, a Hellenistic conflation of the Greek Hermes (god of interpretative wisdom) and the Egyptian Thoth (god of wisdom) was considered by many in the medieval world as the father of culture. Between c. 300 BCE - c. 1200 CE various treatises were attributed to the legendary sage, becoming known as the Hermetica - a combination of diverse philosophical and spiritual systems, addressing subjects such as alchemy, magic, and astrology. The Hermetica circulated widely, with premodern translations in Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Persian, Arabic, and other Eastern languages. Whilst these iterations have been thoroughly researched, little attention has been paid to the Castilian Hermes, the first rendition of the wisdom traditions of Hermes Trismegistus in a Romance language. This book follows the ways in which Hermetic knowledge was brought to the Iberian Peninsula, showing how Hermes became the philosophical and spiritual inspiration for Christian, Arabic, and Jewish scholars there. Udaondo Alegre unveils the pivotal role of King Alfonso X ("the Learned") of Castile (1252-84) in creating this Spanish Hermes. Through the meticulous tracing of source texts and literary influences, the author explores the myriad ways in which Hermes crossed religious and linguistic boundaries to embody a composite intellectual identity, emblematic of medieval Spain's multicultural ethos. Alfonso's court is revealed as the site for a unique convergence of translation and interpretation that shaped a distinctly "Hispanic" Hermes.
Book Synopsis Atoms and Alchemy by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Atoms and Alchemy written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Enlightenment, alchemy has been viewed as a sort of antiscience, disparaged by many historians as a form of lunacy that impeded the development of rational chemistry. But in Atoms and Alchemy, William R. Newman—a historian widely credited for reviving recent interest in alchemy—exposes the speciousness of these views and challenges widely held beliefs about the origins of the Scientific Revolution. Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle’s famous mechanical philosophy, Newman shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors—figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert—provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, Newman argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an “atomic” element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry. Atomsand Alchemy thus provokes a refreshing debate about the origins of modern science and will be welcomed—and deliberated—by all who are interested in the development of scientific theory and practice.
Book Synopsis Science, Fables and Chimeras by : Philippe Murillo
Download or read book Science, Fables and Chimeras written by Philippe Murillo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of science provides numerous examples of the way in which imagination, religion and mythology have sometimes helped and sometimes hindered scientific progress. While established ideas and beliefs clearly held back the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin, the intuitive knowledge found in mythology, art and religion has often proved useful in indicating new ways in which to explore or represent new knowledge of the world. Stories, fables and images have contributed to drawing a fuller picture of the past, understanding the present and imagining the future. The essays in this book, written by academics, writers and artists from various fields ranging from La Fontaine’s fables to nanotechnology and modern art, all point out the ways in which imagination works its way into all the fields of knowledge. At both ends of the spectrum, the hybrid nature of the chimera emerges as a pivotal symbol of both man’s predation instinct and a powerful symbol of his fear of extinction. This interdisciplinary book, weaving together visual representation, literature, mysticism, and science, will appeal to historians of science, philosophy, art and religion. It will also be of interest to scholars in cultural studies and anthropology. Drawing on recent scientific research and artistic production, the volume will additionally interest a wider audience wishing to learn more about man’s obsession and fascination with the potent symbolism of dinosaurs and dragons and all hybrid forms generated by the human imagination and recent technology.
Book Synopsis The Practice of Reason by : Marcelo Dascal
Download or read book The Practice of Reason written by Marcelo Dascal and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) dedicated much of his life to some of the most central debates of his time. For him, our chance of progress towards the happiness of mankind lies in the capacity to recognize the value of the different perspectives through which humans approach the world. Controversies supply the opportunity to exercise this capacity by approaching the opponent not as an adversary but as someone from whose point of view we can enrich our own viewpoint and improve our knowledge. This approach inspired the creation of this series. The book – the first in the series devoted to Leibniz – presents his views through actual controversies in which he participated, in several domains. Leibniz’s original ‘theory of controversies’ thus appears not only as what the thinker thinks about how one should use reason in a controversy, but also how he puts in practice the kind of rationality he preaches.
Book Synopsis Promethean Ambitions by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Promethean Ambitions written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.
Book Synopsis The Alchemist in Literature by : Theodore Ziolkowski
Download or read book The Alchemist in Literature written by Theodore Ziolkowski and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike most other studies of alchemy and literature, which focus on alchemical imagery in poetry of specific periods or writers, this book traces the figure of the alchemist in Western literature from its first appearance in the Eighth Circle of Dante's Inferno down to the present. From the beginning alchemy has had two aspects: exoteric or operative (the transmutation of baser metals into gold) and esoteric or speculative (the spiritual transformation of the alchemist himself). From Dante to Ben Jonson, during the centuries when the belief in exoteric alchemy was still strong and exploited by many charlatans to deceive the gullible, writers in major works of many literatures treated alchemists with ridicule in an effort to expose their tricks. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, as that belief weakened, the figure of the alchemist disappeared, even though Protestant poets in England and Germany were still fond of alchemical images. But when eighteenth-century science almost wholly undermined alchemy, the figure of the alchemist began to emerge again in literature--now as a humanitarian hero or as a spirit striving for sublimation. Following these esoteric romanticizations, as scholarly interest in alchemy intensified, writers were attracted to the figure of the alchemist and his quest for power. The fin-de-siecle saw a further transformation as poets saw in the alchemist a symbol for the poet per se and others, influenced by the prevailing spiritism, as a manifestation of the religious spirit. During the interwar years, as writers sought surrogates for the widespread loss of religious faith, esoteric alchemy underwent a pronounced revival, and many writers turned to the figure of the alchemist as a spiritual model or, in the case of Paracelsus in Germany, as a national figurehead. This tendency, theorized by C. G. Jung in several major studies, inspired after World War II a vast popularization of the figure in novels--historical, set in the present, or juxtaposing past and present-- in England, France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and the United States. The inevitable result of this popularization was the trivialization of the figure in advertisements for healing and cooking or in articles about scientists and economists. In sum: the figure of the alchemist in literature provides a seismograph for major shifts in intellectual and cultural history.
Book Synopsis The Spirit of French Capitalism by : Charly Coleman
Download or read book The Spirit of French Capitalism written by Charly Coleman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the economy become bound up with faith in infinite wealth creation and obsessive consumption? Drawing on the economic writings of eighteenth-century French theologians, historian Charly Coleman uncovers the surprising influence of the Catholic Church on the development of capitalism. Even during the Enlightenment, a sense of the miraculous did not wither under the cold light of calculation. Scarcity, long regarded as the inescapable fate of a fallen world, gradually gave way to a new belief in heavenly as well as worldly affluence. Animating this spiritual imperative of the French economy was a distinctly Catholic ethic that—in contrast to Weber's famous "Protestant ethic"—privileged the marvelous over the mundane, consumption over production, and the pleasures of enjoyment over the rigors of delayed gratification. By viewing money, luxury, and debt through the lens of sacramental theory, Coleman demonstrates that the modern economy casts far beyond rational action and disenchanted designs, and in ways that we have yet to apprehend fully.
Book Synopsis The Young Descartes by : Harold J. Cook
Download or read book The Young Descartes written by Harold J. Cook and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Descartes is best known as the man who coined the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” But though he is remembered most as a thinker, Descartes, the man, was no disembodied mind, theorizing at great remove from the worldly affairs and concerns of his time. Far from it. As a young nobleman, Descartes was a soldier and courtier who took part in some of the greatest events of his generation—a man who would not seem out of place in the pages of The Three Musketeers. In The Young Descartes, Harold J. Cook tells the story of a man who did not set out to become an author or philosopher—Descartes began publishing only after the age of forty. Rather, for years he traveled throughout Europe in diplomacy and at war. He was present at the opening events of the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe and Northern Italy, and was also later involved in struggles within France. Enduring exile, scandals, and courtly intrigue, on his journeys Descartes associated with many of the most innovative free thinkers and poets of his day, as well as great noblemen, noblewomen, and charismatic religious reformers. In his personal life, he expressed love for men as well as women and was accused of libertinism by his adversaries. These early years on the move, in touch with powerful people and great events, and his experiences with military engineering and philosophical materialism all shaped the thinker and philosopher Descartes became in exile, where he would begin to write and publish, with purpose. But though it is these writings that made ultimately made him famous, The Young Descartes shows that this story of his early life and the tumultuous times that molded him is sure to spark a reappraisal of his philosophy and legacy.
Book Synopsis Mis-reading the Creative Impulse by : Adrianna M. Paliyenko
Download or read book Mis-reading the Creative Impulse written by Adrianna M. Paliyenko and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on work by Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, and Harold Bloom, Adrianna M. Paliyenko's richly textured study revises our previous understanding of Arthur Rimbaud's (1854-1891) indirect artistic influence on Paul Claudel (1868-1955). Paliyenko's analysis answers to critical readings that rely on speculative spiritual affinities and text-surface similarities in identifying Claudel as Rimbaud's artistic follower. She traces the two writers' development of the poetic subject, striving to map Claudel's "creative corrections," or revisions, of Rimbaud's work. In redirecting discussion of Rimbaud's work, she develops a Bloomian paradigm of how creative artists strive for originality by correcting or revising their predecessors.
Book Synopsis Pierre Gassendi's Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists by : Saul Fisher
Download or read book Pierre Gassendi's Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists written by Saul Fisher and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This look at Gassendi’s philosophy and science illuminates his contributions to early modern thought and to the broader history of philosophy of science. Two keys to his thought are his novel picture of acquiring and judging empirical belief, and his liberal account of criteria for counting empirical beliefs as parts of warranted physical theories. By viewing his philosophical and scientific pursuits as part of one and the same project, Gassendi’s arguments on behalf of atomism can be fruitfully explained as licensed by his empiricism.
