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Author: Edgar Laing Heermance
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
Author: Heidi C. M. Scott
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271065362
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.
Author: Norman Cohn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Author: Karen Ann Lang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801488559
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos, Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany--the period from the 1880s to 1940--she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena--chaos--into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry.Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur.Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge.
Author: Stephen Ray Graham
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802808417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Philip Schaff is considered the founder of the discipline of church history in America, and he was the foremost practitioner of that discipline in nineteenth-century America. In this book Stephen R. Graham provides the first in-depth treatment of Schaff's analysis of religion in American and, by means of that study, examines not only Schaff's thought but also the development of religion in the United States in the nineteenth century. Topics covered include the three "threats" to American Christianity as conceived by Schaff -- sectarianism, romanism, and rationalism; Schaff's understanding of the American experiment of separation of church and state; Schaff's conception of America as playing a unique role in world and Christian history; and Schaff's contributions to ecumenism.
Author: Elisabet Sahtouris
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The first popularly written explanation of the scientific theory galvanizing both New Age and scientific circles: the GAIA Hypothesis.
Author: Barry Parker
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780738206318
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
From award-winning science writer Barry Parker, the only book to consider chaos theory in all areas of astronomy.
Author: Edgar Laing Heermance
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
Author: Barry R. Parker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1489933700
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
'he year was 1889. The French physicist-mathematician Henry T Poincare could not believe his eyes. He had worked for months on one of the most famous problems in science-the problem of three bodies moving around one another under mutual gravita tional attraction-and what he was seeing dismayed and trou bled him. Since Newton's time it had been assumed that the problem was solvable. All that was needed was a little ingenuity and considerable perseverance, but Poincare saw that this was not the case. Strange, unexplainable things happened when he delved into the problem; it was not solvable after all. Poincare was shocked and dismayed by the result-so disheartened he left the problem and went on to other things. What Poincare was seeing was the first glimpse of a phe nomenon we now call chaos. With his discovery the area lay dormant for almost 90 years. Not a single book was written about the phenomenon, and only a trickle of papers appeared. Then, about 1980 a resurgence of interest began, and thousands of papers appeared along with dozens of books. The new science of chaos was born and has attracted as much attention in recent years as breakthroughs in superconductivity and superstring theory.
Author: Edgar Laing Heermance
Publisher: Wentworth Press
ISBN: 9780530824130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Author: Olaf Almqvist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350221864
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Cosmological narratives like the creation story in the book of Genesis or the modern Big Bang are popularly understood to be descriptions of how the universe was created. However, cosmologies also say a great deal more. Indeed, the majority of cosmologies, ancient and modern, explore not simply how the world was made but how humans relate to their surrounding environment and the often thin line which separates humans from gods and animals. Combining approaches from classical studies, anthropology, and philosophy, this book studies three competing cosmologies of the early Greek world: Hesiod's Theogony; the Orphic Derveni theogony; and Protagoras' creation myth in Plato's eponymous dialogue. Although all three cosmologies are part of a single mythic tradition and feature a number of similar events and characters, Olaf Almqvist argues they offer very different answers to an ongoing debate on what it is to be human. Engaging closely with the ontological turn in anthropology and in particular with the work of Philippe Descola, this book outlines three key sets of ontological assumptions – analogism, pantheism, and naturalism – found in early Greek literature and explores how these competing ontological assumptions result in contrasting attitudes to rituals such as prayer and sacrifice.
