The Paramaterial Phantasy
I have been discussing the paramaterial objects of the medieval and early modern mind as if they paradoxically took part in both the material nature of external objects and the immaterial abstraction of the soul. I will have more to say about the strange positioning and representation of those objects in later posts, but here […]
In his Microcosmographia, Helkiah Crooke, drawing upon and adapting Placentinus, takes issue with the traditional hierarchy of the external senses in the opening gambit of book eight’s “Dilucidation or Exposition of the Controuersies belonging to the Senses.” Whereas it was common practice in early modern anatomy and natural philosophy to account vision the “noblest sense,” […]
In Petrarch’s Secretum written somewhere between 1347 and 1353 and circulated posthumously, Petrarch shapes a dialogue between himself and a fictionalized Augustine. Augustine chastises and instructs Petrarch for favoring an attention to the world over devotion to God and spiritual things. Towards the end of book one of this dialogue, Augustine reveals the tensions inherent […]
In Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, Bacon claims that four “idols” corrupt the understanding and block science from developing a proper understanding of nature. Bacon offers that “there are four kinds of idols besetting human minds,” and gives them names, saying, “I call the first, Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the […]
I have recently been working on an interactive Flash meta-mind map animation to help explain the features and functions assigned to the faculties within various models of the mind. For my first post, I have embedded the “fantasia” portion of my Flash meta-mind map. It represents one portion in a longer interactive map designed to […]
My last post sketched out how the paramaterial mind emerges towards the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I will have more to say about deceiving the external and internal senses in that play in a later post, but I first want to focus on a much shorter and less complex poem to develop […]
portion of my last post’s title comes from the fifth act of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Hippolyta and Theseus discuss the strange alterations of love they have just witnessed in the forest. Hippolyta declares the speeches delivered by the lovers as “strange,” prompting The Duke’s declaration of the vulnerability […]
While studying mind models available in the early modern period, I noticed an unusual confluence of supposed “influences” on the mind that generate paradoxical aspects within medieval and early modern constructions of the Imagination or the Phantasy. These paradoxes reveal a Phantasy that resembles but differs from our ordinary contemporary understanding of the imagination. For […]