The Paramaterial Phantasy
Part I. “He thinks tis but our fantasy”: The Ontology and Epistemology of Ghosts and Spirits In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the skeptical and possibly Stoic Horatio reveals to the melancholic eponymous prince that he has seen a phantasm. Before Horatio can even reveal his harrowing yet problematic tale of seeing a “form like [Hamlet’s] father,” […]
NB: I just discovered this image so this post will be brief and very tentative. I hope to follow it up with more extensive research soon and will post a more expansive discussion of this image at a later time. Last week, while I was working on revising a post on vision in Hobbes’ Leviathan […]
The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutions in the Microcosm and Macrocosm and the Crystalline Humor in the Three Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy Part I. The Three Fleshly Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy Augustine famously discusses the three eyes of a perceiver. He details that, first, there is the eye of the flesh. Second, […]
I. “The Arbaian trees their medicinable gum”: Othello’s Weeping Trees During Othello’s suicide speech, he makes several references that have attracted the attention of modern editors and scholars. The most famous concerns the textual variations between the Quarto and Folio versions of the line “Like a base Indian, threw a pearl away.” Whereas the Quarto […]
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 […]
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 […]