The Paramaterial Phantasy
I have been arguing for a medieval and early modern paramaterial phantasy which paradoxically positioned the phantasy and its spirits somewhere between the material and the immaterial, and between the body and the soul. In this post, I want to explore Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic construction of love in his De Amore (On Love) to further […]
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,” […]
In his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell’s speaker begins by imagining a scenario in which he and his lover have all the time in the world to love one another without a fear of death. During the course of his musings, the lover makes an odd metaphor for the growth of his love […]
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 […]
Hitherto, I have been focusing on the relationships established among the objects of the world and the objects of the mind predominantly in popular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy. I do so, in part, because the divisions between perception and reality, and between appearance and reality, for contemporary critical practice, are a given and are […]
A few years ago, Gordon Braden introduced me to the peculiar sonnet from Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe. At that time, I remember finding the pairing of Jove’s “golden shower” with the speaker’s desire to become the urine of his beloved both hilarious and intriguing. I wondered whether this was the first instance in English […]
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 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 […]