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Shaping Sense

The Paramaterial Phantasy

“Double bewitchment”: Love-Beams, the Mutual Gaze, and the Interpenetrating Visions of Marsilio Ficino’s De Amore

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 […]

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Posted in Scholarship, Early Modern Senses, Shaping Sense Tagged Phantasy, theories of love, vision, history of vision, early modern senses, Marsilio Ficino, love beams, early modern, homoeroticism, imagination, De Amore, paramaterial, Love

“Their phantasies differ”: The Phantasy in Raleigh’s translation of Sextus Empiricus

The “Sceptick,” first published in 1651 and attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, offers one of the first known English translations, albeit unacknowledged, of portions of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines. While it is not a pure translation, and while it only offers an expurgated version of Sextus’ classical skeptical work, it is undoubtedly based on portions of […]

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Posted in Scholarship, Philosophical Skepticism, Shaping Sense Tagged Sextus Empiricus, skepticism, early modern senses, Raleigh, early modern, history of senses, paramaterial, phantasms, Phantasy, philosophical skepticism

“In my mind’s eye”: Species, Phantasms, Skepticism, and the Phantasy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in Early Modern Theater

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,” […]

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Posted in Scholarship, William Shakespeare, Early Modern Senses, Philosophical Skepticism, Shaping Sense Tagged spirits, epistemology, supernatural, skepticism, drama, history of science, Galenic humoralism, vision, Johann Weyer, history of the senses, accounts of demons and witchcraft, Reginald Scot, imagination, Hamlet, optics, Robert Burton, Malleus Maleficarum, paramaterial, history of vision, witches, Phantasy, William Shakespeare, delusions, philosophical skepticism, early modern senses, cultural studies, Rene Descartes, renaissance, perimaterial, Descartes, Raleigh, senses, ghosts, early modern, Ralegh, Shakespeare

Double Vision: Thomas Hobbes’ Eye in “A Minute or First Draft of the Optiques” (BL Harley MS 3360)

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 […]

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Posted in Early Modern Senses, Scholarship, Philosophical Skepticism, Shaping Sense, Tangents Tagged ocular anatomy, history of the senses, the eye, Kepler, history of vision, manuscripts, Leviathan, paramaterial, Short Tract of First Principles, vesalius, vision, Thomas Hobbes, British Library MS 3360, "A Minute or First Draft on the Optiques", history of science 3 Comments

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 One.

This entry is part [part not set] of 2 in the series The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutions in the Microcosm and Macrocosm, and the Crystalline Humor in the Three Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy.

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, […]

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Posted in Early Modern Senses, Philosophical Skepticism, Shaping Sense Tagged Augustine, paramaterial, crystalline humor, Platter, Descartes, senses, early modern, vesalius, eye, vision, history of science, history of the senses, Kepler, lens, optical anatomy, anatomy, optics

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 Two.

This entry is part [part not set] of 2 in the series The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutions in the Microcosm and Macrocosm, and the Crystalline Humor in the Three Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy.

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 II. The Revolution of the Eye and De-centering the Eye’s Sovereign In the first section, I discussed Andre du Laurens’ extended metaphorical treatment of the eye’s structure. There, du Laurens […]

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Posted in Scholarship, Early Modern Senses, Philosophical Skepticism, Shaping Sense Tagged anatomy, senses, Augustine, sight, Descartes, skepticism, early modern, vision, Helkiah Crooke, History of medicine, history of science, Kepler, optics, paramaterial, Ambroise Paré, science

“A mere Phantasm or Imagination”: Philosophical Skepticism and Joseph Mede’s Crisis of Sense

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 […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense, Early Modern Senses, Philosophical Skepticism Tagged phantasms, Phantasy, Descartes, philosophical skepticism, early modern, senses, history of ideas, Sextus Empiricus, history of philosophy, skepticism, history of science, species, imagination, Joseph Mede, Montaigne, paramaterial 4 Comments

“Runne through [t]he[i]r vaynes”: Phantasies of Desire in Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe’s Sonnet 63 and Sestine 5

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 […]

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Posted in Early Modern Senses, Shaping Sense Tagged Barnabe Barnes, early modern, history of senses, imagination, paramaterial, Phantasy, theories of love

Monstrous Phantasies: Imagining the Fetus in Ambroise Paré’s “Of Monsters and Prodigies”

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 […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense, Early Modern Senses Tagged Ambroise Paré, anatomy, early modern, imagination, Michel de Montaigne, monsters, paramaterial, Phantasy, representations of the body, senses

The “plague of phantasms”: Petrarch’s Secretum and the Paramaterial Objects of Sense in Human and Non-Human Animals

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 […]

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Posted in Shaping Sense Tagged imagination, ontology, Albertus Magnus, optics, animal studies, paramaterial, cultural studies, Petrarch, early modern, Phantasy, epistemology, renaissance, Francesco Petrarcha, Secretum, history of he mind, senses, history of science, history of the senses 1 Comment
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