The Paramaterial Phantasy
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 […]
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 […]