Magic Reason And Experience

This study of the origins and progress of Greek science focuses especially on the interaction between scientific and traditional patterns of thought from the sixth to the fourth century BC. It begins with an examination of how particular Greek authors deployed the category of "magic," sometimes attacking its beliefs and practices; these attacks are then related to their background in Greek medicine and philosophical thought. In his second chapter Lloyd outlines developments in the theory and practice of argument in Greek science and assesses their significance. He next discuses the progress of empirical research as a scientific tool from the Presocratics to Aristotle. Finally, he considers why the Greeks invented science, their contribution to its history, and the social, economic, ideological and political factors that had a bearing on its growth.

This book is a study of the origins and development of Greek science, focusing especially on the interactions of scientific and traditional patterns of thought from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC. The starting point is an examination of how certain Greek authors deployed the category of 'magic' and attacked magical beliefs and practices, and these attacks are related to their complex background in Greek medicine and speculative thought. In his second chapter Dr Lloyd outlines the development, and assesses the significance, of the theory and practice of argument in early Greek science, and he follows this with a study of the development of empirical research. Finally the author confronts the question of why the Greeks invented science: what precisely was their contribution to science, and what social, economic, ideological and political factors had a bearing on the growth of science in Greece.

In Magic’s Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two pursuits are not as separate as they may seem at first. As Jones shows, they not only matured around the same time, but they also shared mutually reinforcing stances toward modernity and rationality. It is no historical accident, for example, that colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western magicians and native ritual performers, who, in their view, hoodwinked gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine. Using French magicians’ engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how magic became enshrined in anthropological reasoning. Acknowledging the residue of magic’s colonial origins doesn’t require us to dispense with it. Rather, through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic’s Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparison.

Rabbinic hermeneutics in ancient Judaism reflects this multifaceted world of the text and of reality, seen as a world of reference worth commentary. As a mirror, it includes this world but perhaps also falsifies reality, adapting it to one's own aims and necessities. It consists of four parts: Part I, considered as introduction, is the description of the "Rabbinic Workshop" (Officina Rabbinica), the rabbinic world where the student plays a role and a reformation of a reformation always takes place, the world where the mirror was created and manufactured. Part II deals with the historical environment, the world of reference of rabbinic Judaism in Palestine and in the Hellenistic Diaspora (Reflecting Roman Religion); Part III focuses on magic and the sciences, as ancient (political and empirical) activities of influence in the double meaning of receiving and adopting something and of attempt to produce an effect on persons and objects (Performing the Craft of Sciences and Magic). Part IV addresses the rabbinic concern with texts (Reflecting on Languages and Texts) as the main area of "influence" of the rabbinic academy in a space between the texts of the past and the real world of the present.

The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to theatheos, or "godless." Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief.

Vols. 1-2 concern the first 13 centuries of the Christian era; vols. 3-4, the 14th and 15th centuries, vols. 5-6, the 16th century, and vols. 7-8, the 17th century.