Premodern Experience Of The Natural World In Translation

This innovative collection showcases the importance of the relationship between translation and experience in premodern science, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to offer a nuanced understanding of knowledge transfer across premodern time and space. The volume considers experience as a tool and object of science in the premodern world, using this idea as a jumping-off point from which to view translation as a process of interaction between diff erent epistemic domains. The book is structured around four dimensions of translation—between terms within and across languages; across sciences and scientific norms; between verbal and visual systems; and through the expertise of practitioners and translators—which raise key questions on what constituted experience of the natural world in the premodern area and the impact of translation processes and agents in shaping experience. Providing a wide-ranging global account of historical studies on the travel and translation of experience in the premodern world, this book will be of interest to scholars in history, the history of translation, and the history and philosophy of science.

This volume brings together contributions from distinguished scholars in the history of philosophy, focusing on points of interaction between discrete historical contexts, religions, and cultures found within the premodern period. The contributions connect thinkers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and include philosophers from the three major monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. By emphasizing premodern philosophy’s shared textual roots in antiquity, particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle, the volume highlights points of cross-pollination between different schools, cultures, and moments in premodern thought. Approaching the complex history of the premodern world in an accessible way, the editors organize the volume so as to underscore the difficulties the premodern period poses for scholars, while accentuating the fascinating interplay between the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin philosophical traditions. The contributors cover many topics ranging from the aims of Aristotle’s cosmos, the adoption of Aristotle’s Organon by al-Fārābī, and the origins of the Plotiniana Arabica to the role of Ibn Gabirol’s Fons vitae in the Latin West, the ways in which Islamic philosophy shaped thirteenth-century Latin conceptions of light, Roger Bacon’s adaptation of Avicenna for use in his moral philosophy, and beyond. The volume’s focus on "source-based contextualism" demonstrates an appreciation for the rich diversity of thought found in the premodern period, while revealing methodological challenges raised by the historical study of premodern philosophy. Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy: Explorations of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin Traditions is a stimulating resource for scholars and advanced students working in the history of premodern philosophy.

Philosophy in the Islamic World is a comprehensive and unprecedented four-volume reference work devoted to the history of philosophy in the realms of Islam, from its beginnings in the eighth century AD down to modern times. In the period covered by this second volume (eleventh and twelfth centuries). Both major and minor figures of the period are covered, giving details of biography and doctrine, as well as detailed lists and summaries of each author’s works. This is the English version of the relevant volume of the Ueberweg, the most authoritative German reference work on the history of philosophy ( Philosophie in der Islamischen Welt Band II: 11.–12. Jahrhundert. Zentrale und östliche Gebiete , Basel: Schwabe, 2021). Contributors Peter Adamson, Amos Bertolacci, Hans Daiber, Frank Griffel, Dimitri Gutas, Hermann Landolt, Wilferd Madelung, Jon McGinnis, Ahmed H. al-Rahim, David C. Reisman, Ulrich Rudolph, Tony Street, Johannes Thomann, and Renate Würsch.

This volume excavates the genealogy of xin 信--a term that has become the modern Chinese counterpart for the English word "faith." More than twenty experts trace its religious and non-religious roots in several traditions, including Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, Christian, Japanese, popular religious, and modern secular contexts.

Building on the historical study of cultural translation, this volume brings together a range of case studies and fresh approaches to early modern intellectual history by scholars from across Europe reflecting on ideological and political change from c. 1600 to 1840. Translations played a crucial role in the transmission of political ideas across linguistic and cultural borders in early modern Europe. Yet intellectual historians have been slow to adopt the study of translations as an analytical tool for the understanding of such cultural transfers. Recently, a number of different approaches to transnational intellectual history have emerged, allowing historians of early modern Europe to draw on work not just in translation studies, literary studies, conceptual history, the history of political thought and the history of scholarship, but also in the history of print and its significance for cultural transfer. Thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of texts in translation can place them more accurately in time and space. This book provides a better understanding of the extent to which ideas crossed linguistic and cultural divides, and how they were re-shaped in the process. Written in an accessible style, this volume is aimed at scholars in cognate disciplines as well as at postgraduate students.

This book returns to the question at the center of our existence, a question that the narcissistic culture in which we are immersed systematically tends to remove: “Why?” The underlying thesis is that the answer must not be sought in success or social recognition, but in a “fragment of truth”, hidden somewhere inside each of us, which reveals itself only if we detach ourselves from our ego and its certainties. It is not, therefore, a matter of finding yet another philosophical theory of the meaning of existence, but rather of shedding light on the conditions under which such meaning can emerge. The author shows us that the ultimate source of our existential orientation lies in the affective sphere, and that the current crisis of orientation is derived from the atrophy of the process of affective maturation on a large scale, and from a lack of knowledge and experience about which techniques are best to reactivate it. We are like glowworms that had once unlearned how to illuminate and have since begun to hover around the magic lantern of the ascetic ideal, already criticized by Nietzsche, and then around neon advertising signs. We are glowworms that have forgotten that we have within our own affective structure a precious source of orientation. The basic thesis is that this source of orientation can be reactivated through the care of desire and practices of emotional sharing.

The practice and the representation of flaying in the middle ages and after are considered in this provocative collection.

This book gathers essays on premodern plants, considering the position of critical plant studies in relation to medieval studies. Contributions cover topics including the significance of the daisy in the two Prologues to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; naming in premodern herbals; gathering prayers; vegetal decay in the prose romance Perceforest; the futurity of plants as they ripen and then rot; and vegetal life in libertine science and literature from the seventeenth century. Taken together, they provide a thoughtful reflection on premodern plants.