Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> History & Surveys - Renaissance

The Renaissance marked a turning point in Europe's relationship to Arabic thought. On the one hand, Dag Nikolaus Hasse argues, it was the period in which important Arabic traditions reached the peak of their influence in Europe. On the other hand, it is the time when the West began to forget, and even actively suppress, its debt to Arabic culture. Success and Suppression traces the complex story of Arabic influence on Renaissance thought.

It is often assumed that the Renaissance had little interest in Arabic sciences and philosophy, because humanist polemics from the period...

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare s drama. The discourse of folly s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims a fool s truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the...

Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought. Celebrated historian J.G.A. Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. Pocock shows that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which Pocock calls the "Machiavellian moment."

After examining this problem in the works of Machiavelli,...

New scientific theories, methods, and objectives exert subtle and often unnoticed influences on literary creation. The developments of the attitudes and aspirations of French scientists between the Renaissance and the Revolution and the impact of these new outlooks on French literature form the theme of this book by an authority in the interdisciplinary treatment of science and literature. Implicit in the author's exploration is the view that in the development of the scientific revolution there was no overall design, but rather random growth; human beings turn up at various moments, some...

To be an alchemist, traditionally one must gain access to the Philosophers' Garden - but to advance into the garden one must be an alchemist. ARS ALCHEMICA: Foundations of Practical Alchemy provides essential instruction to assist the student to gain ingress into this sacred realm.

This work teaches the practical laboratory alchemy of the past masters and for the first time reveals many of their secrets, including the volatilization of the salts and the mysteries of the sal ammoniac salts. These are a major key to many operations of the arte without which...