Heretics

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Diana B. Altegoer

"Using the tools of rhetorical and poetic analysis, this study of Baconian science reveals how the construction of scientific and philosophical discourse in early-modern England cannot be separated from literary-rhetorical production and political partisanship. By calling into question the usual way of dividing disciplines into logic, rhetoric, and poetics, Bacon suggested the constructed nature of these disciplines, and of traditional forms of knowledge. Bacon did not call into being a fissure of science and the arts; rather he conceptualized a unique relationship between the two by creating an experimental (and rhetoricized) "logic" that allowed nature to shape and fashion the perceiving mind of the witness in order to advance the political fortunes of Elizabethan and Stuart England."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kristen Poole

"Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest"--

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Marije Altorf

"Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining offers a new appreciation of Iris Murdoch's philosophy, emphasising the importance of images and the imagination for her thought." "This book is first and foremost a study of Iris Murdoch's philosophical work. It examines how literature and imagination enabled Murdoch to form a philosophical response to the decline of religion. It thus argues that Murdoch is an important philosopher, because she has not confined herself to philosophy. The book also reconsiders various contemporary assumptions about what philosophy is and does. Through Le Doeuff's notion of the philosophical imaginary, it examines the different ways in which images and imagination are part of philosophy."--Jacket.

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Sanjay K. Gautam

The 'Kamasutra' is best known in the West for its scandalous celebration of unbridled sensuality. Yet, there is much, much more to it; embedded in the text is a vision of the city founded on art and aesthetic pleasure. Sanjay K. Gautam lays out the nature and origin of this iconic Indian text and engages in a serious reading of its relationship with Foucault. Gautam shows how closely intertwined the history of erotics in Indian culture is with the history of theater-aesthetics grounded in the discourse of love, and Foucault provides the framework for opening up an intellectual horizon of Indian thought.