Academic literature on the topic 'Philosophical overtones'

Abstract The significance of The Matrix as a movie with deep philosophical overtones is well recognized. Whenever the movie is discussed in philosophy classes, comparisons are made with Descartes’s Meditations, particularly the dream argument and the evil-genius scenario, both of which are intended to generate skeptical doubt. How do we know, for example, that we are awake now, rather than merely dreaming? How do we know that our thoughts are not being manipulated, and that our perceptions of “reality” are accurate? The Matrix makes these doubts stand out vividly.

Abstract This chapter surveys the main trends that have surfaced in the field of Byron Studies, intertwining with the developments of literary theory. The dialogue across linguistic, literary, and disciplinary boundaries explored here has provided new approaches to three thematic clusters in Byron criticism. First is the relationship between Byron’s personality and his work, focusing on cultural constructs such as Byron’s masks, his mobility, ‘Byromania’, his takes on gender and race, and his concern for the body as a site of meaning. The second cluster deals with Byron’s ‘thought’, exploring his links with philosophical scepticism, his use of Romantic irony, the religious unorthodoxy or spiritual overtones of his works, and his notion of history and controversial political views, as well as reading him through the lens of the critique of anthropocentrism. The last cluster consists of new formalist approaches to Byron’s writing, covering its generic hybridity, overt intertextuality, and polyglossic qualities.

This chapter turns to four contemporaries of Abravanel who also explored the question of dogma in Judaism. Yorn Tov Lippmann Muehlhausen (d. after 1450) is the only medieval Ashkenazi Jew known to have commented on the principles of Judaism. Muehlhausen included two lists of principles in his well-known anti-Christian polemic, Sefer Ha-Niẓẓaḥon. Elijah ben Moses Delmedigo (c.1460–1497) was a philosopher and rabbinic scholar active in Italian renaissance circles. In 1496, he composed his Beḥinat ha-Dat, a work with strongly Averroist overtones dealing with the relationship between religion and philosophy. Delmedigo's countryman, Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (c.1470–1526), is best known as the author of a responsum, Kevod Ḥakhamim. The last figure to deal with the principles of Judaism before the Haskalah was Rabbi Moses ben Joseph Trani (1500–1580), known as the ‘Mabit’), the Safed halakhist. Trani devoted the lion's share of his Bet Elohim to an ethical, homiletical, and philosophical commentary on Maimonides’ thirteen principles.

Abstract This chapter asserts that a transdisciplinary approach to the study of music that enables scholars to transcend the narrow sets of questions that musicology and music theory have traditionally privileged—concerns with aesthetic value and a perceived intrinsic worthiness of specific musical texts and practices—is essential in defining music studies as an endeavor relevant to larger intellectual projects in the humanities and social sciences. This transdisciplinary approach resonates with James Pawelski’s call for an alliance between the humanities and the science of well-being that would make “humanities scholarship more informed and more relevant to contemporary debates.” Pawelski’s definition of well-being in relation to “a society based on individual freedom and self-realization” and his attempts to engage quantitative evaluative methods, however, have neoliberal overtones. In response, this chapter offers an assessment of neoliberalism’s take on human flourishing and proposes alternative well-being strategies that privilege collective realization and avoid giving in to economic, political, and philosophical models that thrive on human precarity and conflict.

René Descartes began his career writing about music, which affected his innovative natural philosophy throughout its development. His first book was about music, addressed to another natural philosopher interested in it, Isaac Beeckman. In this book, Descartes used music as an exemplar of the approach he would take to mathematics and physics. This book remained important in Descartes’s correspondence with Marin Mersenne, which included musical as well as scientific topics. This chapter reads this lengthy correspondence as showing the interaction between musical, mathematical, and philosophical themes in Descartes’s work. Musical observations led to Descartes’s initial observations of the overtones of vibrating strings, which in turn led to wider consideration of mechanics, motion in a vacuum, and eventually to his continuum theory of the universe. This chapter argues that Descartes’s rejection of the vacuum came in the context of musical-physical problems. Descartes’s theories emerged in constant dialogue with musical issues and problems. Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).

Many reverses of the Intermediate and Secondary phases have human figures either singly or in pairs, sitting or standing, and with a variety of attributes. Among the many figures representing Virtues in Roman art and coinage, that of Victory must be counted among the most influential of Roman-inspired reverse coin designs. Quite apart from formal variations, the subtlety with which it could be used as propaganda for military or political achievements facilitated its passage to a more idealized sphere. The move, already effected in stoic circles, where Victory had come to signify abstract philosophical and moral triumphs, culminated with Christianity to symbolize virtuous triumph and ultimate victory over death. Iconographically, in addition to the traditional wreath and palm carried by Victory, still appropriate symbols of triumph for the new ideology, other specifically Christian attributes were added, such as long crosses. The shift from pagan to Christian mirrors a readjustment not only in the meaning, but in the perception of Victory, which, together with other Virtues of pagan times, became an Angel, a personification of the celestial power of God. In the Lombard regal gold coinage (c.690–774), during the reign of Cunincpert (688–700), the traditional Victory transformed into the Archangel St Michael (Fig. 3.1). Anglo-Saxon moneyers would have had many different models of Victory to draw on, not only from Roman examples, numismatic and others, but from Byzantine, Burgundian, Alemannic, Merovingian, Visigothic, and Lombard coins, appealing to Romanitas and with political or religious overtones. It is surprising that more extensive use of it was not made. Indeed, the find of a gold coin on the seashore at Weymouth, with a striding Victory on its reverse, led Stewart to propose that this and another gold coin with a facing Victory, unprovenanced, could represent an early and unrecognized phase of Anglo- Saxon coinage, contemporary to the time when the Victory was used as a reverse on Continental coins, before being replaced by crosses (c.578–82). His suggestion has encountered scepticism, mainly because an English origin is debatable for both.

This chapter examines the culture of divine revelation in the context of the Scientific Revolution and early Enlightenment, paying particular attention to certain philosophical challenges to the epistemic validity of divine revelation. Highlighting particular challenges from thinkers like Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, and Richard Overton, the chapter charts the responses to challenges to the traditional ideas about the human soul and the relationship of human reason to revelation, which were enumerated by England’s leading scientists, philosophers, and churchmen. Rebutting any simple decline of divine revelation as being philosophically warranted, the chapter illustrates that there was a robust defense of divine revelation on offer at the end of the seventeenth century, although it was a defense that relied upon arguments beyond the strictly mechanical and empirical.

As is generally perceived, one of the leading themes in Plato’s Republic is psycho-paideia, education and enculturation of human soul or psyche (ψυχή) from a moralistic standpoint. Interestingly, the overall structure of the dialogue as a whole is philosophically framed to address the problem with the soul through a chain of myths or allegories. It commences with the myth of the magic ring of Gyges (359d-360d) that is deployed to expose the vulnerable nature of the human soul in the choice between the just and unjust deeds; later on it intermediates with the allegorical tripartition of the soul through the three prominent images of a man, a lion and a many-headed monster (588c-590c), employed to illustrate the complex traits of the soul itself and its possible likes and consequences; and finally, it ends up with the great myth of Er (614b-621b), especially designed to illuminate the postmortem experience of the wandering soul that witnessed how the divinely authorized reward-and-punishment principle is applied to the other afterlife souls, categorized into two broad types known as the just and the unjust. This experience is associated with transmigration in the mystic overtone of the Orphic-Pythagorean tradition. The myth of Er at the end of Plato’s Republic is usually conceived as an eschatological one, set in a philosophical context. It, thus, reveals the relationship between philomythos and phylosophos, and the interaction between myth and philosophy in a creative manner. Engaging and thought-provocating as it is, it is deployed to stir much reflection on the possible aspects of the human soul in terms of justice and injustice. In addition, it well demonstrates how Plato applies it as one of many typical cases to his philosophical discourse and speculative formulation with dramatic effect, mystical import and aesthetic pleasure. Teleologically, the story itself could be treated as a psycho-paideia mythos in principle. It is intended to help cultivate and save the soul through such three ways as the heavenly, the underground, and the philosophical. All this is assumed to feature a kind of poetic wisdom characteristic of Plato’s poetic philosophy as is exemplified in his dialogues. This poetic wisdom lies in such realms as philosophical rewriting of myths, organic contextuality, divine law in a moralized cosmos, symbolic expression of the oneness between absolute necessity and destiny, imaginative participation via mythical experience, and even bricolage intellectue working at cross-levels.

Abstract This chapter traces the various attempts to define science in the UK and US since its formation as a recognisable discipline, distinct from natural philosophy, in the nineteenth century. It argues that, debates around the demarcation problem notwithstanding, this is an increasingly urgent task on account of the prominence of pseudoscience today, as well as well-attested problems internal to science, such as the apparent rise in ‘fraud, bias, negligence, and hype’. The chapter draws on philosophical sources (including the work of Robert Merton, Karl Popper, Larry Laudan, and Massimo Pigliucci) and legal ones (including the Overton Judgement, Edwards v. Aguillard, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, and the British Science Council’s 2009 definition of science) to argue that a singular, ‘necessary and sufficient’ definition of science is not possible. Rather, it argues, following Pigliucci, that a Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’ approach is the most appropriate and coherent way to ‘define’ science. It puts forward an initial outline of what this might look like, highlighting four dimensions or ‘features’ of science: philosophical, methodological, cultural, and social. Thus science (1) is defined by certain philosophical axioms or presuppositions; (2) is characterised by a strict methodological approach; (3) demonstrates a particular attitudinal or cultural dimension; and (4) is an inherently communal and co-operative activity. It adds the important caveat that we must not limit our definition of science to this normative understanding, and that a full picture of science would also take into account the descriptive reality of science as it is actually practised.