James Dougal Fleming - Böcker

Scientific modernity treats interpretation as a matter of discovery. Discovery, however, may not be all that matters about interpretation. In Milton's Secrecy, J. D. Fleming argues that the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674) are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic model. This is based on openness within language, rather than on secrets within the world. Milton's representations of meaning are exoteric, not esoteric; recognitive, not inventive. Milton's Secrecy places its titular subject in opposition to the epistemology of modern natural science, and to the interpretative assumptions that science supports. At the same time, the book places Milton within early modern contexts of interpretation and knowledge. Drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Tudor-Stuart ideology, and the Calvinist theory of conscience, Milton's Secrecy argues that the attempt to theorize interpretation without discovery is not unorthodox within early modern English culture. If anything, Milton's hostility to secrecy and discovery aligns him with his culture's ethical and hermeneutic ideal. Milton's Secrecy provides an historical framework for considering the theoretical validity of this ideal, by aligning it with the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700 is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge.

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586).Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination—less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright’s proscriptions. These are followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative—and prophylactic. Bright’s technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation.This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information—as theory, and technology.

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586).Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination—less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright’s proscriptions. These are followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative—and prophylactic. Bright’s technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation.This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information—as theory, and technology.

Scientific modernity treats interpretation as a matter of discovery. Discovery, however, may not be all that matters about interpretation. In Milton's Secrecy, J. D. Fleming argues that the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674) are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic model. This is based on openness within language, rather than on secrets within the world. Milton's representations of meaning are exoteric, not esoteric; recognitive, not inventive. Milton's Secrecy places its titular subject in opposition to the epistemology of modern natural science, and to the interpretative assumptions that science supports. At the same time, the book places Milton within early modern contexts of interpretation and knowledge. Drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Tudor-Stuart ideology, and the Calvinist theory of conscience, Milton's Secrecy argues that the attempt to theorize interpretation without discovery is not unorthodox within early modern English culture. If anything, Milton's hostility to secrecy and discovery aligns him with his culture's ethical and hermeneutic ideal. Milton's Secrecy provides an historical framework for considering the theoretical validity of this ideal, by aligning it with the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700 is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge.

This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a "real" or "universal" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work.