A New Renaissance

A New Renaissance PDF

Author: David Lorimer

Publisher: Scientific and Medical Network

Published: 2023-07-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781786772466

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A New Renaissance diagnoses the urgent need for cultural change and renewal in today's period of crisis in philosophy, science, and society - now even more pressing than when this volume was first published. Some six hundred years ago, the Florentine Renaissance took a huge leap forward into realism, rationality, and self-awareness. It was born from the waning authority of medieval institutions and beliefs. Today, we stand at a similar junction in history. It appears to many that reductionist science and its materialistic values - a worldview that has driven modern culture for the past two centuries - is rapidly losing credibility. Its objectives of growth and acquisition and its guiding principles asserting that there is no intrinsic meaning to life or purpose in the cosmos are now widely seen as creating an unhappy and unsustainable world. The essays gathered here are a cultural response to the shortcomings of the prevailing materialistic worldview. Contributors include: Ervin Laszlo, Richard Tarnas, HM King Charles III, Iain McGilchrist, Larry Dossey, Chris Clarke, Rupert Sheldrake, Anne Baring, Satish Kumar, Henryk Skolimowski, Guy Claxton, Peter Russell, Jean Hardy, David Peat, David Luke, Elisabet Sahtouris, with an Introduction by David Lorimer. "It is a rare treat to find so much wisdom and thought-provoking substance in just one book. The reason for this is that it is the distillation of the world and cosmic views of many leading thinkers in science, medicine and philosophy." Michael Lingard.

Age of Discovery

Age of Discovery PDF

Author: Ian Goldin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-05-19

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 1472936388

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'A landmark new book.' - The Guardian Age of Discovery looks at the world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks the question, how do we avoid chaos and disruption, and share more widely the benefits of progress? Now is humanity's best moment. And our most fragile. Global health, wealth and education are booming. Scientific discovery is flourishing. But the same forces that make big gains possible for some of us deliver big losses to others-and tangle us together in ways that make everyone vulnerable. We've been here before. The first Renaissance, the time of Columbus, Copernicus, Gutenberg and others, redrew all maps of the world, liberated information and shifted Western civilization from the medieval to the early modern era. Such change came at a price: social division, political extremism, economic shocks, pandemics and other unintended consequences of human endeavour. Now is our second Renaissance. In the face of terrorism, Brexit, refugee crises and the global impact of a Trump presidency, we can flourish-if we heed the urgent lessons of history. Age of Discovery, revised and updated for this paperback edition, shows us how.

Into the White

Into the White PDF

Author: Christopher P. Heuer

Publisher: Zone Books

Published: 2019-05-14

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1942130147

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How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination. European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet, as Christopher Heuer explains, between 1500 and 1700, one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North—a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination—offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “non-site,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts—and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy. In Into the White, Heuer uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates over perception and matter, representation, discovery, and the time of the earth—long before the nineteenth century Romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, he argues, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and impossible to be mastered, something beyond the idea of image itself.

Calling for a New Renaissance

Calling for a New Renaissance PDF

Author: Xingjian Gao

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781621966616

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"In Calling for a New Renaissance, Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian summarizes his primary concerns of the past decade or so. He indicts the lingering impact of ideology on contemporary literature and art, and for this reason he calls for "a new Renaissance," a result of which would be "boundary-crossing creations" such as the three cine-poems that he has produced and describes in detail in his latest book. Of importance in this book, and not documented elsewhere, are his insights into how despite receiving his education in the People's Republic of China, Gao succeeded in educating himself in both Chinese and world literatures because of his love of reading and his disciplined approach to reading. This book also includes fifty images selected by Gao, a large number of which are his favorite paintings"--

Stamped from the Beginning

Stamped from the Beginning PDF

Author: Ibram X. Kendi

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 1568584644

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The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities. In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.

Your Personal Renaissance

Your Personal Renaissance PDF

Author: Diane Dreher

Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books

Published: 2009-03-25

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 078673194X

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We've all asked ourselves, “What should I do with my life?” “Where am I going?” “Is this what I really want?” Whether you're graduating, changing careers, getting divorced, retiring, or just confused about what's next, Your Personal Renaissance will help you find your calling. Combining the lost wisdom of the Renaissance with groundbreaking research in positive psychology, this book approaches a calling in its original definition-not just a job, but a joyous, meaningful life. The book features an innovative program of contemplative steps (Discovery, Detachment, Discernment, and Direction) and practices that help readers combat overscheduling, stress, and depression-and change their lives.

Worldly Goods

Worldly Goods PDF

Author: Lisa Jardine

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780393318661

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'Worldly Goods' provides a radical interpretation of the Golden Age of European culture. During the Renaissance, Jardine argues, vicious commercial battles were being fought over silks and spices, and who should control international trade.

Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy

Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy PDF

Author: Robert Brennan

Publisher: Harvey Miller

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9781912554003

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"Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy" reconstructs a historical concept of modern art on the basis of sources written between the 1390s and 1440s. The central point of reference in these sources was Giotto, the early fourteenth-century painter who, as one writer put it in 1442, "first modernized (modernizavit) ancient and mosaic figures." The word "modern" was used in a wide variety of ways throughout this period, some quite polemical, others rather prosaic. To call art (ars) modern, however, was to invoke a stable, well-defined concept whose roots ran deep in late-medieval intellectual life. According to this concept, to make an art modern was to set it on a new foundation in science (scientia) and rationalize it accordingly. As familiar as this formulation may sound in principle, each and every one of its key terms--art, modernity, science, rationality--meant something strikingly different in this period than it does in our time. The hallmark of modern art was not verisimilitude or expression or virtually any of the achievements that art historians associate with Giotto today, but rather the invention of techniques that aimed to imitate nature in its very manner of operation, aligning the concrete, step-by-step process of painting with the inner workings of nature itself. By reclaiming this concept and tracking its complex relation to early Renaissance concerns such as linear perspective and the canon of proportion, the book not only establishes a novel framework for the visual analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian painting, but also unravels a fundamental master narrative of Western art history from within, clearing the way for renewed discussions of alternative modernities, including those that precede the story of modernism as we know it. --Publisher's website.

The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities

The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities PDF

Author: Christopher S. Celenza

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1108988873

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Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano developed innovative ways to read texts closely, paying attention to historical context, developing methods to determine a text's authenticity, and taking the humanities seriously as a means of bettering human life. Alongside such novel reading practices, technology – the invention of printing with moveable type – fundamentally changed perceptions of truth. Celenza also reveals how luminaries like Descartes, Diderot, and D'Alembert – as well as many lesser-known scholars – challenged traditional ways of thinking. Celenza's authoritative narrative demonstrates above all how the work of the early modern humanist philosophers had a profound impact on the general quest for human wisdom. His magisterial volume will be essential reading for all those who value the humanities and their fascinating history.

Revaluing Renaissance Art

Revaluing Renaissance Art PDF

Author: Gabriele Neher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1351739727

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This title was first published in 2000: Michelangelo gave his painting of "Leda and the Swan" to an apprentice rather than hand it over to the emissary of the Duke of Ferrar, who had commissioned it. He was apparently disgusted by the failure of the emissary - who was probably more used to buying pigs than discussing art - to accord the picture and the artist the value they deserved. Any discussion of works of art and material culture implicitly assigns them a set of values. Whether these values be monetary, cultural or religious, they tend to constrict the ways in which such works can be discussed. The variety of potential forms of valuation becomes particularly apparent during the Italian Renaissance, when relations between the visual arts and humanistic studies were undergoing rapid changes against an equally fluid social, economic and political background. In this volume, 13 scholars explicitly examine some of the complex ways in which a variety of values might be associated with Italian Renaissance material culture. Papers range from a consideration of the basic values of the materials employed by artists, to the manifestation of cultural values in attitudes to dress and domestic devotion. By illuminating some of the ways in which values were constructed, they provide a broader context within which to evaluate Renaissance material culture.