Koen Vermeir

The magic of the magic lantern (1660–1700): on analogical demonstration and the visualization of the invisible

The history of the magic lantern provides a privileged case study with which to explore the histories of projection, demonstration, illusion and the occult, and their different intersections. I focus on the role of the magic lantern in the work of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and the French Cartesian Abbe de Vallemont. After explaining the various meanings of the seventeenth-century concept of illusio , I propose a new solution for the long-standing problem that Kircher added the ‘wrong’ illustrations to his description of the lantern. The complex interaction between text, image and performance was crucial in Kirchers work and these ‘wrong’ figures provide us with a key to interpreting his Ars Magna . I argue that Vallemont used the magic lantern in a similar rhetorical way in a crucial phase of his argument. The magic lantern should not be understood merely as an illustrative image or an item of demonstration apparatus; rather the instrument is employed as part of a performance which is not meant simply to be entertaining. Both authors used a special form of scientific demonstration, which I will term ‘analogical demonstration’, to bolster their world view. This account opens new ways to think about the relation between instruments and the occult. Sol fons lucis universi, vas admirabile, opus Excelsi, divinitatis thalamus, risus coeli, decor, & pulchritudo mundi A. Kircher For one of those Gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.J. L. Borges

Idols of the Imagination: Francis Bacon on the Imagination and the Medicine of the Mind

We propose to read Francis Bacons doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacons tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacons epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacons views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

Philosophical Enquiries into the Science of Sensibility: An Introductory Essay

The three sections of this introductory essay broadly correspond to the three sections of this book. The first part, ‘Science and sensibility’, provides a background to the writing of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and how it fits into the medical and scientific study of sensibility. The writing of this text in its particular eighteenth-century culture reflects both a reaction to overly mechanistic world-views, on the one hand, and secondly, the necessity of verifying all theories in experience. Burke’s contribution to the scientific core of the culture of sensibility consisted in an emphasis on nerves and feelings as well as physiological causes that could be recognised in the common person’s experience. The second part, ‘Sensibility, morals and manners’, considers the moral implications of this physiological and psychological experience. On the one hand, by examining literary examples of Jane Austen and Samuel Richardson, it is shown that the experience of reading was considered an emotional and character-building enterprise. The result of reading novels could be called ‘sentimental education’. Earlier eighteenth-century writers such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson attempted to bring together beauty and the good by defending a theory of ‘moral sensibility’, which would later be elaborated by Hume and Smith. Burke differs from this perspective by defending a distinction between virtue and beauty. On the other hand, Burke’s physiological theory is closely tied to his view of morality. It is the sublime, through its tensions and labours, that more likely leads to virtue, in contrast to the indolence and relaxation of beauty. In the third part, ‘Sensibility and aesthetics’, it is further shown how the notion of taste and the arts developed in the eighteenth century. Behind this development were the ability to arouse emotions by means of words as well as rhetorical gestures and devices. Does everyone universally react in the same way to the same stimuli? The answer to this question is both scientific and aesthetic, requiring experimental methods to prove the probability of how art, music but also food, for instance, affect the human beings’ sensible nature. The introductory essay ends with an analysis of the context in which the discussion about universality versus diversity arises vis a vis the ‘standard of taste’, in particular in the work of Burke and Hume.

Electricity and Imagination: Post‐romantic Electrified Experience and the Gendered Body. An Introduction

In this introduction, I evoke the poetic force and spectacular experiences of electricity in the 19th century. Electricity is taken here as a specific subject for “science and imagination studies”, an inter- and multidisciplinary perspective that takes into account the history of science, medicine and technology as well as literature, theatre studies and dance studies, among other disciplines. The envisioned approach is inclusive, and the sciences are not considered to have a privileged perspective on electricity. Indeed, I question common diffusionist models and I plead for more methodological exchange between disciplinary approaches to electricity. In the special issue, electricity is analyzed both as a concept traversing a diversity of contexts and as a phenomenon that was carefully staged. Besides introducing the four contributions that follow on the introduction, I briefly explore relevant related themes, including the reception history of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and the electrified dances of Loie Fuller, the electrical fairy. I show that the experience of electricity and the gendered body are common themes of the special issue and that their study is indeed crucial for understanding 19th century electrical imaginaries.

Electricity and Imagination: Post-romantic Electrified Experience and the Gendered Body.

In this introduction, I evoke the poetic force and spectacular experiences of electricity in the 19th century. Electricity is taken here as a specific subject for “science and imagination studies”, an inter- and multidisciplinary perspective that takes into account the history of science, medicine and technology as well as literature, theatre studies and dance studies, among other disciplines. The envisioned approach is inclusive, and the sciences are not considered to have a privileged perspective on electricity. Indeed, I question common diffusionist models and I plead for more methodological exchange between disciplinary approaches to electricity. In the special issue, electricity is analyzed both as a concept traversing a diversity of contexts and as a phenomenon that was carefully staged. Besides introducing the four contributions that follow on the introduction, I briefly explore relevant related themes, including the reception history of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and the electrified dances of Loie Fuller, the electrical fairy. I show that the experience of electricity and the gendered body are common themes of the special issue and that their study is indeed crucial for understanding 19th century electrical imaginaries.

Boundaries, Extents and Circulations: An Introduction to Spatiality and the Early Modern Concept of Space

This introductory chapter spells out our vision of a more inclusive history of space. We start with a close look at the meaning of the concept of space and its cognates, noting their practical as well as theoretical implications. In exploring earthly, imaginary and (un)godly places and spaces, we remain in continuous interaction with the classical historiography of space but also add unexpected perspectives. Suspicious of linear or teleological accounts, we stress the flourishing and mixing of many different ideas about space. This chapter is simultaneously a stand-alone introduction to the history of early modern space and an introduction to the contributions that follow, which we locate in a thematic network.

Boundaries, Extents and Circulations. Space and Spatiality in Early Modern Natural Philosophy

This volume is an important re-evaluation of space and spatiality in the late Renaissance and early modern period. History of science has generally reduced sixteenth and seventeenth century space to a few canonical forms. This volume gives a much needed antidote. The contributing chapters examine the period’s staggering richness of spatiality: the geometrical, geographical, perceptual and elemental conceptualizations of space that abounded. The goal is to begin to reconstruct the amalgam of “spaces” which co-existed and cross-fertilized in the period’s many disciplines and visions of nature. Our volume will be a valuable resource for historians of science, philosophy and art, and for cultural and literary theorists

Malebranche et les pouvoirs de l’imagination

Malebranche’s ideas about the imagination have inspired philosophers over the centuries. Drawing on the writings of Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes and many other sources, Malebranche created his own innovative theory. It is especially his work on the force of the imagination, however, that was to be of lasting influence. In this introductory article, we briefly discuss Malebranche’s theory of the imagination and point out its role in mathematics, contagion of ideas, monstrous births, errors of the mind and rhetoric.

Imagination between Physick and Philosophy: On the Central Role of the Imagination in the Work of Henry More

I argue that the imagination plays a central role in the thought of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. First, physiological descriptions of melancholy and imagination were at the heart of his attack against enthusiasm and atheism. Second, in order to defend his metaphysical dualism, he had to respond to traditional accounts of the imagination as a mediating faculty between body and soul. Third, More also opposed the traditional view that the imagination was a material faculty, because in the context of 17th century philosophy and medicine, such ideas could lead to materialism. Mores metaphysics led him to propose a novel view in which the imagination was part of the immaterial soul and at the same level as reason. In his physiological descriptions, however, he retained a gradualist view on the imagination that suggested intermediate stages between material and immaterial substances. Although his metaphysical and physiological descriptions seem to conflict, I suggest that the conflict can be mitigated by his interpretation of the body as the instrument of the soul.