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Rambling Reflections: On Summers in Switzerland and Sheffield

- December 11, 2018 in Featured Articles, flâneur, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl phillip moritz, Literature, Philosophy, romanticism, Rousseau, w.g. sebald, walking, Yorkshire

In the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Philipp Moritz — from the peace of Lake Biel to the rugged Peaks — Seán Williams considers the connection between walking and writing.

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The Art of Philosophy: Visualising Aristotle in Early 17th-Century Paris

- October 24, 2017 in allegory, aristotle, Art & Illustrations, Philosophy

With their elaborate interplay of image and text, the several large-scale prints designed by the French friar Martin Meurisse to communicate Aristotelian thought are wonderfully impressive creations. Susanna Berger explores the function of these complex works, and how such visual commentaries not only served to express philosophical ideas in a novel way but also engendered […]

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The Art of Philosophy: Visualising Aristotle in Early 17th-Century Paris

- August 30, 2017 in allegory, aristotle, Art & Illustrations, Philosophy

With their elaborate interplay of image and text, the several large-scale prints designed by the French friar Martin Meurisse to communicate Aristotelian thought are wonderfully impressive creations. Susanna Berger explores the function of these complex works, and how such visual commentaries not only served to express philosophical ideas in a novel way but also engendered their own unique mode of thinking.

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Out From Behind This Mask

- July 27, 2017 in Art & Illustrations, Culture & History, death, death masks, Featured Articles, laurence hutton, laurence hutton collection, masks, memorial, Philosophy, plaster, punctum, roland barthes, walt whitman

A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids — D. Graham Burnett on meditations conjured by a visit to the death masks of the Laurence Hutton Collection.

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Micromégas by Voltaire (1752)

- July 11, 2017 in aliens, early science fiction, Enlightenment, outer space, Philosophy, saturn, science fiction, sirius, Voltaire

Early sci-fi short story by Voltaire recounting a visit to Earth by Micromégas, an inhabitant of a distant planet which circles the star Sirius, and his companion hailing from Saturn.

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Micromégas by Voltaire (1752)

- July 11, 2017 in aliens, early science fiction, Enlightenment, outer space, Philosophy, saturn, science fiction, sirius, Voltaire

Early sci-fi short story by Voltaire recounting a visit to Earth by Micromégas, an inhabitant of a distant planet which circles the star Sirius, and his companion hailing from Saturn.

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Micromégas by Voltaire (1752)

- July 11, 2017 in aliens, early science fiction, Enlightenment, outer space, Philosophy, saturn, science fiction, sirius, Voltaire

Early sci-fi short story by Voltaire recounting a visit to Earth by Micromégas, an inhabitant of a distant planet which circles the star Sirius, and his companion hailing from Saturn.

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“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull and Computational Imagination

- November 10, 2016 in artificial intelligence, calculating machine, calculator, computation, Culture & History, Featured Articles, language, leibniz, Philosophy, ramon llull, Science & Medicine, the first calculator, universal language

Three hundred years after the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and seven hundred years after the birth of Ramon Llull, Jonathan Gray looks at how their early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” speak to our own age of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

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Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature

- June 1, 2016 in alchemy, Featured Articles, francis van helmont, hebrew, invented languages, Jan Baptist van Helmont, language, occult, Philosophy, Religion, Myth & Legend, universal language

Largely forgotten today in the shadow of his more famous father, the 17th-century Flemish alchemist Francis van Helmont influenced and was friends with the likes of Locke, Boyle, and Leibniz. While imprisoned by the Inquisition, in between torture sessions, he wrote his Alphabet of Nature on the idea of a universal natural language. Je Wilson explores.

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Notes on the Fourth Dimension

- October 28, 2015 in 4D, Books, charles howard hinton, Featured Articles, flatland, fourth dimension, geometry, ghosts, hinton cube, hyperspace, mathematical fiction, mathematics, maths, Philosophy, physics, Science & Medicine, spirits, spiritualism, tesseract

Hyperspace, ghosts, and colourful cubes - Jon Crabb on the work of Charles Howard Hinton and the cultural history of higher dimensions.

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