Books in the Natur, Wissenschaft und die Kuenste / Nature, Science and the Arts / Nature, Science et les Arts series

The book examines the presence of medicine matters in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and documents how the theme of medicine can acquire particular importance for the interpretation of the plays: namely, it matters. Andrea A. Conti provides information on certain aspects of the medical context of the Renaissance, effecting the essential connections with previous and subsequent periods and furnishing the necessary background for the understanding of the state of the art of medicine at the time. Luisa Camaiora presents a close reading of the comedies, and identifies for each a specific and dominant medical facet, then proposed as a structural key for the analysis of the plays. The medical motifs enucleated determine the critical perspective for the discussion of the dramatic characters and events and for the interpretation of the overall meaning and significance of the single works. Features and references related to the sphere of medicine, identified in the comedies, are also commented upon and examined in the context of this medical reading of the plays.

Baroque novels focus on the psychology of love, while love in the context of nature is the subject of the pastoral genre. Introducing animals to such texts proves unexpectedly challenging. The inclusion of pets in the artistic representation involves a reversal of scale and various modes of comedy, including socio-political satire. At a time when some writers fantasize that children can be born of a human-animal couple, or question the degree of free will and physiological determinism influencing human or animal actions, scientific and philosophical enquiries threaten to reduce the whole animated world to a physiology akin to one of automatons. It is a criticism levied by the sentimentaires against the libertines. Eventually, the study must be initiated with the monitoring of the modulated and variable conceptions of the persons constituting a couple and the status of the pet.

This book paints a flowing picture of the relationship beween life and nature, through the evolution of a word - physiology. Today, it denotes a scientific discipline at the intersection of biology and medicine, signifying the study of life Yet, physiology manifests a split personality in the course of history. It came down to us from the ancient Greeks, where it represented the study of nature or natural philosophy - the precursor of modern-day science Physiology originates from an older Greek root, physis - meaning nature itself - that stretches far back to the birth of Greek thought. How did this word generate two such disparate meanings? What does this word tell us, historically, about humankind's grasp of the essence of nature and the essence of life - and the interrelationship between the two? The author follows an etymological path into the distant past, in writing the biography of the word physiology The book delves into linguistic pre-history, in search of the primordially interwoven views of life and nature - and the words that symbolized those views. It tracks the evolving meaning of those words in Western civilization across time, space, language, and culture.

This book explores a paradox: how can a musical work that was written specifically for a certain architectural space survive dramatic changes in performance conditions, as in the case of Handel's Messiah? From the chamber music hall in Dublin where it was first performed in 1742, small baroque theaters, and the chapel of London's Foundling Hospital, performances of Messiah after Handel's death moved to cathedrals, to new and large 19th-century concert halls, and finally to the immense Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Are there boundaries determining an adequate performance? How can we define the quality of room acoustics and how does this quality affect the performance as actual sonorous presentation of a musical work? In short, how do different acoustical conditions affect basic aesthetic premises? There are no simple answers to these complex questions, which elicit different responses according to varying points of view. This aspect of cultural history necessarily calls for an investigation based on systematic, historical, and psychological methods. In the first part of this book, which draws from an extensive database of documents on halls, theatres, and churches, essential concepts from the main disciplines involved are introduced in order to define quality of room acoustics in relation to different performance situations. This background then serves as framework to investigate the performance history of Handel's Messiah in the second part.

The Paths of Creation explores the idea of creativity both in science and in art. The editors have collected papers from different philosophers working on philosophy of science and aesthetics to show that the creative processes of science and art share identical procedures: metaphor, ruled method, analogy, abduction, similarity. They are both surrounded by emotions, contain inspirations, proceed through revolutions that maintain some kind of continuity, and have a long common history in which no one worried about whether something was science or art. The purpose of this volume is to show that there are no different rationalities applied to science and art, but the same human reason developing in different forms to create not just different disciplines, but different worlds as well.

The book explores the concept of "interartistic phenomenon" in the semiotic field of intermedial researches. The semiotic analysis is concentrated on the works of Michel de Montaigne focusing the research on his "Essays" and "The Diary of Montaigne's Travels".

Habitus in Habitat III

Habitus in Habitat II

Habitus in Habitat I Emotion and Motion

This book presents aestheticism of the 19th century as a philosophical theory, and as the source of modernist and formalist aesthetics and art of the 20th century. It analyzes the definition of art formulated by Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and James Whistler, and their theory of form and content, art's autonomy and ontology, criticism, and musicality.

Beyond The Great Wave