The ArgumentIt is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary (...) philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together. (shrink)

This journal article has been superseded by a revised version, published in the collection _Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes_, ed. by Stephen Voss (Oxford University Press, 1993), 259–287.

The ArgumentThis paper focuses on several Italian Jewish philosophers in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century. It argues that their writings share a certain theology of nature. Because of it, the interest of Jews in the study of nature was not a proto-scientific but a hermeneutical activity based on the essential correspondence between God, Torah, and Israel. While the theology of nature analyzed in the paper did not prevent Jews from being (...) informed about and selectively endorsing the first phase of the scientific revolution, it did render the Jews marginal to it. So long as Jewish thinkers adhered to this theology of nature, Jews could not adopt the scientific mentality that presupposed a qualitative distinction between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. (shrink)

In our recent book (Abraham and Roy 2010) we have repurposed a mathematical model for the quantum vacuum as a model of consciousness. In this model, discrete space and time are derived from a discrete cellular dynamical network. As our model is essentially atomistic, we included in our book a short support chapter on atomism. In this aticle we expand on the few pages of that chapter devoted to the history of atomism, to place the current revival of atomism in (...) a larger context. (shrink)

The works of the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto present us with a radicalised idea of the cosmos that challenges both the humanist centring of the world on man and the hierarchy of divine authority that dominate the artistic traditions to which he is heir. In their place, Tintoretto confronts us with a ‘machinic’ staging of forces in which man, nature, religious figure and artificial element are integrated within an extended material plane. With this pictorial immanence, Tintoretto presents a ‘cosmic (...) materialism’ unprecedented in Venetian painting. In this, his work gives provocative expression to Deleuze and Guattari's ontology of the artwork as ‘cosmic’ construction, and to their conception of the artist as ‘cosmic artisan’. Via readings of the art historical reception of Tintoretto's work by the art historian Arnold Hauser, and the artistic reception of Tintoretto's work by Paul Cézanne, I explore this expression, and attend to questions of modernity, temporality and art history as they are inflected in Deleuze and Guattari's thought. (shrink)

Článek nabízí kritickou reflexi způsobů, jimiž se filozofie snaží zajistit a zprostředkovat vědění o sobě samé, svých dějinách a klíčových problémech. Podrobně se věnuje procesům redukce a explikace, které jsou nedílnou součástí tohoto úsilí. S pomocí mnoha konkrétních příkladů ukazuje jejich úskalí a vzájemnou provázanost.