Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy

Mostrar todas las versiones(2)

Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a "long" early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anoma...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales:	Wolfe, Charles T, Manzo, Silvia
Formato:	Parte de libro publishedVersion
Lenguaje:	Inglés
Publicado:	2020
Materias:	Filosofía Historia de la filosofía Filosofía contemporánea Filosofía analítica Laws of nature Medicine Chance
Acceso en línea:	https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/libros/pm.5813/pm.5813.pdf
Aporte de:	Memoria Académica - FaHCE (UNLP) de Universidad Nacional de La Plata

id	I19-R125-Jpm5813
record_format	dspace
spelling	I19-R125-Jpm58132023-05-08 2020 Wolfe, Charles T Manzo, Silvia Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a "long" early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anomalies (whether a two-headed calf, an individual suffer- ing from microcephaly or Proteus syndrome) or to "freak occurrences" like Mary Toft's supposedly giving birth to a litter of rabbits, in Surrey in the early eighteenth century (Todd 1995). But the term itself has a rich semantic history, coming from the Latin verb monstrare (itself deriving from monere, to remind, warn, advise), "to show," from which we also get words like "monitor," "admonish," "monument," and "premonition"; hence there are proverbs like, in French, le monstre est ce qui montre, difficult to render in English: "the monsters is that which shows." Scholars have discussed how this "monstrative" dimension of the monster is in fact twofold: on the one hand, and most awkwardly, the monster is an individual who is "pointed at," who is shown; on the other hand, the monster is a sign, a portent, and an omen and in that sense "shows us" something (on the complex semantic history of the term across Indo-European languages, see Ochsner 2005). The latter dimension persists in naturalized form in the early modern period when authors like Bacon, Fontenelle, or William Hunter insist that monsters (or anomalies) can show us something of the workings of nature. Fil: Manzo, Silvia. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (UNLP-CONICET); Argentina. application/pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ D. Jalobeanu, C.T. Wolfe (Eds.) (2020). Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Cham : Springer. Filosofía Historia de la filosofía Filosofía contemporánea Filosofía analítica Laws of nature Medicine Chance Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart info:ar-repo/semantics/parte de libro info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/libros/pm.5813/pm.5813.pdf
institution	Universidad Nacional de La Plata
institution_str	I-19
repository_str	R-125
collection	Memoria Académica - FaHCE (UNLP)
language	Inglés
orig_language_str_mv	eng
topic	Filosofía Historia de la filosofía Filosofía contemporánea Filosofía analítica Laws of nature Medicine Chance
spellingShingle	Filosofía Historia de la filosofía Filosofía contemporánea Filosofía analítica Laws of nature Medicine Chance Wolfe, Charles T Manzo, Silvia Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy
topic_facet	Filosofía Historia de la filosofía Filosofía contemporánea Filosofía analítica Laws of nature Medicine Chance
description	Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a "long" early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anomalies (whether a two-headed calf, an individual suffer- ing from microcephaly or Proteus syndrome) or to "freak occurrences" like Mary Toft's supposedly giving birth to a litter of rabbits, in Surrey in the early eighteenth century (Todd 1995). But the term itself has a rich semantic history, coming from the Latin verb monstrare (itself deriving from monere, to remind, warn, advise), "to show," from which we also get words like "monitor," "admonish," "monument," and "premonition"; hence there are proverbs like, in French, le monstre est ce qui montre, difficult to render in English: "the monsters is that which shows." Scholars have discussed how this "monstrative" dimension of the monster is in fact twofold: on the one hand, and most awkwardly, the monster is an individual who is "pointed at," who is shown; on the other hand, the monster is a sign, a portent, and an omen and in that sense "shows us" something (on the complex semantic history of the term across Indo-European languages, see Ochsner 2005). The latter dimension persists in naturalized form in the early modern period when authors like Bacon, Fontenelle, or William Hunter insist that monsters (or anomalies) can show us something of the workings of nature.
format	Parte de libro Parte de libro publishedVersion
author	Wolfe, Charles T Manzo, Silvia
author_facet	Wolfe, Charles T Manzo, Silvia
author_sort	Wolfe, Charles T
title	Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy
title_short	Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy
title_full	Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy
title_fullStr	Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy
title_full_unstemmed	Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy
title_sort	monsters in early modern philosophy
publishDate	2020
url	https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/libros/pm.5813/pm.5813.pdf
work_keys_str_mv	AT wolfecharlest monstersinearlymodernphilosophy AT manzosilvia monstersinearlymodernphilosophy
_version_	1768268432462053376

Monsters in Early Modern Philosophy

Ejemplares similares