University Studies

http://www.upf.edu/forma/_pdf/vol08/forma_vol08_06gilbert.pdf
Book bindings and binding decor can reveal deep parts of our attitudes toward books and toward culture. Changes in attitudes toward the codex book during the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are part of continual change in book culture. The re-binding of early printed books is exemplary evidence of these changes. The new bindings express both a rejection of pre-Enlightenment culture and an attempt to stabilize traditional cultural values. This also suggests how we might view events customarily considered to be “revolutions”.

Close reading of the principal testimonies of Carthusians Bruno, Guigo I, Guigo II, and some other witnesses, as well as some passages in Saint Augustine, argues that Carthusian scribal work was more preliminary practice for spiritual development than it was the sacralization of codices and texts.  The two-step structure, composed of contrary movements of presentation and effacement, guarded what the Carthusians regarded as spiritual activity within a  changing historical environment and became a fundamental part of Latin Christian mysticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

This is an M.A. thesis that is on ProQuest Open: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1285538511

Plato is known to have given only one public lecture, called "On the Good." We have one highly reliable quotation from Plato himself, stating his doctrine that "the Good is one." The lecture was a set of ideas that existed as an historical event but is now lost--and it dealt with ideas of supreme importance, in brief form, by the greatest of philosophers. Any reading of the lecture is speculative. My approach is philosophical rather than historiographic. The liminal existence of the lecture is taken as an exemplar of the retrieval of what is lost in historical time. Through the lecture-event I examine several major schools of Platonic interpretation--the esotercists of the 1950's, and after, and Hans-Georg Gadamer and the "aporetic" reading--and reject most of it. My method is to establish in tandem an explanation of the lecture doctrine, especially by a reading of issue of normative ethics in the Philebus, and an account of how we are to understand Plato's way of teaching. Plato affirms the existence of the Good itself and was concerned with explaining its relation to persons as moral agents, which includes teaching, amidst the determinants of moral life and in transmission across time. The tension between universal good and plural goods suggests a fruitful relationship between normative ethics and historical theory. I apply this especially to the viability of intellectual history, to material culture studies, and to our understanding of the way in which history "lives." For this I suggest "a moral turn" in historiography in support of cultural theory.

This is an MA thesis available on Proquest (academic access): http://search.proquest.com/docview/1562959696

The Rococo period in the arts, flourishing mainly from about 1710 to about 1750, was stylistically unified, but nevertheless its tremendous productivity and appeal throughout Occidental culture has proven difficult to explain. Having no contemporary theoretical literature, the Rococo is commonly taken to have been a final and degenerate form of the Baroque era or an extravagance arising from the supposed careless frivolity of the elites, including the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Neither approach adequately accounts for Rococo style.

Naming the Rococo raises profound issues for understanding the relations between conception and production in historical terms. Against the many difficulties that the term has involved in accounting for an immense but elusive cultural movement, this thesis argues that some of the chief philosophical conceptions of the period clarify the particular character and significance of Rococo production. Rococo production is here studied chiefly in decor, architecture, and the plastic arts. This thesis also makes an extended general argument for the value of intellectual history.

Rococo style is a group of visual effects of which the central character is atectonicity. This is established by a synthesizing overview of Rococo ornamental motifs. Principal theorists of post-Cartesian thought have failed to see how these distinguish Rococo style from both Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The analysis addresses the historical narratives of Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, and others about Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The core historical claim of this thesis is that Rococo atectonic effects are visual forms of the anti-materialist, idealist ontology of George Berkeley and of the metaphysics and ontology in the early work of Giambattista Vico. Close readings of important passages from works of both philosophers published in 1710 develop the relationship between atectonics and idealist ontology. Both men rejected the Baroque hierarchical cosmology in favor of finitude as the key to human understanding. The readings center on the issue of causality, including Berkeley's views of the perfect contingency of the world and on Vico's theories of truth and ingenium.

A reading of Diderot's critique of the Rococo, which led the reaction to it, shows that he recognized the power of idealist ontology in the Rococo cultural production. The larger force in the rejection of Rococo is the emergence of the sublime as a morally fearful feature of physical nature. Montesquieu's aesthetic work also shows the transition to a more rigidly determined view of existence, which was expressed but constrained in the little-recognized lattice motif in Rococo arts.

The result of these readings is the influence during and after the Rococo period of the concept of continuous creation, in which the memory and imagination of the human subject relays God-given powers of creation into the production of culture. Continuous creation also suggested a human capability to animate material nature. Rococo style displays this as a pre-cinematic effects that represent the non-material, non-causal deep structure of reality.

A finished sketch for a light-and-shadow projection device by the Paduan mechanical artisan Johannes de Fontana (c.1395–1455), in his manuscript book of drawings now known as Liber Bellicorum Instrumentorum, depicts a machine for communicating ideas or information through spectacle.  My account in the case of this "castle of shadows" image in this paper emphasizes issues of imagery, communication, subjectivity, moral feeling, spiritual life, and personhood.  I oppose my account to approaches based in object-oriented ontology.  I claim that probable elements of a contemporary response to his picture about pictures show the original and continued place of spiritual, rather than naturalized, vision in early modern communications technology. We today share these responses to perennial issues with Fontana and his contemporaries.

In the first days of 1786, the Parisian porters—at the lowest end of the economy save for vagabonds—found their livelihood taken away by a new government-run system of parcel delivery.  This system was part of an endeavor to rationalize the economy, especially in its American trade.  At the same time the neighbourhoods the porters lived in were brought under a system of geographic control on scientific principles.  They took to rioting and were the first rioting mob to appeal to King at Versailles.  This paper looks at the riot from the points of view of the rioters and their neighbours, the police, the investors in the new parcel post scheme, and Thomas Jefferson, then Ambassador to Paris.  It also studies the techniques the rioters used and how they learned to advance their cause.  I attempt to give a full picture of the moral forces pressuring all sides, and to add new terms to the debate over the “moral economy”---the moral universe---of riot actions in pre-Revolutionary France.  I use the police dossier of the riot and comments from S.-P. Hardy’s journals.

Current and recent philosophy of history contemplates a deep change in fundamental notions of the presence of the past. This is called breaking up time. The chief value for this change is enhancing the moral reach of historical research and writing. However, the materialist view of reality that most historians hold cannot support this approach. The origin of the notion in the thought of Walter Benjamin is suggested. I propose a neo-idealist approach called perennialism, centered on recurrent moral dilemmas and choices. This suggests a view of the relations of moral thought and ontology placed in the diachronic context that historians study.

The matter I am going to present you grows from a long-term research project I started early in 2014. The problem I set myself is, how to deepen our understanding of the role of the book as an access-point to the history of the formation of values and meaning in Western culture. For the diffusion of texts and images by human, then mechanical, and now electrical and nuclear power, has been a central project of the humanities throughout its history. It may even be said with justice that this is its defining activity.

The philosophical and religious ideas of Simone Weil bear on theory of history and historiography in ways not previously explored. They amount to a view of history as a consequence of the original creation, but they also generally exclude theodicy. By examining these ideas we see some of the ways in which to develop a theory of history centered on a conception of moral understanding that is impartialist and universal. For Weil such understanding is both inside of and outside of history. This leads to an approach to human history that centers on the moral dilemmas and choices of historical actors and that matches the force of compassion with that of power. Under an approach inspired by Weil’s ideas, the historian’s work of understanding can be an experience of moral growth.

The history of ideas is most prominently understood as a highly specialized group of
methods for the study of abstract ideas, with both diachronic and synchronic aspects.
While theorizing the field has focused on the methods of study, defining the object of
study – ideas – has been neglected. But the development of the theories behind material
culture studies poses a sharp challenge to this narrow approaches. It both challenges
the integrity of the notion of abstract ideas and also offers possibilities for
enlarging the scope of the ways in which we can study ideas historically. It is proposed
here to regard ideas as mental relations deeply connected to human communication by
both thinking and doing. This connection of ideational thought to human production
and behavior is a deep foundation for the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary historiographic
means of understanding moral life.

An illiustrated look at peruses the sketchbook of 15th-century engineer Johannes de Fontana, a catalogue of designs for a variety of fantastic and often impossible inventions, including fire-breathing automatons, pulley-powered angels, and the earliest surviving drawing of a magic lantern device.

Historical study has traditionally been built around the placement of the human at the center of inquiry. The de-stabilized concepts of the human in contemporary thought challenge this configuration. However, the ways in which these challenges provoke new historical perspectives both expand and enrich historical study but are also weak and vulnerable in their concept of the human, lacking or omitting something valuable in our self-understanding. A Personalist Philosophy of History argues for a robust concept of personhood in our experience of the past as a way to resolve this conflict.
Focused on those who know history, rather than on the abstract properties of knowledge, it extends the moral agency of persons into non-human, tranms-human, and deep history domains. It describes an approach to moral life through historical experience and study, rather than through abstractions. And it describes a kind of historiography that matches factual accuracy to both the constructed nature of understanding and to unavoidable moral purpose.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1.  Receiving the Past
Chapter 2.  Moral Agency Personalism
Chapter 3. Shaping Up Time
Chapter 4.  The Long Experience of Moral Obligation
Chapter 5.  From Moral Force Ethics to Personalist Philosophy of History

In 1713 the engineer Jakob Lupold published designs for three machines for automating the anamorphosis of single-point perspective images.  This was the first attempt to design machinery with internal moving parts that replaced human agecy in producing original images.  Leupold’s devices do not use the grid essential to all previous perspective-producing devices.  His proposed machines do not work because they do not use electricity or have the right sensitive and conducting materials.  They still require the subject's agency, but her invisibility suggests the conflict between mechanistic causality and the invention of early modern idealist ontology by Berkeley and Vico in the period 1710–1725.  Leupold’s interest in inscription is also an early sign of the conflict between personal identity and registration of documents.  He could not reconcile human agency with physical forces.  Such conflicts were the object of Berkeley’s and Vico’s ontologies and are represented in Rococo artistic production of this period as well.  This shows a difficulty in network theory as an explanatory principle for history: taking Leupold’s proposals for imaginary machines as expressing fundamental desires, the development of conceptions of personhood have been more significant to historical actors than the invention of technologies.