In the shadow of the Enlightenment. Occultism and Renaissance science in eighteenth-century America

New Zealand Association for Research in Education Conference ( Hyatt Regency Hotel )

This paper maps definitions of modernism extracting some of the features of aesthetic modernism as it discusses Descartes, the Enlightenment, Cartesian rationalism and the notion of ‘aesthetics’. Within modernism, I consider its major assumptions, values, (or its aesthetic), the theoretical sources of formalism and the ideas and outstanding figures associated with modernism, such as Immanuel Ka...

Interrelationships between Language and Literature from Old English to the Modern Period

Literature is the aesthetic manifestation of language. It is ‘as old as human language and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise.’ This paper explores the interrelationships between language and literature from 600 AD to the present day.  The grammar of present-day English is closely related to that of Old English with the same tense formation and word orders. The verse unit is a single line and its org...

Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century Britain

A guide to the archives and manuscripts of The Royal Society

thinkers, the "science of man" meant exactly that and did not include women; and that "nature" provided the foundation of difference, not its erasure. Additional exploration of the meaning of "science" is provided by Phillip Sloan in his magisterial essay on the natural history of man. He concentrates on Linnaeus and Buffon, practising scientists with very different views of what constituted hu...

Herder and Reappraising Sculpture as Tactile Art

The main objective of this essay is to re-examine the nature of sculpture and its importance among arts via retrieving and studying the relatively neglected importance of touch in the experience of this art. This objective is pursued according to eighteenth-century German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder, by focusing on his Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Cre...