The Perfecting Of Nature

Author : Josh Doty
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 146965962X
Total Pages : 181 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Perfecting of Nature written by Josh Doty and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century saw a marked change in how Americans viewed and understood the human form. These new ways of understanding the body reflect how Americans were beginning to see the body's constituent parts as interconnected. From the transcendentalists' idealized concept of self to the rise of Darwinian theory after the Civil War, the era and its writers redefined the human body as both deeply reactive and malleable. Josh Doty explores antebellum American conceptions of bioplasticity—the body's ability to react and change from interior and exterior forces—and argues that literature helped to shape the cultural reception of these ideas. These new ways of thinking about the body's responsiveness to its surroundings enabled exercise fanatics, cold-water bathers, cookbook authors, and everyday readers to understand the tractable body as a way to reform the United States at the physiological level. Doty weaves together analysis of religious texts, nutritional guides, and canonical literature to show the fluid relationship among bodies, literature, and culture in nineteenth-century America.

Author : William R. Newman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226577139
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Promethean Ambitions written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.

Author : Leon Kass
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226425689
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Hungry Soul written by Leon Kass and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, c1994. With new foreword.

Author : Joseph Lane Hancock
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 506 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nature Sketches in Temperate America written by Joseph Lane Hancock and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Joseph William Reynolds
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 444 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Natural History of Immortality written by Joseph William Reynolds and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : E. Melanie Dupuis
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814719376
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nature's Perfect Food written by E. Melanie Dupuis and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2002-02 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how Americans came to drink milk For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate? Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, "Milk: The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them. In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.

Author : John Michael Rziha
Publisher : CUA Press
ISBN 13 : 0813216729
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Perfecting Human Actions written by John Michael Rziha and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last few centuries, a practical dichotomy between God and humans has developed within moral theory. As a result, moral theory tends to focus only on humans where human autonomy is foundational or only on God where divine commands capriciously rule. However, the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas overcomes this dichotomy. For Thomas, humans reach their perfection by participating in God's wisdom and love. Perfecting Human Actions explores the ways humans participate in eternal law--God's wisdom that guides and moves all things to their proper action. The book begins with a thoughtful examination of the philosophic recovery of the notion of participation in Thomistic metaphysics. It then explains Thomas's theological understanding of the notion of participation to show how humans are related to God. It is discovered that when performing human actions, humans participate in the eternal law in two ways: as moved and governed by it, and cognitively. In reference to participation as moved and governed, humans are directed by God to their proper end of eternal happiness. This mode of participation can be increased by perfecting the natural inclinations through virtue, grace, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In reference to cognitive participation, humans as rational creatures can know their proper end and how to attain it. Through this knowledge of moral truths, the intellect participates in the eternal law. Cognitive participation is perfected by the intellectual virtues (especially faith) and the gifts of the Holy Spirit (especially wisdom). The book concludes by showing how the notion of human participation in the eternal law is a much better foundation for moral theory than the contemporary notion of autonomy. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Rziha is associate professor of theology at Benedictine College. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: " A] competent and indeed masterful study. . . . Rziha's book is to be welcomed as not just an important, but indeed an overdue contribution to the contemporary recovery of Aquinas's moral theory. More importantly, this study is of surpassing importance in advancing the correct understanding of the relationship between human freedom and natural law. . . . Rziha's lucidly written and well-documented study displays all the characteristics of a competent and learned interpretation of the thought of the doctor communis according to the highest standards of current Aquinas scholarship."--Reinhard Hutter, Thomist "Rziha explores at length the two modes by which human participate in God's eternal law: as moved and governed by it and as having knowledge of it. . . . T]his book proves to be something of a comprehensive course in Thomistic thought. This project is supported by extensive and meticulous footnote reverences to texts of Aquinas." --Janine Marie Idziak, Speculum

Author : Franz Heinrich Reusch
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nature and the Bible written by Franz Heinrich Reusch and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Free Church Year Book written by and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Université catholique de Louvain (1835-1969). Institut supérieur de philosophie
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Natural theology (theodicy), logic, ethics, history of philosophy written by Université catholique de Louvain (1835-1969). Institut supérieur de philosophie and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: