Liberal Arts

Did Shakespeare read Cornelius Agrippa's The Vanity of Sciences? In an investigation into a possible signature of Shakespeare on a copy of Agrippa's book, this paper suggests that natural magic shaped the rise of early modern arts by transforming their state of mind from contemplation on the world to reflections on our thoughts of the world. The intellectual revolution at the outset of the modern age rested primarily on a fusion of practice and philosophy – that is, on how to “make a philosophical city without philosophy,” in the words of Thomas More. It began with art, when Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) sought to understand the connection between “to paint” and a painting, and transformed the painter into an artist. It continued with Cornelius Agrippa, who wanted to grasp the connection between “the magical manipulation” and “nature,” and transformed the magician into a scientist. It passed through Shakespeare in literature, as writing poetry was bound up with “making theater” and the playwright became the important literary persona. The artisan, the philosopher and the poet, who in ancient times purported to describe reality in itself,  were superseded by the artist, the scientist and the playwright, who set out to describe reality and left us looking into ourselves.

This paper suggests that in the search for particular practices that escape biological
determinism historians may be better off focusing on circulating men and cultural objects – on displaced figures – as they travel and adjust to new conditions. Strangers experience intense cognitive dissonance between the innate natural conditions of their upbringing and their cognitive values, and as such, these figures work out their mental capacities and exercise free-will more powerfully than well-embedded cultural figures. To adjust to new language and cultural practices, they wrestle with fixed habits. Natives, on the other end, experience estrangement when they encounter foreign cultural objects, reinterpret and place them in a fluid web of implied meanings. Both encounters generate sensations of estrangement, forcing humans to act beyond their inborn and habitual reactions. Therefore, in this current age of physical determinism, cultural networks and moving objects carry great potential in further developing cultural history and in re-stressing and maintaining culture as the expressive realm of the collective soul.

Did economic factors determine the rise and decline of scientific cultures?
In taking the 'decline theory' into the field of economics, this paper aims at challenging the essentialist premises and methods of those who spoke of either a decline or a renaissance in Islamic science during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have suggested as an alternative method of analysis the evaluation of scientific activities according to the investment they received, both political and economic. Political and economic transformation inevitably affect the economy of scientific activity--the funding of research and development projects along with the development of school systems. But the driving force for these transformations must be sought in changes within social property relations. Thus, families of tax collectors and provincial lords, in spite of a set of curbs to their authority, accumulated capital, and local political power. During the seventeenth century’s global economic crisis, the state was weak and succumbed to the pressures applied by provincial lords to liberalize land tenure. By winning lifetime tenure and, later, inheritance rights (malikane), they won the right to accumulate private property. During the late eighteenth century, these changes transformed agriculture into a market-dependent economy. At the same time, the economic units of waqf, which aimed to fund madrasah, preserved their self-sustaining character. As a result, waqf production could not keep up with the competition provided by the new system. The unintended outcome was a severe crisis in the funding of the madrasah. Since financial resources were depleted, the remaining resources were used to fund religious studies. Preference was given to religious studies, while scientific activity underwent a severe decrease in funding and activity. Therefore, instead of looking for cultural flaws and religious obstacles, I have proposed an alternative explanation that can explain why Islamic science was not highly productive during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

המחקר רב-השנים על קופרניקוס והספרות המחקרית החדשה על אובייקטיביזציה של הטבע עדיין לא הצטלבו. במאמר זה אבקש להציג ממצאים ראשוניים אשר מחברים את המסורות ההיסטוריגורפיות האלה לסיפור אחד, ולהראות ששאלות מהתחום החזותי תרמו באופן בלתי צפוי לגיבושה של אחת מהתובנות המדעיות החשובות בהיסטוריה – הסטת השמש למרכז היקום. תחילה אצביע על המוזרויות בטקסט של קופרניקוס, קרי על השימוש שהוא עושה במטפורות כישופיות המתייחסות לשמש כאל אובייקט, אחר כך אחפש אחר מקורות ההשראה שהולידו מטפורות אלה, ולבסוף אחשוף את אופני הקריאה של הטקסט בסביבת גידולו של קופרניקוס. מסע זה יבקש להראות כי הסוגיה המרכזית שעמדה לפתחו של קופרניקוס היתה הפער בין תיאור תיפקודה של השמש כאובייקט בעל הכוח הגדול ביותר ביקום לבין תיאור מיקומה באופן פורמלי מתמטי-גיאומטרי לפיו היא עוד אחד מכוכבי הלכת.  תפיסת השמש כאובייקט אפשרה לקופרניקוס להסיטה למרכז היקום, הסטה אשר פתרה את הסתירות שליוו את תאור השמש ואפשרה ליצור שפה פרדיגמטית וחזותית אחידה בעבור מי שעסקו במלאכת הכישוף-הכוכבי ומי שעסקו באסטרונומיה מתמטית.


Clues beneath the Lamp: On Copernicus's Magical "Other" -  Preliminary Report

Avner Ben-Zaken
The extended scholarship on Copernicus and the new scholarship on objectification and visualization of nature have not yet intersected. In this paper I would like to present preliminary findings that bring these two scholarships together into one story, showing that questions about the visualization of the sun unexpectedly contributed to one of the most important scientific insight – the shift of the sun to the center of the universe. I will start in investigating some peculiarities in the text that Copernicus chose to encircle the heliocentric diagram in which he stirred up metaphors of astral magic; then I will point out on a possible source for such metaphors; and at the end I will excavate the modes of readings of such astral-magical source in Copernicus’s habitat – Cracow University. This exploration shows that the most critical question that Copernicus faced was the discrepancy between the astral-magical functional description of the sun as the most powerful object in nature and the astronomical-mathematical structural description of the sun as merely a marginal planet. The perception of the sun as an object enabled Copernicus to shift it to the center, resolving the contradicting descriptions of the sun and generating for the first time a unified visualized paradigmatic language for both, practitioners of astral-magic and astronomers.

When Marxism circulated outside Europe, cultural tension was the prism through which Marxism was introduced and received. The presentation of Marxist discourse further intensified this cultural tension, not as an artifact of European culture and history, but as a “scientific,” “objective” program to analyze history and transform society. Marxists needed intermediaries fluent in both European and Middle Eastern cultures and languages who could disseminate Marxist ideology in the Middle East. The Comintern assigned Eastern European Jewish Marxists, who arrived at the turn of the century with the buds of the Zionist immigration, to circulate Marxism in the Middle East. Thus, Marxism’s “objective scientific truth” installed in Eastern European Jews a sense of conviction that Marxism could easily bridge cultural differences and transform the cultures and consciousnesses of local Middle Eastern workers.

Greaves’ engagement with Eastern sources involved a search for the pristine, thus precise, numbers, ancient measure expressed in modern terms. In turn it helped to recapture a perfect ancient knowledge of the dimensions of the universe. Subsequently, the methodological path helped fashion him to the scholarly needs of his patrons William Laud (1573-1645) and James Ussher (1581-1656). His work emanated as a side-project of these patrons’ belief in a Linguistic Leviathan to be found in the writings of the primitive church, and which could reconcile controversies in political-theology. Finally, Greaves was not working alone, but actually as a member in a cluster of royalist scholars, centered during the 1630s and 1640s on Oxford University. All of the men concerned were, in one way or another, interested in obtaining primordial sources also for resolving controversies. Before and during the Civil War, they either died or were ejected from Oxford by the parliamentary visitors and were replaced by Puritans, parliamentary adherents and Copernicans — men with no interest in primordial sources. Greaves’ attention to primordial measurement was later noticed by Isaac Newton, who explored the ancient sacred cubit in order to recapture the measurements of the Second Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem — the microcosm of the universe.

During the fifteenth century manuscripts of Narbonni’s commentary on Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān circulated along the Jewish communities from Barcelona through Provance all the way to Italy. In the early 1490s Pico della Mirandola encountered one of these circulating manuscripts and had it translated. The story of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān appeared for the first time in Latin. The manuscript, as it came down to us, is a straight forward translation with few annotations or marginalia and it is now kept at the Biblioteca Universitaria di Genova.  During the time he was engaged with Ḥayy, and before completing his influential anti-astrological work Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, Pico died. Recently, a team of scientists exhumed the corpses of Pico and his close friend Poliziano, and subjected them to a battery of tests. In February 2008 they concluded that both men, Poliziano in September and Pico in November 1494, had been poisoned.  During his last years, Pico hectically wrote against astrology within a cultural and personal uproar.  If we situate Pico’s translation of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān at the heart of these events, then we should ask what attracted Pico in the story of Ḥayy and how this philosophical novel fitted within the turmoil in Florence during the early 1490s?