Art in Art: Cabinets of Curiosity and the Rise of the Gallery Painting

By Thea Applebaum Licht

In the 17th century, emanating from Antwerp, a new genre of artwork came on the scene: paintings of paintings, works populated by a lush array of meta-images. From its origins in picturing private curiosity cabinets to its later use in documenting increasingly public collections, Thea Applebaum Licht charts the course of this alluring aesthetic tradition. more

The Adventures and Experiences of the First Slovak Novel

By Dobrota Pucherová

Partially banned upon publication and translated into English for the first time this year, René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences (1783–85) found new readers in the communist era thanks to its critiques of feudalism, capitalism, and the Catholic Church. Dobrota Pucherová introduces us to this hybrid work, which mixes the bildungsroman with the philosophical novel, the romance, the adventure story, the travelogue, the history book, and the orientalist fantasy. more

Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern Camera Obscura

By Julie Park

Centuries before photography froze the world into neat frames, scientists, poets, and artists streamed transient images into dark interior spaces with the help of a camera obscura. Julie Park explores the early modern fascination with this quasi-spiritual technology and the magic, melancholy, and dream-like experiences it produced. more

Strange Gods: Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned (1919)

By Joshua Blu Buhs

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned. “For every five people who read this book“, wrote one reviewer, “four will go insane”. Joshua Blu Buhs recounts Fort’s early life, unfinished manuscripts (“X”, “Y”), and the philosophical monism that informed his research. more

“To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”: Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism

By Randall Fuller

“As a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded” — this is the kind of life envisioned by Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). With an ear attuned to the transcendentalist’s inimitable voice, Randall Fuller revisits the intellectual context, interviews with female prison inmates, and personal longing that informed this landmark feminist work. more

Same as It Ever Was?: Eternal Recurrence in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

By Claire Hall

While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition. Claire Hall explores various shades of this idea in ancient philosophy, from Pythagorean metempsychosis to Stoic predictions about a cosmological reset. more

Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy

By Anthony Grafton

Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a path that leads both upward and downward: up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth. more

Free Speech and Bad Meats: The Domestic Labour of Reading in Milton’s Areopagitica

By Katie Kadue

Does a healthy intellectual culture resemble a battlefield or a kitchen? Revisiting Milton’s Areopagitica, a tract often championed by today’s free speech absolutists, Katie Kadue finds a debt to the work of early modern housewives. In their labours to preserve food and transform it into wholesome cuisine, Milton saw an analogue for how the reading public might digest books — good and bad alike — into nourishing ideas. more

Marxist Astronomy: The Milky Way According to Anton Pannekoek

By Lauren Collee

Can a person’s experiences on earth alter how they perceive the stars? Lauren Collee peers through the telescope of Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer whose politics informed his human approach to studying the cosmos. more

Music of the Squares: David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics

By Carmel Raz

Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the Scottish artist’s original, idiosyncratic, and occasionally bewildering aesthetics. more

Get Thee to a Phalanstery: or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade

By Dominic Pettman

Hot on the heels of the French Revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman explores Fourier’s radical, bizarre, and often astonishingly modern ideas, and how they might guide us in our own troubled times. more

Rambling Reflections: On Summers in Switzerland and Sheffield

By Seán Williams

In the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Philipp Moritz — from the peace of Lake Biel to the rugged Peaks — Seán Williams considers the connection between walking and writing. more

The Art of Philosophy: Visualising Aristotle in Early 17th-Century Paris

By Susanna Berger

With their elaborate interplay of image and text, the several large-scale prints designed by the French friar Martin Meurisse to communicate Aristotelian thought are wonderfully impressive creations. Susanna Berger explores the function of these complex works, and how such visual commentaries not only served to express philosophical ideas in a novel way but also engendered their own unique mode of thinking. more

Out From Behind This Mask

By D. Graham Burnett

A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids — D. Graham Burnett on meditations conjured by a visit to the death masks of the Laurence Hutton Collection. more

“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination

By Jonathan Gray

Three hundred years after the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and seven hundred years after the death of Ramon Llull, Jonathan Gray looks at how their early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” speak to our own age of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. more

Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature

By Jé Wilson

Largely forgotten today in the shadow of his more famous father, the 17th-century Flemish alchemist Francis van Helmont influenced and was friends with the likes of Locke, Boyle, and Leibniz. While imprisoned by the Inquisition, in between torture sessions, he wrote his Alphabet of Nature on the idea of a universal “natural” language. Je Wilson explores. more

Notes on the Fourth Dimension

By Jon Crabb

Hyperspace, ghosts, and colourful cubes — Jon Crabb on the work of Charles Howard Hinton and the cultural history of higher dimensions. more

Machiavelli, Comedian

By Christopher S. Celenza

Most familiar today as the godfather of Realpolitik and as the eponym for all things cunning and devious, the Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli also had a lighter side, writing as he did a number of comedies. Christopher S. Celenza looks at perhaps the best known of these plays, Mandragola, and explores what it can teach us about the man and his world. more

Scurvy and the Terra Incognita

By Jonathan Lamb

One remarkable symptom of scurvy, that constant bane of the Age of Discovery, was the acute and morbid heightening of the senses. Jonathan Lamb explores how this unusual effect of sailing into uncharted territory echoed a different kind of voyage, one undertaken by the Empiricists through their experiments in enhancing the senses artificially. more

Black on Black

By Eugene Thacker

Should we consider black a colour, the absence of colour, or a suspension of vision produced by a deprivation of light? Beginning with Robert Fludd's attempt to picture nothingness, Eugene Thacker reflects* on some of the ways in which blackness has been used and thought about through the history of art and philosophical thought. more

Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia

By Benjamin Breen

Grounded in the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1901) is an odd and intriguing work. Benjamin Breen explores these “synesthetic” abstractions and asks to what extent they, and the Victorian mysticism of which they were born, influenced the Modernist movement that flourished in the following decades. more

A Dangerous Man in the Pantheon

By Philipp Blom

This October marks 300 years since the birth of French Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot. Although perhaps best known for co-founding the Encylopédie, Philipp Blom argues for the importance of Diderot's philosophical writings and how they offer a pertinent alternative to the Enlightenment cult of reason spearheaded by his better remembered contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau. more

Lucian’s Trips to the Moon

By Aaron Parrett

With his Vera Historia, the 2nd century satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote the first detailed account of a trip to the moon in the Western tradition and, some argue, also one of the earliest science fiction narratives. Aaron Parrett explores how Lucian used this lunar vantage point to take a satirical look back at the philosophers of Earth and their ideas of "truth". more

As a Lute out of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy

By Noga Arikha

In 1621 Robert Burton first published his masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy, a vast feat of scholarship examining in encyclopaedic detail that most enigmatic of maladies. Noga Arikha explores the book, said to be the favorite of both Samuel Johnson and Keats, and places it within the context of the humoural theory so popular at the time. more