Descrizione

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Slight staining on edge and binding, otherwise very good and clean. / Leichte Anschmutzung auf Schnitt und Einband, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - Starting with an exploration of what seems to be a breakdown in the sense of what it was and felt like to be a person in the last years of the European sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth, this volume analyzes notions and experiences of who-ness through philosophical, medical, legal, and imaginative writing from Plato, the Hippocratics, and Aristotle through Descartes. In antiquity, Cicero, Seneca, Galen, and Augustine receive close examination; Plutarch, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Nemesius, Justinian, and others are touched on more briefly. Two chapters explore the extent to which surviving writings let one apply the experience they reveal to women and slaves. In antiquity, personhood was dominantly conceived in terms of reactions to a totality of surroundings (�circles� or �spheres,� as many called, and depicted, them) that composed what it was to be a person. The nature of these reactions was called �passibility.� Carrying the analysis through the middle ages via the Arab doctors (especially Avicenna), Hildegard of Bingen, Christina of Markyate, H�� and Abelard, and various secular writers, the book�s second half discusses Petrarch, Loyola, H�senne, Montaigne, and Descartes, along with others like Alberti, Erasmus, Stampa, Vives, Melanchthon, Lab�Huarte, and Sabuco. The author shows how some aspects of ancient experience continued in an understanding of what was called the �selfe,� while new ones started to emerge, particularly a sense of growing impermeability to the world and separateness from others. As the senses of passibility and surrounding circles decayed and fragmented, the passion of anger rather than love offered a way to affirm a new sense of selfhood, one still profoundly uncomfortable for Descartes. The book also suggests how traces of this who-ness are to be found in visual artifacts. - Timothy J. Reiss is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. The most recent of his many books is Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics oj Cultural Exchange (Stanford, 2002).