[NetBehaviour] a few random items

[Max Herman]

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Prehistoric science, a la Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything," from the preface to an old book from 1969 by Giorgio di Santillana:

"This time I was able to grasp the idea at a glance, because I was ready for it.  Many, many years before, I had questioned myself, in a note, about the meaning of _fact_ in the crude empirical sense, as applied to the ancients.  It represents, I thought, not the intellectual surprise, not the direct wonder and astonishment, but first of all an immense, steady, minute attention to the seasons.  What is a solstice or an equinox?  It stands for the capacity of coherence, deduction, imaginative intention and reconstruction with which we could hardly credit our forefathers.  And yet there it was.  I _saw_.
Mathematics was moving up to me from the depths of centuries; not after myth, but before it.  Not armed with Greek rigor, but with the imagination of astrological power, with the understanding of astronomy.  Number gave the key.  Way back in time, before writing was even invented, it was _measures_ and _counting_ that provided the armature, the frame on which the texture of real myth was to grow."

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Don Quixote, who circa 1605 said "Experience itself, the mother of all the Sciences" and used the word "experiencia" forty additional times, discussed in a post about avoiding the European/Ottoman conflict's new variation in the US/China rivalry by using lessons from early modern Spanish fiction:

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2404/msg00000.html

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Tampere University has a study center for the History of Experience:

https://research.tuni.fi/hex/

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Mary Baine Campbell article about alchemy, AI/GPT, and the homunculus, which argues that metaphor was "the supreme figure of early modern poetry":

https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i02_02campbell_comp3_083010_JM_0.pdf

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“We know that, during the Renaissance, a lot of imagery was intended to be enigmatic — it was intended to be interpreted in many ways and to kind of spark discussion,” Nogueira said. “And so if we find some of it confusing today, it’s not just because we’re centuries removed — it was intended to be that way.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/style/hidden-faces-met-museum-renaissance-portraits/index.html

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Whitehead quote about Leonardo from "Science and the Modern World," perhaps not quite right if indeed La Joconde is Esperienza, and given that Leonardo wrote "Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals":

"Perhaps the man who most completely anticipated both Bacon and the whole modern point of view was the artist Leonardo Da Vinci, who lived almost exactly a century before Bacon. Leonardo also illustrates the theory which I was advancing in my last lecture, that the rise of naturalistic art was an important ingredient in the formation of our scientific mentality. Indeed, Leonardo was more completely a man of science than was Bacon. The practice of naturalistic art is more akin to the practice of physics, chemistry and biology than is the practice of law. We all remember the saying of Bacon’s contemporary, Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, that Bacon ‘wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor.’ But at the beginning of the modern period Da Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating the various strains which have combined to form the modern world, namely, legal mentality and the patient observational habits of the naturalistic artists."

[Some believe it was actually Leonardo who discovered the circulation of the blood.]

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Book from 2016, "Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature":

https://academic.oup.com/book/26933

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