Cosmic Viewpoint A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions 1st Edition by Gareth Williams 0199731586 9780199731589

Cosmic Viewpoint A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions 1st Edition by Gareth Williams – Ebook PDF Instant Download/Delivery: 0199731586, 9780199731589

Full download Cosmic Viewpoint A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions 1st Edition after payment

Product details:

ISBN 10: 0199731586

ISBN 13: 9780199731589

Author: Gareth D. Williams

Seneca’s Natural Questions is an eight-book disquisition on the nature of meteorological phenomena, ranging inter alia from rainbows to earthquakes, from comets to the winds, from the causes of snow and hail to the reasons why the Nile floods in summer. Much of this material had been treated in the earlier Greco-Roman meteorological tradition, but what notoriously sets Seneca’s writing apart is his insertion of extended moralizing sections within his technical discourse. How, if at all, are these outbursts against the luxury and vice that are apparently rampant in Seneca’s first-century CE Rome to be reconciled with his main meteorological agenda? In grappling with this familiar question, The Cosmic Viewpoint argues that Seneca is no blinkered or arid meteorological investigator, but a creative explorer into nature’s workings who offers a highly idiosyncratic blend of physico-moral investigation across his eight books. At one level, his inquiry into nature impinges on human conduct and morality in its implicit propagation of the familiar Stoic ideal of living in accordance with nature: the moral deviants whom Seneca condemns in the course of the work offer egregious examples of living contrary to nature’s balanced way. At a deeper level, however, The Cosmic Viewpoint stresses the literary qualities and complexities that are essential to Seneca’s literary art of science: his technical enquiries initiate a form of engagement with nature which distances the reader from the ordinary involvements and fragmentations of everyday life, instead centering our existence in the cosmic whole. From a figurative standpoint, Seneca’s meteorological theme raises our gaze from a terrestrial level of existence to a more intuitive plane where literal vision gives way to ‘higher’ conjecture and intuition: in striving to understand meteorological phenomena, we progress in an elevating direction – a conceptual climb that renders the Natural Questions no mere store of technical learning, but a work that actively promotes a change of perspective in its readership.

Cosmic Viewpoint A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions 1st Table of contents:

1. Interiority and Cosmic Consciousness in the Natural Questions
I. Seneca’s Totalizing Worldview
II. The Senecan Worldview Defined by Contrast with Cicero
III. Interiorization in the Preface to Book 3
IV. The Differing World Outlooks of Seneca and Pliny
V. The Natural Questions in Sociopolitical Context

2. Seneca’s Moralizing Interludes
I. The Problem
II. Hostius Quadra as the Anti-Sapiens
III. The Unified World as Drawn in Books 1 and 2.1–11
IV. Hostius Quadra and Seneca’s Interlocutor in Book 1
V. Of Subterranean Fish and Degenerate Diners in 3.17–18
VI. Further Transgressions in 5.15 and 7.31–32
VII. The Textual Containment of Vice

3. The Cataclysm and the Nile
I. Introduction
II. The Vice of Flattery
III. Lucilius in the Preface
IV. The Cataclysm of 3.27–30
V. Into Egypt
VI. The Nile, the Cataclysm and Ovid
VII. The Missing Link, and Other Theories of the Nile Flood

4. The Rhetoric of Science
I. Introduction
II. 4b.13 in Context
III. The Rhetoric of Science
IV. Strategies of Argument in 4b.3–7
A. Reliance on Influential Authority
B. Argument by Analogy
C. Argument by Bold Inference
D. Competing Arguments
E. Superstition in Contention with Reason
V. The Better Argument
VI. Book 4b in Context

5. Seneca on Winds
I. Introduction
II. Pre-Stoic and Stoic Theories of Wind
III. Seneca’s Typology of Winds
IV. Mapping the Winds
A. The Cardinal Winds in Ovid
B. The Varronian Compass Card
C. The Twelve Sectors
D. Local Winds
V. Wind Direction, Human Misdirection
VI. The Roman Dimension

6. Earthquakes, Consolation and the Senecan Sublime
I. Introduction
II. Consolatory Amplification Before Reduction
III. Sublime Superiority over Nature
IV. The Two Verse Quotations at 6.2.1–3 and 6.2.9
V. Controlling Nature in the Senecan Inventory (6.4–26)
A. Taking Stock of Earlier Seismological Investigation
B. From Sight to Insight
C. From Analogical Inference to Abstract Speculation
D. The Living Cosmos
E. Elemental Interchangeability Revisited
F. The Normalization of Seismic Experience
VI. The Totum in Book 6
VII. The Campanian Earthquake in Perspective

7. Seneca on Comets and Ancient Cometary Theory
I. Introduction
II. Seneca on Progress, on Hostius Quadra and on Nature’s Mysteries
III. Sub- and Supralunary Interpretation of Comets
IV. The Whirlwind Theory
V. The Optical Illusion Theory
VI. The Planetary Theory
VII. The Senecan Theory

8. Seneca on Lightning and Divination
I. Introduction
II. Coordination Between 2.12–30 and 2.54–58
III. The Totalizing Worldview: Strategies of Unification in 2.1, 2.12–30 and 2.54–58
A. 2.1–11
B. 2.12–30 and 2.54–58
C. 2.32–51
IV. Seneca on Divination in 2.32–51
A. Reconciling Prayer and Expiation with a Deterministic View of Fate (2.35–38)
B. The “Scientific” Classification of Lightning (2.39–40)
C. Seneca’s Rationalization of Etruscan Belief (2.42–46)
D. Caecina and Attalus (2.48.2–50)
V. Taking Stock

People also search for Cosmic Viewpoint A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions 1st: 

a cosmic companion research steps

seneca – on the creation of earthquakes

 cosmic perspective stoicism

seneca’s imaginary tutor 

the cosmic perspective stars galaxies and cosmology

Tags:

Gareth Williams,Viewpoint,Cosmic,Natural