John Dee's Natural Philosophy

Clulee, Nicholas H.

doi:10.4324/9780203083123

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Other things are represented in similar images, as Horus describes. (Boas, 1993: 14) In the same vein, John Dee in 1564 proposed a symbol that he called monas hieroglyphica, which he took to encapsulate the essence of the universe (Figure 2; for further details, see Josten, 1964;Clulee, 2005Clulee, , 2006. This compact symbol incorporates a circle that represents the sun, a semicircle that represents the moon, a cross, and the zodiacal sign of Aries.…”

Section: Laws Of Nature As Expressive Symbolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning with visual metaphors

McAllister

2013

The Knowledge Engineering Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Research into visual reasoning up to now has focused on images that are literal depictions of their objects. I argue in this article that an important further mode of visual reasoning operates on images that depict objects metaphorically. Such images form part of the class of expressive symbols: they are found, for example, in allegorical representations in works of visual art, studied by iconology. They were also a common way of encapsulating insights about the universe in natural philosophy in the Renaissance. Many writers assume that expressive symbols have vanished from modern science, but I argue in the second part of the article that mathematical law statements in present-day physics should be seen, in part, as images that constitute expressive symbols of the world. In support of this view, I offer evidence that law statements relate to their objects metaphorically and that physicists engage with them primarily through visual inspection and visual reasoning. REASONING WITH VISUAL METAPHORS 2 1 Visual reasoning with literal depictionsThis article has two aims. The first is to broaden the scope of discussions of visual reasoning by arguing that visual reasoning operates on a larger class of images than hitherto acknowledged. Whereas discussions of visual reasoning have so far focused on images taken to be literal depictions of the objects of the reasoning, I will seek to extend the domain to cover images that constitute-for want of a better word at this stage-metaphorical depictions of objects. I will proceed partly by bringing into contact bodies of literature that are usually kept apart. The second aim, to which I will turn in section 4, is to argue that this account applies also to law statements in present-day sciences such as physics. I will argue both that law statements partly constitute metaphorical depictions of their objects, and that physicists achieve understanding of them mainly by visual inspection and visual reasoning.

show abstract

Section: Laws Of Nature As Expressive Symbolsmentioning

confidence: 99%