"Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world--mechanistic materialism and vitalism--in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe,...
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"Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world--mechanistic materialism and vitalism--in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form."-- Hogarth's practical aesthetics / Ruth Mack -- Presence of mind : an ecology of perception in eighteenth-century England / Jonathan Kramnick -- Reading Locke after Shaftesbury : feeling our way towards a postsecular genealogy of religious tolerance / David Alvarez -- Rethinking superstition : Pagan ritual in Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages / Mary Helen McMurran -- Defoe on spiritual communication, action at a distance, and the mind in motion / Sara Landreth -- The persistence of Clarissa / Sarah Ellenzweig -- The early-modern embodied mind and the entomological imaginary / Kate E. Tunstall -- Diderot's Brain / Joanna Stalnaker -- Conclusion: Can aesthestics overcome instrumental reason? The need for judgement in Mandeville's Fable of the bees / Vivasvan Soni
