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SUMMARY:Verbal picturing and aesthetic experience in natural history\, 165
 0–1720 - Alexander Wragge-Morley (University College London)
DTSTART:20150216T130000Z
DTEND:20150216T141500Z
UID:TALK57288@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Margaret Carlyle
DESCRIPTION:In this talk I will offer a new interpretation of the work of 
 representing nature in the 17th-century Royal Society of London\, focusing
  on the verbal descriptions made by the botanist John Ray (1627-1705) and 
 his immediate contemporaries. Long considered to be plain and passionless\
 , I will show that Ray's descriptions were highly rhetorical\, intended to
  provoke mental pictures that were as pleasurable as they were vivid.\n\nM
 y purpose\, however\, is not simply to argue that the rhetoricality of Ray
 's descriptions has been overlooked. Instead I will explore the sources of
  Ray's conception of powerful picturing\, drawing on rhetoric\, art theory
 \, theories of mind\, and neurological models. Through this exploration I 
 will show that the verbal descriptions of natural history were - in a mann
 er of speaking - just as pictorial as the pictures that accompanied them. 
 They may therefore serve as a powerful source for rethinking Ray's concept
 ion of experience\, revealing the role that he assigned to its irreducibly
  affective dimensions in the communication of knowledge.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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