The Metaphor of Harmony in Comenius and in Early Modern Science
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F24%3A00600690" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/24:00600690 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
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DOI - Digital Object Identifier
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Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
The Metaphor of Harmony in Comenius and in Early Modern Science
Original language description
Jan Amos Comenius is sometimes said to be a “thinker of harmony”. He systematically implemented the metaphor of harmony into his epistemology to describe the natural “consonance” of all things, imitate God’s order, and control the coherence of the current knowledge. Using this musical metaphor abounding with strong mathematical and cosmological connotations, he manifested his advanced intellectual predilection for order and revealed significant sources of his conceptual thinking. On the one hand, his church, the Unity of Brethren, had a highly developed musical culture and music was extensively practised in the Unity (Jan Blahoslav’s Musica, various books of liturgical canticles, etc.). On the other hand, there are many other prominent “thinkers of harmony” in early modernity: Comenius’ eclectic teacher Alsted with his Logicae systema harmonicum and Physica harmonica, Johannes Kepler with Harmonices Mundi, Marin Mersenne with Harmonicorum libri XII, and, of course, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to name just a few examples. By confronting Comenian texts (including his Gospel harmonies) with the NOSCEMUS database of digital transcriptions (=ca. 1000 representative early modern scientific texts) and some other sources, this lecture analysed the heuristic and explanatory function of the Harmony metaphor in Comenius and within early modern scholarly discourse.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
O - Miscellaneous
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60301 - Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Result continuities
Project
<a href="/en/project/LL2320" target="_blank" >LL2320: The Origins of Modern Encyclopaedism: Launching Evolutionary Metaphorology</a><br>
Continuities
I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace
Others
Publication year
2024
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů