Miracles And Machines
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Miracles and Machines
An abundantly illustrated narrative that draws from the history of art, science, technology, artificial intelligence, psychology, religion, and conservation in telling the extraordinary story of a Renaissance robot that prays. This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.
Miracle and Machine
Miracle and Machine is a sort of "reader's guide" to Jacques Derrida's 1994-95 essay "faith and knowledge," his most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media. It provides essential background for understanding Derrida's essay, commentary on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship among religion, science, and the media. Along the way it offers in-depth analysis of Derrida's treatment of everything from the nature of religious revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity, fundamentalism, and secularism to the way religion is today being transformed by globalization, technoscience, and worldwide telecommunications networks. But Miracle and Machine is much more than a commentary on a single Derrida text. Through references to scores of other works by Derrida, both early and late, it also provides a unique introduction to Derrida's work in general. It demonstrates that one of the very best ways to understand the terms, themes, claims, strategies, and motivations of Derridean deconstruction from the early 1960s through 2004 is to read critically and patiently, in its spirit and in its letter, an exemplary text such as "Faith and Knowledge." Finally, Miracle and Machine attempts to put Derrida's ideas about religion to the test by reading alongside "Faith and Knowledge" an already classic work of American fiction that is more or less contemporaneous with it, Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a novel that explores the same relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and science, religious revelation and the World Wide Web, messianicity, and weapons of mass destruction--in a word, in two words, miracles and machines.
Palimpsests of Religious Encounter in Asia, 1500–1800
During the 'thick globalism' of the early modern world, evidence of religious contact, between conflict and commerce, has been overlooked in national narratives. In Palimpsests of Religious Encounter in Asia, 1500–1800, a cross-disciplinary group of international experts delve into on-site artefacts and archives to consider the geographical imagination, the transfer of knowledge, the politics of interreligious dialogue, the practice of reception, and the cyclical flow of meaning across transcultural things. Illustrations of objects rarely available to the public demonstrate how religious belief can provide a shared methodological platform for the global turn of art history. Contributors: Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Fayaz A. Dar, Antonio De Caro, Michiko Fukaya, Kayo Hirakawa, René B. Javellana, S.J., Emy Merin Joy, Zubair Khalid, Edith Llamas Camacho, Sidh Losa Mendiratta, Mia M. Mochizuki, D. Max Moerman, Raphaèle Preisinger, Dhruv Raina, Timon Screech, Nicolas Standaert, Guillermo Wilde, Ines G. Županov.