Breaking up the body: Dissecting the Baroque period

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

7 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

02/26/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Linguistics

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Summary :

Introduction.
Hermeneutics: Prior to the Baroque period.
The first known record of dissection.
Contradiction within religiosities damning.
This refusal of bodily death as the end of a human's soul.
Liebniz's answer to the question of the soul.
Conclusion.
Works cited.

Abstract

During the baroque period, things fell apart; the center of beliefs, institutions, and truisms could no longer hold. Indeed, not even one's body was free of speculation, debate, and change; with scientific discoveries and experiments, as well as the thinkers and philosophers challenging preconceived ideas, what was once considered the human body fell apart. Suddenly, to "know thyself" meant a complete reexamination of what "thyself" meant in the new terms of the body. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things claimed that during the baroque period, there was a definitive cut, a break in language and images. "The erudition that once read nature and books alike as parts of a single text," he writes, "has been relegated to the same category as its own chimeras (...) the signs of language no longer have any value apart from the slender fiction which they represent" (48). As the term "body," too, became dissected, then so did the idea of self, soul, and mind.