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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Thinking Nature, "Pierre Maupertuis And The Charge Of Error Against Fermat And Leibniz", Richard Samuel Lamborn
Thinking Nature, "Pierre Maupertuis And The Charge Of Error Against Fermat And Leibniz", Richard Samuel Lamborn
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this dissertation is to defend Pierre Fermat and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz against the charge of error made against them by Pierre Maupertuis that they errantly applied final causes to physics. This charge came in Maupertuis’ 1744 speech to the Paris Academy of Sciences, later published in different versions, entitled Accord Between Different Laws Which at First Seemed Incompatible. It is in this speech that Maupertuis lays claim to one of the most important discoveries in the history of physics and science, The Principle of Least Action. From the date of this speech up until the end …
Wrestling With Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry, Paul T. Corrigan
Wrestling With Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry, Paul T. Corrigan
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
In the current “secular age,” more and more people find beliefs and behaviors associated with traditional religion intellectually and ethically untenable. At the same time, many “postsecular” writers, both believers and nonbelievers, continue to write with religious or religiously-inflected forms, themes, and purposes. In the United States, postsecular poets “wrestle with angels” by engaging constructively and deconstructively with matters traditionally considered the domain of religion and spirituality. While the recent work of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, John McClure and others puts the concept of the postsecular at the cutting edge of various fields of study, including religion, sociology, and literature, …