Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster
Gerard Passannante
Abstract
Catastrophizing argues that the seismic encounter between early modern culture and materialism (the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter) can be understood through a history of mental disasters. As early modern thinkers pondered the insensible causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they both conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded to those disasters as if they were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers—from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s g ... More
Keywords: catastrophizing, philosophy, catastrophe, disaster, materialism, early modern, Renaissance, affect, intellectual history
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 | Print ISBN-13: 9780226612218 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2019 | DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226612355.001.0001 |
