Navakas, Eugene Glasberg (Author)
University of California, Irvine
Kroll, Richard
Edition Details: Advisor: Kroll, Richard
Physical Details: 244 pp.
Language: English
In this dissertation, I argue that radical Academic epistemology pervades the writing of a number of otherwise very different seventeenth century English authors in the form of a shared conception of travel. In particular, I argue that Robert Boyle, John Dryden, William Harvey, John Milton, and William Dampier all conceive of travel as a repetitious labor, or travail, to make knowledge visible. Together, these authors employ this shared conception of travel in order to defend the probabilistic radical Academic skepticism that they inherit and adapt from Cicero as the best means of acquiring elemental, moral, sovereign, physiological, theologico-empirical, and natural knowledge. In Chapter One, I analyze the explicit statements of epistemological preference in Boyle's Sceptical Chymist and Dryden's "Life of Plutarch," then attempt to integrate those statements with their authors' uses of travel metaphor, from Boyle's critical analogy of the chymists to the navigators of Solomon's Tarshish fleet to Dryden's more admiring analogy of well-crafted biography to a prospective glass. In Chapter Two, I compare Dryden's Aeneis with the roughly contemporary English translations of the Aeneid by John Ogilby and Richard Lauderdale. I conclude that Dryden's Aeneis alone depicts Aeneas's voyages in terms of physiological circulation--in particular, as a circulatory process designed to restore the health of the Trojan succession by reinvigorating the displaced Trojan household gods, or heart. In Chapter Three, I read Dryden's Aeneis alongside Harvey's De motu cordis and De circulatione sanguinis . I argue that Aeneas's travels in Dryden's Aeneis share many of the features of Harvey's revolutionary cardiocentric theory. I also argue that Harvey's comparison of the heart to a king suggests that Aeneas ultimately acquires, according to Dryden, a laudably skeptical form of sovereign knowledge. Lastly, in Chapter Four, I compare the epistemological function of travel in Milton's Paradise Lost and Dampier's A New Voyage Round the World . I argue that these texts' villainous depictions of the travails of Satan and Dampier the pirate ultimately illuminate the humbler but far more virtuous travails of Milton himself and Dampier the naturalist--travails equally well grounded in empirical, probabilistic radical Academic skepticism.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 70/02 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3347822.
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