The Elucidated Entity (Translated, Annotated, and Illustrated): A brand-new discourse showing that there are invisible irrational animals in nature - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

This special edition brings for the first time in English the most popular work of Antonio de Fuentelapeña, and includes:

• A newly prepared English translation
• 38 explanatory and historical annotations
• 10 newly created illustrations
• A reading guide and historical chronology
• A glossary, bibliography, and analytical index

First published in 1676, The Elucidated Entity is one of the most singular works of Spanish natural philosophy. Antonio de Fuentelapeña investigates a remarkable question: could material beings exist in nature while remaining invisible to human perception?

Drawing upon scholastic philosophy, theology, medicine, optics, accounts of spontaneous generation, and the scientific debates of his century, Fuentelapeña constructs an elaborate theory of invisible creatures and hidden natural causes. His arguments offer modern readers an extraordinary window into the intellectual world of Baroque Spain, where inherited Aristotelian ideas encountered observation, experiment, folklore, and emerging scientific thought.

This English edition presents the complete work in a carefully reconstructed and readable translation. Its annotations explain historical references, philosophical terminology, obsolete scientific theories, and passages that can easily be misunderstood outside their seventeenth-century context. Ten original illustrations and extensive supplementary materials further illuminate the book’s unusual intellectual universe.

A fascinating primary source for readers interested in the history of science, early modern philosophy, obscurantism and magic, metaphysics, occult thought, and the boundaries between reason and wonder.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.