Hannah Dawson
Making the First Move
The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
By Jessica Riskin
University of Chicago Press 548pp £28
The world used to be full of magic and then science took it all away. If you went to university in the 16th century, you learned about a universe that pulsed with life and purpose. You learned that every individual thing has a natural motion to its proper end, an internal appetite for what is good for itself. A man, for example, desires to use his reason. An acorn has an appetite to turn into an oak. Even a stone thrown into the air, Aristotle wrote, has an appetite to fall to the ground.
The so-called scientific revolutionaries of the 17th century laughed at this view of nature. They said that it was an elaborate fantasy spun out of words rather than things, no more real than sprites. As Thomas Hobbes observed, it was pretty funny to say that ‘heavy bodies’ knew what was good for them (falling), when even human beings – who in England had just come through a civil war – did not seem to have a clue.
For Hobbes, all that exists in the world is matter in motion. Indeed, as he put it with stunning reductionism, ‘Life itself is but Motion’. While Hobbes’s iteration of the new philosophy was extreme, alarming many of his contemporaries with its thoroughgoing materialism, it nevertheless exemplifies the more general mechanistic
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm