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Publications

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A Possible Source for the Term Mental Sight in John Milton's Paradise Lost 11.418 in Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed I:4.

Samson's Lockean Person: Prefigurations of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Milton's Samson Agonistes.

Samson's Lockean Person: Prefigurations of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Milton's Samson Agonistes.

This paper proposes a new source for the term "mental sight" in PL 11.418 in Maimonides’s discussion of prophecy in Guide of the Perplexed I: 4. It will show that Milton alludes to Maimonides's term "mental sight" to mark the moment of union between Adam's mind and the angelic intellect in Adam's prophetic vision as distinctly cognitive. By using Maimonides’s term to describe this moment, Milton may be seen as implying that even in his fallen condition Adam is capable of the highest degree of moral and intellectual perfection that is required in Maimonides’s Guide for the union of the human and the angelic intellects. For Milton, as for Maimonides, this moment is an act of intellectual rather than mystical union, in which the human mind passes from potentiality to actuality to acquire knowledge of the divine.

Samson's Lockean Person: Prefigurations of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Milton's Samson Agonistes.

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 21.3 (2021):1-19

doi:10.1353/jem.2021.0016

This essay proposes that in Samson Agonistes (1671) Milton represents Samson’s development of self as a psychological process that is conditioned on Samson’s capacity to change his initial Hobbesian idea of self as a spatial construct to an understanding of himself as self-constituted by acts of consciousness. Samson’s process of self-constitution is, it is suggested, very similar to Locke’s theory of personal identity, published twenty-three years later in the second edition of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Further, the connection Milton makes between personhood and freedom is strikingly similar to Locke’s understanding of the way in which these terms are linked. For Milton, as for Locke, only persons can become full-fledged agents. In Samson Agonistes, Milton offers the reader an opportunity to experience the process by which Samson develops into person, his choice not to respond to divine call, and, consequently, his failure to become a free agent. In Milton’s representation, Samson’s failure to achieve free agency results in a violent act that destroys both the Philistines and himself.

Identity over Time in Paradise Lost

University of Toronto Quarterly, 90.1 (2021): 42-57.

doi.org/10.3138/utq.90.1.03

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Milton’s Aristotelian Transformations in the Representation of Regenerative Change

Modern Philology, 118 No. 3 (2021): 390-408

doi.org/10.1086/712386

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A Possible Source for John Milton’s Paradise Lost 12.270-79 in Job 42:5

Notes and Queries, 67 (3) (2020),  383–385

https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjaa096

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Samson's Now and 'I': Their Development in Time

Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 21 (2), 2020

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Meanwhile: Paradisian Infinity in Paradise Lost

Partial Answers,19 No. 1 (2021).

doi:10.1353/pan.2021.0000

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Temporal Succession in Samson Agonistes

Philosophy and Literature44.2 (2020): 298-309.

doi:10.1353/phl.2020.0023

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Milton's Aristotelian Now

Milton Studies, 57 (2016), 95-117

http://www.jstor.org/stable/26396089

I propose that underlying the various temporal functions of the now in Paradise Lost is a concrete and intelligible structure, which is modelled on Aristotle’s concept of the now in Physics IV. Similar to its Aristotelian prototype, the Miltonic now serves as a medium of interaction between mind and world, in and through which the unfallen mind transforms kinetic into temporal order.
By analyzing the two distinct ways in which the now is used in the language of the unfallen and fallen mind I argue that sequentiality is indispensable for our understanding of morality in Milton’s poem and is the only medium in and through which the individual achieves a coherent sense of his or her self as a free moral agent, who is capable of regeneration.

Milton’s Aevum: The Time Structure of Prevenient Grace in Paradise Lost

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Pardon may be Found in Time Besought:' Two Time Structures of the Mind in Paradise Lost and McTaggart's Theory of Time

Milton Studies, 52 (2011), 169-183

https://doi.org/10.2307/26395946

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Milton’s Thomistic Error: On the usefulness of the distinction between mistake and error in Samson Agonistes (Co-author Giora Hon)

Speer, Andreas, and Mauriège, Maxime, eds. Irrtum – Error – Erreur (Miscellanea Mediaevalia Band 40). De Gruyter, 2018

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1.Ayelet Langer, "A Possible Source for the Term Mental Sight in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 11.418 in Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed I: 4, Notes and Queries, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjae074

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Ayelet C. Langer

I'm a senior lecturer at the Department of English at Haifa University. My research interests are Early Modern literature with an emphasis on John Milton's poetry and its intellectual sources and engagements. I have published essays on Milton's representation of time, change, and infinity in light of Aristotle's Physics, the distinction between the A- and B-series of time developed by the 20th century Cambridge philosopher John M. E. McTaggart, Aquinas's commentary on the Book of Job, and Locke's theory of personal identity.  I'm now working on a book project, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, on Milton and Time.


https://haifa.academia.edu/AyeletLanger

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3566-3413

Get in Touch

Dr. Ayelet Langer
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Haifa
199 Aba Khoushy Ave
Mount Carmel, Haifa
Israel 3498838

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