In the “Historical Background” that opens Doctor Illuminatus, A Ramon Llull Reader, Llull translator, commentator, and biographer Anthony Bonner introduces a startlingly complex figure (noting “This initial characterization is taken largely…Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labor; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give…7 Bonner, Anthony, ed. and tr. Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232-1316). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
8 Coudert, Allison P. Leibniz and the Kabbalah, in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion. Coudert, Allison P. , Popkin,…
Anthony Bonner
scholar · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Anthony Bonner is the primary modern translator and editor of Ramon Llull's works, making his scholarship essential for understanding Llull's combinatorial logic systems and their influence on early modern thought about knowledge organization. His introductions and translations serve as a gateway for the course to examine how Llull's ars combinatoria—an early algorithmic system for generating all possible knowledge through systematic permutation—prefigures contemporary questions about computational thinking and artificial systems. Bonner's work enables readings that trace a genealogy from medieval mysticism through Leibniz to modern AI, positioning Llull as a proto-computational thinker wrestling with problems of representation and exhaustive synthesis.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Ramon Llull 3Gilles Deleuze 2Jonathan Swift 2Daniel Libeskind 1Jorge Luis Borges 1Ada Lovelace 1Alan Mathison Turing 1Allison P. Coudert 1Charles Babbage 1Donato Ricci 1Gordon M. Weiner 1Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1Richard H. Popkin 1Stuart Brown 1Thomas J. Misa 1Tom Conley 1Valentin Goujon 1Yuen-Ting Lai 1Jesus Christ 1Robert Pring-Mill 1