Cicero’s Philosophical Writing in Its Intellectual Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Claudia Moatti
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Intellectual Context

The Enneads of Plotinus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kalligas
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Christian Thought

This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus—a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep influence on early Christian thought and medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This volume covers the first three of the six Enneads, as well as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, a document in which Plotinus’s student—the collector and arranger of the Enneads—introduces the philosopher and his work. A landmark contribution to modern Plotinus scholarship, this commentary is the most detailed and extensive ever written for the whole of the Enneads. For each of the treatises in the first three Enneads, the volume provides a brief introduction that presents the philosophical background against which Plotinus’s contribution can be assessed; a synopsis giving the main lines and the articulation of the argument; and a running commentary placing Plotinus’s thought in its intellectual context and making evident the systematic association of its various parts with each other.

A Yogācāra Buddhist Theory of Metaphor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Tzohar
Keyword(s):  
Figurative Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Theory Of Meaning ◽  
Philosophical School ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Philosophical Texts

This book is about what metaphors mean and do within Buddhist texts. More specifically, it is about the fundamental Buddhist ambivalence toward language, which is seen as obstructive and yet necessary for liberation, as well as the ingenious response to this tension that one Buddhist philosophical school—the early Indian Yogācāra (3rd–6th century CE)—proposed by arguing that all language use is in fact metaphorical (upacāra). Exploring the profound implications of this claim, the book presents the full-fledged Yogācāra theory of meaning—one that is not merely linguistic, but also perceptual.Despite the overwhelming visibility of figurative language in Buddhist philosophical texts, its role and use have received relatively little attention in scholarship to date. This book is the first sustained and systematic attempt to present an indigenous Buddhist philosophical theory of metaphor. By grounding the Yogācāra’s pan-metaphorical claim in its broader intellectual context, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, the discussion reveals an intense Indian philosophical conversation about metaphor and language that reached across sectarian lines, and it also demonstrates its potential contribution to contemporary philosophical discussions of related topics. The analysis of this theory of metaphor radically reframes the Yogācāra controversy with the Madhyamaka; sheds light on the school’s application of particular metaphors, as well as its unique understanding of experience; and establishes the place of Sthiramati as an original Buddhist thinker of note in his own right, alongside Asaṅga and Vasubandhu.

‘The most beautiful of wars’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibylle Scheipers
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
Reform Period ◽  
Political Agent ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
The Individual

Clausewitz’s writings from the reform period combine themes that were central to his thought from his earliest texts and his correspondence, such as the value of the individual as the primary political agent. At the same time, they reflect a thorough engagement with the intellectual context of his time. In the Bekenntnisdenkschrift he presented a notion of war that emphasized its existential and emancipatory qualities. Clausewitz formulated his notion of war in its existential form against the backdrop of contemporary intellectual, political, and cultural discourses in Prussia and Germany more broadly. After the experience of the French Revolution’s descent into terror, the key question facing Clausewitz and his contemporaries was how to advance the liberation of the individual and society more broadly from traditional forms of political authority without risking a degeneration of all political institutions.

Dryden’s Post-Revolutionary Theology of Providence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John West
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

For Dryden, enthusiasm often signalled transcendence from the earthly and glimpsing the divine. The chapter examines the fate of this idea by tracing his late thinking about the relationship between providence and human action. The Hind and the Panther (1687) presents providence as mysteriously distant from humanity and inspiration as mediated through the Church. After the 1688 Revolution, such a view stood in contradistinction to the rhetoric of special providential intervention commonly used by Williamites. Dryden sometimes condemns this rhetoric as enthusiasm. His recurrent preoccupation in the 1690s is not militant Jacobitism, however, but learning to live in exile and suffering. The chapter argues that mystical Catholicism linked with Jansenism provides an intellectual context for this turn in Dryden’s thought. It reads this mysticism in Dryden’s late translations of Juvenal, Persius, Virgil, and Ovid which reflect on how contemplative reflection of God’s mysterious providence could help navigate a corrupt world.

Socialism and Socialist Intellectuals in French History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Wright
Keyword(s):  
French History ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Capitalist State ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
Relationship Of

This chapter sets out the specific historiographical basis for a new study of the French socialist movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that one particular framework—that of the reluctant relationship of socialism with power in the capitalist state—has dominated our approaches to writing the history of French socialism, and suggests that a new focus on temporalities, particularly exploring the clash between revolutionary, future-focused socialism, and present-minded socialism, opens up a new range of cultural, intellectual, and biographical sources for understanding the French socialist movement. It provides the specific intellectual context for understanding how historians in France today are seeking to rethink their intellectual inheritance from left-wing writers of earlier generations.

Durkheim’s French Neo-Kantian Social Thought: Epistemology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Morality in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Kant Yearbook ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56
Author(s):  
Dustin Garlitz
Keyword(s):  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Emotional Contagion ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Paradigm Case ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
Formative Years

AbstractThis article presents Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian social thinker and a source of the theory of emotional contagion. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is examined as Durkheim’s paradigm case of Neo-Kantianism. He is first considered among the intellectual context of French Neo-Kantianism and its figures Charles Renouvier, Émile Boutroux, and Octave Hamelin, all whom were influential in his formative years. Durkheim’s Neo-Kantianism in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is then juxtaposed to the Neo-Kantian legal philosophy of Emil Lask and Hans Kelsen. Agued is that Durkheim’s notions of distortion and emotional contagion are his leading contributions to Neo-Kantianism.

From Perinet to Jelinek: Viennese Theatre in Its Political and Intellectual Context

2004 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 552
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson ◽  
W. E. Yates ◽  
Allyson Fiddler ◽  
John Warren
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Context

Structure and Meaning in The Prelude, Book v

PMLA ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Morkan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Theory ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Conceptual Integrity

Although most critics have registered disappointment with Book v of Wordsworth's Prelude, a reading of that part of the epic in the light of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educational theory reveals that in it Wordsworth made a supremely unified and significant poetic statement. Such a reading of Book v demonstrates that Wordsworth feared that the overly manipulative systems of contemporary educational theorists would sever children from the sources of their imaginative growth. The Book shows that Wordsworth believed, in contrast with most contemporary educational theorists, that freedom and spontaneity were the sources of the imagination. If the childhood of humanity were deprived of the freedom necessary for imaginative growth, human culture, so important to man's earthly existence, would wither and die. In Book VWordsworth took a stand against what he thought was an overwhelming contemporary evil. If we read Book v in its proper intellectual context, the structural and conceptual integrity that previous critics have missed becomes apparent.

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