scholarly journals PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN THE WRITINGS OF FREDERICK II OF PRUSSIA

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
AVI LIFSCHITZ
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
State Service ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Window Dressing ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Status ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

Abstract Frederick II's writings have conventionally been viewed either as political tools or as means of public self-fashioning – part of his campaign to raise the status of Prussia from middling principality to great power. This article, by contrast, argues that Frederick's works must also be taken seriously on their own terms, and interpreted against the background of Enlightenment philosophy. Frederick's notions of kingship and state service were not governed mostly by a principle of pure morality or ‘humanitarianism’, as argued influentially by Friedrich Meinecke. On the contrary, the king's views were part and parcel of an eighteenth-century vision of modern kingship in commercial society, based on the benign pursuit of self-love and luxury. A close analysis of Frederick's writings demonstrates that authorial labour was integral to his political agency, publicly placing constraints on what could be perceived as legitimate conduct, rather than mere intellectual window-dressing or an Enlightened pastime in irresolvable tension with his politics.

The Status of Animals in Scottish Enlightenment Philosophy

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Wolloch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
Social Improvement ◽  
John Gregory ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

This article examines the consideration of animals by various eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, with special attention given to the physician and philosopher John Gregory, who utilized the comparison of human beings with animals as a starting point for a discussion about human moral and social improvement. In so doing Gregory, like most of his contemporary fellow Scottish philosophers, exemplified the basic anthropocentrism of the common early modern consideration of animals.

Shipped but Not Sold

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Um
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The West ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Indian Ocean

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Yemen hosted a lively community of merchants that came to the southern Arabian Peninsula from the east and the west, seeking, among other products, coffee, at a time when this new social habit was on the rise. Shipped but not Sold argues that many of the diverse goods that these merchants carried, bought, and sold at the port, also played ceremonial, social, and utilitarian roles in this intensely commercial society that was oriented toward the Indian Ocean. Including sumptuous foreign textiles and robes, Arabian horses, porcelain vessels, spices, aromatics, and Yemeni coffee, these items were offered, displayed, exchanged, consumed, or utilized by major merchants in a number of socially exclusive practices that affirmed their identity and status, but also sustained the livelihood of their business ventures. These traders invested these objects with layers of social meaning through a number of repetitive ceremonial exercises and observances, in addition to their everyday protocols of the trade. This study looks at what happened to these local and imported commodities that were diverted from the marketplace to be used for a set of directives that were seemingly quite non-transactional.

‘Levelling the Sublime’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
English Prose ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Status

The eighteenth century saw the curious tradition of translating Milton’s Paradise Lost into normative English prose and verse. The status of these translations as literary curiosities belies their serious ambition: to secure a universal readership of this English classic, an ambition also articulated in contemporary works of criticism and commentaries. Rather than treating this cluster of works as adaptations, this chapter conceives of them as intralingual translations, thus positioning them in the terms with which their authors describe them and within the earlier tradition of translation-as-commentary. Milton’s English translators aim at making his epic accessible to women, ‘foreigners’, ‘young people’, and ‘those of a capacity and knowledge below the first class of learning’, even if that accessibility requires some rewriting. Borrowing methods from the teaching of Latin, these authors established a practice that persists to this day in student-friendly translations of English poetry.

Interesting Haydn: On Attention's Materials

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 655-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mathew
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Commercial Environment

This article examines the idea of interest and the interesting in the late eighteenth century through Haydn's London experiences of the 1790s. It argues that several of Haydn's London compositions, together with the surviving records of his English trips, bear the traces of a metropolitan mediascape and urban commercial environment in which attention and desire were newly conceivable in terms of the psychic “investments” of interest—a concept that notably oscillates between what we would nowadays consider separate economic and aesthetic meanings. Looking again at Haydn's late encounter with England's burgeoning commercial society might prompt musicologists to rethink the nature of their own scholarly interests, as well as the deeper histories of currently popular methodological paradigms that aim to resolve musicology's objects of study into networks of people and things gathered together by entangled interests and “concerns.”

Verse Miscellanies in the Eighteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carly Watson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The Status ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Distinct Kind

The eighteenth century was an age of miscellanies; thousands of miscellaneous collections containing verse appeared in print over the course of the century. This article considers miscellanies as a distinct kind of verse collection; whereas anthologies promote authorship as a category of literary definition, miscellanies invite readers to sample a variety of poetic forms and genres and often include poems without authorial attribution. The eighteenth-century tradition of miscellanies devoted exclusively to poetry has its roots in the late seventeenth century, and many aspects of seventeenth-century miscellany culture persisted well into the next century. This article looks at a number of ways in which verse miscellanies offer fresh perspectives on eighteenth-century literary culture. The popularity and reception of particular poems and poets, the formation of the English literary canon, and the status of authorship are all areas in which miscellanies make a significant contribution to critical understanding.

scholarly journals The Philosophy of the Enlightenment as a Paradigm of Transhumanism

Problemos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 186-197
Author(s):  
Marius Markuckas
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Program ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Status ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

In the works devoted to the phenomenon of transhumanism, it is widely recognized that philosophy of the Enlightenment had a great intellectual influence on the formation of transhumanism. Yet, this article states that the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy can be reasonably treated as not only consisting the conceptual transhumanism core but also as being a source of its internal contradictions. The paper defends the position that transhumanism in general is an intrinsically controversial project and introduces the premises for this contradiction – the basic anthropological views inherited from philosophy of the Enlightenment. Finally, the article questions the status of transhumanism as a techno-scientific program and states it to be an ideologically engaged project in anthropological engineering, which, in its turn, is devoid of any clear theoretical and practical outline.

scholarly journals Human Rights

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Reetta Toivanen ◽  
Dorothée Cambou
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Legal Situation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Development Goals

This chapter takes up the status of the human in terms of rights and law. Surveying the status of human rights law within the framework of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the authors highlight the cultural context of Arctic Indigenous peoples, namely the Sámi people in Finland. The lack of legal and political agency is a barrier not only to sustainable and culturally desirable livelihoods, as the authors detail: this legal situation enables ongoing extractivist projects in the form of mining and forestry.

scholarly journals Russia and Russians: The Image in the Eyes of the West in History and Modern

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-207
Author(s):  
Larisa S. Ruban ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
System Analysis ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Xviii Century ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
The Status ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
Opinion Polls

From the XVIII to the XXI century, there was an evolution of the image of Russia in the perception of its Western states. These changes can be traced according to the methodology of system analysis. The data of the project “Russia in the Western European press of the XVIII century” of the Higher School of Economics University and international expert surveys of the project “Dialogue partnership as a factor of stability and integration” 2005–2019 are analyzed in 16 countries, empirical materials of public opinion polls conducted by the Gallop Institute (2007, 2010), INION (2008–2012) and the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2002, 2007) on the study of socio-cultural aspects of the European identity of Russians. The content analysis of publications on this problem is carried out. Comparative analysis shows that the perception of our country by Western states has changed and its image has evolved: from a militarily strong power acting on an equal footing with Western countries in the XVIII century, to the image of the “gendarme of Europe” that developed in the XIX century, and to the personification of Russia as a “citadel of communist evil” in the twentieth century, starting from 1917, and then at the turn of the twentieth century and in the XXI century as a country that has lost the status of a “great power”. A number of experts assess Russia as a regional power trying to regain the status of a great power.

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