Newman on Liberal Education and Moral Pluralism

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Magill

The moral pluralism that characterises contemporary living can largely be attributed to the education that differentiates modern life from previous generations. During the industrial revolution in Britain in the nineteenth century John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was very sensitive to the importance of a more educated society, especially with regard to the development of religious faith and morals in an increasingly secular and sceptical age. Although his dedication to the advancement of knowledge remained throughout his life, his career commitment to formal learning began as an Anglican when he became a tutor at Oriel College, Oxford in 1826. In a sense his academic calling reached its zenith in 1852 as rector of the Catholic university at Dublin when he had the opportunity to express his view of liberal education by writing his university discourses.

Author(s):  
James L. Heft

The chapter describes the person and contribution of John Henry Newman (1801–1890) to the idea of a Catholic university. It describes in some detail his life; the challenges he faced in writing his classic, The Idea of a University; why that book is a classic; and his contribution to understanding the significance of liberal education, mentoring students, and student life and community.


Author(s):  
Roger Ekirch

Although a universal necessity, sleep, as the past powerfully indicates, is not a biological constant. Before the Industrial Revolution, sleep in western households differed in a variety of respects from that of today. Arising chiefly from a dearth of artificial illumination, the predominant form of sleep was segmented, consisting of two intervals of roughly 3 hours apiece bridged by up to an hour or so of wakefulness. Notwithstanding steps taken by families to preserve the tranquillity of their slumber, the quality of pre-industrial sleep was poor, owing to illness, anxiety, and environmental vexations. Large portions of the labouring population almost certainly suffered from sleep deprivation. Despite the prevalence of sleep-onset insomnia, awakening in the middle of the night was thought normal. Not until the turn of the nineteenth century and sleep’s consolidation did physicians view segmented sleep as a disorder requiring medication.


Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.


Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman

Hutton’s business success and social mobility are viewed in the context of Birmingham’s industrial development, a booming land market, the lack of government regulation, and the diversity of religious practice. This chapter reveals the economic framework that allowed Hutton to amass wealth. Once he settled in Birmingham, he found new ways to develop business skills and make money. Early failure stiffened his resolve, taught him lessons, and led him to focus on selling paper, instead of books. Convinced of the future value of land, he made risky speculations and accumulated large debts. A case study compares Hutton’s response to the Industrial Revolution with that of his sister, Catherine Perkins. Hutton devoted all his energies to making money and buying estates. His sister found greater happiness in her religious faith and charity. Their opposing views about land, trade, money, and religion reveal a spectrum of personal responses to rapid economic change.


Author(s):  
Kevin A Morrison

Abstract For roughly a decade, John Morley enjoyed a warm and deferential sociality with George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. The basis for their friendship was the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, which initially held great appeal to Morley, who had lost his religious faith while studying as an undergraduate at Balliol, Oxford. While Lewes and Eliot’s views on Comte were largely fixed by middle age, Morley, still in his twenties, was searching for a substitute belief system. As Morley began to embrace the liberal philosophy of (and form a friendship with) John Stuart Mill, who had declared himself to be an antagonist of Comte’s, Morley, Lewes, and Eliot increasingly held less in common. This lack of commonality gave Morley the critical distance to reassess the couple both personally and intellectually. Embracing a new philosophy and divergent aesthetic preferences, Morley developed an equivocal view of his friends, roughly two decades his senior. Utilizing letters, diary entries, published writings, and a previously untranslated document in French, this essay provides a complex portrait of an intergenerational friendship among three nineteenth-century intellectuals.


1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 113-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Péter Hanák

By abolishing feudalism, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 helped to create the economic preconditions and the legal-political framework necessary for capitalistic development. This made it possible for Hungary to adapt her economy to the market possibilities offered by the Industrial Revolution in western and central Europe and to share in the agrarian boom of the period between 1850 and 1873. The previously existing division of labor between western and eastern Europe and between the western and eastern parts of the Habsburg monarchy continued on a scale larger than before, with the significant difference, however, that this practice now speeded up rather than retarded the development of preconditions for capitalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century the preconditions for capitalism had come into existence in the Cisleithanian provinces at considerable expense to the Hungarian economy.


1958 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max E. Fletcher

The opening of the Suez Canal took place in a century crowded revolutionary changes in the shipping world. In sharp contrast to the slow pace of change and development in the preceding era, major changes occurred in almost every sector of the shipping industry in the nineteenth century. While many of the new departures can be explained, at least in part, by the application of the techniques of the Industrial Revolution to shipping, the opening of Suez went far to accelerate and give direction to these changes. The canal significantly altered shipbuilding techniques and practices and contributed to the precipitous decline in the importance of the sailing ship as a major world carrier. Suez helped to bring about die realignment and relative decline of the European entrepot trade. And the new channel led to significant shifts in the patterns of Eastern and Australasian trade.


2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

The ArgumentIn this essay I will sketch a few instances of how, and a few forms in which, the “invisible” became an epistemic category in the development of the life sciences from the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to most of the other papers in this issue, I do not so much focus on the visualization of various little entities, and the tools and contexts in which a visual representation of these things was realized. I will be more concerned with the basic problem of introducing entities or structures that cannot be seen, as elements of an explanatory strategy. I will try to review the ways in which the invisibility of such entities moved from the unproblematic status of just being too small to be accessible to the naked or even the armed eye, to the problematic status of being invisible in principle and yet being indispensable within a given explanatory framework. The epistemological concern of the paper is thus to sketch the historical process of how the “unseen” became a problem in the modern life sciences. The coming into being of the invisible as a space full of paradoxes is itself the product of a historical development that still awaits proper reconstruction.


PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-727 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Teukolsky

John Ruskin's Modern Painters V (1860) and Charles Baudelaire's “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) are contemporaneous texts that both champion modern painters. Yet the two have rarely been considered together; while Ruskin's work is usually taken to represent a moralistic Victorianism, Baudelaire's essay is a foundational text of aesthetic modernism. This article compares the two texts in order to arrive at a more accurate, descriptive sense of nineteenth-century aesthetics, especially at the mid-century moment when “the modern” emerges as an aesthetic value in both England and France. Ruskin and Baudelaire are shown to propose surprisingly similar aesthetic theories, in part because they negotiate the same traumas of modernity, such as the derailment of religion and the commodification of the material world. Positioned on the ruins of Romanticism, each text intimates an idea of the modern that is not quite modernism but is, in fact, eminently Victorian.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-116
Author(s):  
Rifqi Ayu Everina

Binary opposition is the most important aspect that can reveal how humans think, how humans produce meaning and understand reality (Culler, 1976). Therefore, the discovery of binary oppositions is useful in providing clues to the workings of human reason. In the context of narrative analysis, binary opposition can reveal how the logic behind a narrative is made. Based on this, this study highlights how the formation of binary opposition contained in the novel "Lettres de Mon Moulin" by Alphonse Daudet uses Lévi Strauss's theory of binary opposition (1955) and structural analysis using Freytag's plot theory (1863). The corpus of the research consists of six stories contained in the novel forming a binary opposition. After doing the analysis, it was found that a pair of words with binary opposition were included in the exclusive category and two pairs of words that were included in the non-exclusive binary opposition category. From these findings, it was found that the author of the novel, Daudet, gave directions on what was good and bad by giving a clear line of separation. This is in line with the context of making stories during the industrial revolution, which mapped the world into two things, namely traditional and modern life.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document