WHERE IS AMERICA IN THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS?

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Intellectual Networks ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Athanasius Kircher ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Where is America in the republic of letters? This question has formed in my mind over the last four years as I have collaborated on a new project based at Stanford University called Mapping the Republic of Letters. The project aims to enrich our understanding of the intellectual networks of major and minor figures in the republic of letters, the international world of learning that spanned the centuries roughly from 1400 to 1800. By creating visual images based on large digitized data sets, we hope to reveal the hidden structures and conditions that nourished the growth of the republic of letters in the early modern era and the causes of its transformation in the nineteenth century. This task has only recently become feasible with the digitization of the correspondences of major intellectuals such as Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Athanasius Kircher, and Voltaire, and of libraries, cabinets of artifacts, and Grand Tour itineraries.

Philosophic Pride

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Oosterhoff
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Approach To Learning ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Moment

The moment unfolded in this book unravelled in the following decades, partly because its students moved on, partly because Lefèvre took up a controversial role in the French Reformation. But his circle’s books continued to cultivate a particular approach to learning, and especially to the cultural place of mathematics, through the sixteenth century. This epilogue picks out a specialist strand of this influence in Lefèvre’s edition of Euclid, often reprinted and used in the republic of letters. A second strand is discernible in the pragmatic stance towards the utility of mathematics held by their heirs, Oronce Fine and Peter Ramus, which came to define European culture.

scholarly journals Geldtheorie und -politik in Preußen Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-257
Author(s):  
Jan Greitens
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Monetary Theory ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
Monetary Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Value Of Money ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractIn the history of economic thought, monetary theories in the Germanspeaking world of the early modern era are considered backward compared to the approaches in other European countries. This backwardness can be illustrated by two authors from the mid-18th century who were not only contemporaries but also successively in the service of Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia. The first is Johann Philipp Graumann, one of the 'projectors' of the 18th century. As master of the mints in Prussia, he developed a coin project, where he tried to implement a new monetary standard to promote trade, generate seigniorage income and implement the Prussian coins as a kind of a reserve currency. In his writings, he developed a typical mercantilistic monetary theory with a clear understanding of the mechanism in the balance of payments. But even when he tried to include credit instruments, he did not take banks or broader financial markets into account. The second thinker is Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, who took the opposite position concerning the coin project as well as in his theory. He defended a strictly metalistic monetary approach where the value of money is only based on the metal's value. While Graumann rejected the English coin system, Justi recommended its laws for countries without their own mines, because the sovereign should not misuse his right of coinage. For him, the monetary system had tobe reliable and stable to serve trade and economic development.

Experimentalists in the Republic of Letters

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 89-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Otto Sibum
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Experimental Knowledge ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Academic Recognition ◽  
Electro Magnetic

ArgumentWithin the Republic of Letters the art of experiment led to immense reorientation and an extensive redrawing of the enlightened map of natural knowledge. This paper will investigate the formative period of the exact sciences from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century when the persona of the experimentalist as a scientific expert was shaped. The paper focuses on Moritz Hermann Jacobi’s experimental knowledge derived from his modeling of an electro-magnetic self-acting machine and the social and epistemological problems of its integration into traditional academic life. His struggle to achieve academic recognition and credibility for his experimental work reflects not just his individual quandary, but important structural problems of the historical development of experimental knowledge traditions and science in what has been called the “second scientific revolution.”

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