Sources of the Self From the Renaissance to the 20th Century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elwin Hofman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Locke ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Absence Of Power

The history of the self studies continuities and changes in ideas about and experiences of the individual mind through time, attending to questions of individuality, identity, stability, self-possession, and interiority. Traditionally, this subject has often been approached as an intellectual history, analyzing philosophers’ explicit writings about the self. Through the work of people such as René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, scholars have traced a growing sense of individuality and self-possession since the 16th century, and an increasing feeling of inner depth since the 18th century. The focus on intellectual sources of the self has been criticized, however, by scholars who stress the importance of practices and of social differences. They have broadened the scope of the field by looking at cultural sources, such as autobiographical writing, literature, art, rituals, and festivities. Still other historians have criticized the absence of power in many accounts of the history of the self and stress the institutional and political sources of the self, including religious institutions, schools, and legal systems. Throughout these different approaches, debates continue about whether a “modern self” can be traced, and when such a modern self can be situated. While many recent scholars stress the need to examine different cultures of the self at any given time in their own right, others argue that it remains important to trace grand shifts in this history.

scholarly journals O CONCEITO DE “INFÂNCIA” NO CONTEXTO DA MODERNIDADE EUROPEIA (SÉCULOS XVII-XIX)

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dulce Regina Baggio Osinski ◽  
Amanda Siqueira Torres Cunha
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Locke ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Education History ◽  
Port Royal ◽  
Friedrich Froebel ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts

Este artigo analisa o conceito de “infância” a partir de formulações que marcaram a modernidade, inserindo-se no campo das pesquisas em história intelectual da educação e relacionando-se de modo mais específico com a história dos conceitos. A investigação tratará do contexto europeu, definindo como recorte temporal o período entre os séculos XVII e XIX. As reflexões de Reinhart Koselleck a partir do campo da história dos conceitos serão cotejadas com as de autores como Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin e Kohan, que discutem a infância em perspectiva histórica. Como fontes, serão analisados os discuros de intelectuais envolvidos com a infância e sua formação, tais como os mestre de Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John  Locke, Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi e Friedrich Froebel, os quais evidenciam a construção, manutenção ou ressignificação do conceito de infância no decorrer do tempo, graças a movimentos de circulação e apropriação. Foi possível perceber, no período analisado, que o conceito de infância em circulação no século XVII e início do século XVIII, relacionado a um número maior de aspectos negativos e concebido como um momento da vida imperfeito, pecaminoso e separado da vida adulta, cedeu paulatinamente lugar, até meados do século XIX, à ideia de um período com características próprias e relevante para a concretização do projeto de homem moderno.Palavras-chave: História da educação; história dos conceitos; conceito de infância; infância e modernidade.THE CONCEPT OF "CHILDHOOD" IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN MODERNITY (XVII-XIX CENTURIES)AbstractThis article analyzes the concept of "childhood" from formulations that marked modernity, inserting itself in the field of research in the intellectual history of education and relating more specifically to the history of concepts. The research will deal with the European context, defining as temporal cut-off the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Reinhart Koselleck's reflections from the field of concept history will be compared with authors such as Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin and Kohan, who discuss childhood in historical perspective. As sources, the discourses of intellectuals involved with childhood and its formation, such as the Masters of Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel and Jean Jacques Rousseau, will be analyzed, which put in evidence the construction, maintenance or re-signification of the concept of childhood in the course of time, thanks to movements of circulation and appropriation. It was possible to perceive, in the analyzed period, that the concept of childhood in circulation in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, related to a greater number of negative aspects and conceived as a moment of imperfect, sinful life separated from adult life, gradually gave place, until de nineteenth century, to the idea of a period with its own characteristics and relevant to the realization of the modern man project.Key-words: History of education; history of concepts; concept of childhood; childhood and modernity.EL CONCEPTO DE "INFANCIA" EN EL CONTEXTO DE LA MODERNIDAD EUROPEA (SÉCULOS XVII-XIX) Resumen Este artículo analiza el concepto de "infancia" a partir de formulaciones que marcaron la modernidad, insertándose en el campo de las investigaciones en historia intelectual de la educación y relacionándose de modo más específico con la historia de los conceptos. La investigación tratará del contexto europeo, definiendo como recorte temporal el período entre los siglos XVII y XIX. Las reflexiones de Reinhart Koselleck a partir del campo de la historia de los conceptos serán cotejadas con autores como Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin y Kohan, que discuten la infancia en perspectiva histórica. Como fuentes, se analizarán los discursos de intelectuales involucrados con la infancia y su formación, como los maestros de Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel y Jean Jacques Rousseau, que evidencian la construcción, el mantenimiento o la resignificación del concepto de infancia en el transcurso del tiempo, gracias a movimientos de circulación y apropiación. En el período analizado, el concepto de infancia en circulación en el siglo XVII y el inicio del siglo XVIII, que se relacionó con un número mayor de aspectos negativos, siendo concebido como un momento de la vida imperfecto, pecaminoso y separado de la vida adulta, cedió paulatinamente lugar, hasta el siglo XIX, a la idea de un período con características propias y relevantes para la concreción del proyecto de hombre moderno.Palabras clave: Historia de la educación; historia de los conceptos; concepto de infancia; la infancia y la modernidad.   

Natural Law Republicanism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

By any metric, Cicero’s works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. This book suggests that perhaps Cicero’s most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism’s unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, this book demonstrates that Cicero’s thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero’s vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people’s collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. This book traces the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero’s original articulation through the American founding. It concludes by exploring how modern political ideas remain dependent on the conception of just politics first elaborated by Rome’s great philosopher-statesman.

Locke's review of the Principia

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-161 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Political Exile ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
Independent Account

The publication in July 1687 of Newton’s Principia mathematica gave rise to only four reviews in the European periodical press. The first was Edmond Halley’s pre-publication notice in the Philosophical Transactions (1). Then a year elapsed before the Bibliothèque Universelle (2), the Acta Eruditorum (3), and the Journal des Sçavans (4), approached the book. Of these reviews that which appeared in Jean Leclerc’s widely read Bibliothèque Universelle has received least attention from historians. This is unfortunate because, of several merits, two in particular are important for the intellectual history of the period: it was written specifically for the large and growing intellectual class (5) of western Europe who for the most part were interested in the new physical sciences, but were untrained in the mathematics necessary to understand many of the newest advances in them. And the author of this review, which was the first independent account of Newton’s book to reach this Continental (largely French-speaking) audience, was John Locke, then a voluntary political exile in Holland (6).

scholarly journals Sociological portrait of the self-employed in contemporary Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 821-836
Author(s):  
Z. T. Golenkova ◽  
Yu. V. Goliusova ◽  
T. I. Gorina
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
Informal Employment ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Real Self

The article considers the development of self-employment in the contemporary society: the history of its representation in legal norms and practices; the scope of informal employment according to statistical and sociological data; definitions of self-employment in the scientific literature. The self-employed are usually defined as not employed in organizations but independently selling goods and services produced by themselves. The global number of the self-employed grows. The authors present an algorithm for calculating the indicator potential self-employed based on the secondary analysis of the 27th wave of the RLMS (2018), and stress the lack of a unified methodology for calculating informal employment. According to the official data, the number of the self-employed in Russia ranges from several thousands to several millions, which confuses researchers who study this phenomenon. The article focuses on the results of the study Self-Employed: Who Are They? (Moscow, 2019), whose object were not potential but real self-employed selected on the basis of online advertisements of their services in Moscow. The authors collected information with the method of semi-formalized telephone interview. Based on the collected data, the authors make conclusions about motivating and demotivating factors of self-employment: independence, freedom in planning time and activity, distrust in the state, lack of social guarantees, unpredictable legislation, and imperfect tax system. Today, the status of the self-employed in Russia is still unclear and often substitutes the individual entrepreneur status in order to apply for tax preferences.

Confession, conscience, and selfhood on trial

2018 ◽  
pp. 124-177
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Linear Pattern ◽  
Moral Question ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
Over Time

This chapter deals with the role of the self and conscience in defending oneself against the charge of witchcraft. To add depth to intellectual concepts—and teleologies—of the self, we must understand how the individual self was understood, felt, and experienced. Particularly for the crime of witchcraft, the crux of the trial was premised on the moral question of what kind of person would commit such a crime. Those on trial for witchcraft in the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg invoked the idioms of ‘mind’, ‘conscience’, ‘heart’, or ‘self’ in constructing their defence. Through four case studies, ranging from 1565 to 1678, this chapter examines the different ways in which people could conceptualize their person, and shows that change over time in the ‘development’ of the modern self was not a uniform or directly linear pattern.

Contexts (II)

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-132
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man

Chapter 3, continuing Chapter 2’s intellectual history of the impression, begins by exploring British aestheticism and its roots in Kant and romanticism (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth). It then turns to twentieth-century theories of performativity, which, it argues, combine elements of the empiricist and the aesthetic (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). James followed Pater in resurrecting the ‘impression’. Pater found in Hume’s impression a role for the imagination at the heart of consciousness. But the interpretive excesses of James’s protagonists’ cognitive impressions must also be understood alongside the more flamboyant aestheticism of Pater’s disciple Wilde, and his ‘critic as artist’. The most active of James’s impressions, however, are performative: they are impressions made, not received. Performativity helps frame an account of the impression that encompasses both the receiving and making of impressions, and the confusion between the two.

The History of Science as European Self-Portraiture

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORRAINE DASTON
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
World History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

Since the Enlightenment, the history of science has been enlisted to show the unity and distinctiveness of Europe. This paper, written on the occasion of the award of the 2005 Erasmus Prize to historians of science Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, traces the intertwined narratives of the history of science and European modernity from the 18th century to the present. Whether understood as triumph or tragedy (and there have been eloquent proponents of both views), the Scientific Revolution has been portrayed as Europe's decisive break with tradition – the first such break in world history and the model for all subsequent epics of modernization in other cultures. The paper concludes with reflections on how a new history of science, exemplified in the work of Shapin and Schaffer, may transform the self-image of Europe and conceptions of truth itself.

scholarly journals Outobiografie as hermeneutiek van die self: Van Rousseau tot Le Clézio

Literator ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Snyman
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ken Bugul ◽  
Marguerite Yourcenar ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Intercultural Encounters ◽  
Individual Existence ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Historical Model

Autobiography as hermeneutics of the self, from Rousseau to Le Clézio. This article investigates the hypothesis that autobiography can be regarded as a type of hermeneutics of the self. In order to achieve this, a selection of French autobiographical texts was analysed. As this study is a reworked version of an inaugural lecture, it presents an overview rather than a detailed analysis of the theories or the texts it refers to. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, generally regarded as a cornerstone of modern autobiography, was used as a point of departure for the interpretation of operations of understanding at work in autobiographical texts. The article demonstrates how the writers of the rest of the corpus of texts question Rousseau’s historical model in different ways according to more recent concepts of the self. Thus it is argued that George Perec replaces the historical model of understanding with an approach based on deciphering signs from the past; that Nathalie Sarraute combines the New Novel’s concept of the divided subject with that of tropismes in order to give a truthful representation of her childhood; and that Roland Barthes problematises the notion of language as a medium of expression of subjectivity in his ‘anti-outobiography’. This study furthermore demonstrates how Marguerite Yourcenar breaks with the anthropomorphism associated with humanism to pave the way for the realisation that the presence of the Other profoundly determines the understanding of the self. Finally, the ethics of dealing with the Other in intercultural encounters, as recorded in Ken Bugul and Jean-Marie Le Clézio’s autobiographies, is examined. The article shows how, from the 18th century onwards, literary and philosophical trends influenced the act of understanding and interpreting the individual existence and hence the nature of autobiography.

VENUS ON THE SOFA: WOMEN, NEOCLASSICISM, AND THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Early National ◽  
Mercy Otis Warren ◽  
History Of

What did early national Americans mean when they articulated fears of “luxury and effeminacy,” those twin sins of a republic that idolized the classical virtues of manly self-restraint? This essay argues that the fear of luxury and effeminacy circulated not just as airy metaphor but as palpable reality, specifically in the figure of the female recumbent on the sofa. The article traces separately the careers of Enlightenment Venus, who especially in her recumbent form embodied fears of passion in a republic built on reasoned consent, and the sofa, a piece of neoclassical furniture that rose to great popularity at this time and was envisioned as both effeminate and luxurious in fictional and nonfiction writing. The essay then joins the two figures of recumbent Venus and the sofa, showing how they were mutually enabling, and how they entered into early national conversations about labor and race. It concludes by examining how two educated American women, the self-described Roman matrons Mercy Otis Warren and Martha Bayard Smith, incorporated the image of the supine woman and her implied sofa into fictional writings about classical polities in danger. By knitting political ideologies, imaginative worlds, and neoclassical objects, the essay suggests a way for historians to flesh out the intellectual history of early national women, showing how they could participate in a conversation about modern politics and classical antiquity from which we have assumed they were largely disbarred.

scholarly journals Management and communication ideas in the late 17th – early 19th centuries

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-53
Author(s):  
Denis Kislov
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
John Locke ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Order ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Government

The article examines the period from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century, when on the basis of deep philosophical concepts, a new vision of the development of statehood and human values raised. At this time, a certain re-thinking of the management and communication ideas of Antiquity and the Renaissance took place, which outlined the main promising trends in the statehood evolution, which to one degree or another were embodied in practice in the 19th and 20th centuries. A systematic approach and a comparative analysis of the causes and consequences of those years achievements for the present and the immediate future of the 21st century served as the methodological basis for a comprehensive review of the studies of that period. The scientific novelty of this study is the demonstration of the theoretical heritage complexity of the Enlightenment for the general history of management and communication ideas. The article presents an analysis of the views and concepts of the late 17th – early 18th century thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who defend the right to freedom of communication and liberalization of relationships in the system: “person – society – state”, associated with their own understanding of the government role. French enlighteners François Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, Etienne Condillac were much smaller theorists in management and communication issues, but their successful epistolary and encyclopedic communication practice, starting from the third decade of the XVIII century significantly increased the self-awareness of the masses. The influence of their ideas on the possibility of progressive development of social relations, on improving the national states manageability and on how of a new type scientists were able not only to popularize knowledge, but also to practically make it an object of public communication is shown. In this context, the author considers the importance of political and legal communication problems in the vision of Charles Louis Montesquieu and analyzes the republican governance ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as an outstanding figure of the Enlightenment, who attached great importance to the forms and methods of forming of the state governance structures. At the end of the historical period under consideration, a comparative historical analysis of the most significant statements of such thinkers as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is presented. These founders of the scientific discourse around the problems of power and state, war and peace, the effectiveness of government and communication in relations with the people laid the enduring foundations of the theoretical argumentation of two opposing views on the cardinal problem of our time – the possibility or impossibility of achieving mutually acceptable foundations of a new world order peacefully, excluding all types of hybrid wars. The general picture of the scientific and technological achievements of this period, influencing the level of understanding of the management and communication functions of the state of that time, is given in comparison with the present.

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