5. Philosophy in wartime

Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger ◽  
Knox Peden

In the early twentieth century, German philosophers like Husserl founded theories of phenomenology. ‘Philosophy in wartime: phenomenology and existentialism’ looks at initial adopters in France, some of whom were then quickly gripped by existentialism and structuralism through translations of Heidegger. The leading lights of mid-twentieth-century philosophy—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—explored our place in the world. To what extent are humans the product of traditions and socio-cultural practices? In the 1960s, philosophy moved towards approaches to political, social, and scientific problems that challenged the popular humanism of Sartre’s doctrines.

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.


Author(s):  
E.A. Radaeva ◽  

The purpose of this study is to present a model for the development of the expressionist method in the genre of the novel using the example of the evolution of the novelistic work of the Austrian writer of the early twentieth century L. Perutz. The results obtained: the creative method of the Austrian writer is moving from scientific knowledge to mysticism; in the center of all novels created with a large interval, there is always a confused hero, broken by what is happening (in other words, the absurdity of the world), whose state is often conveyed through gestures; the author finally moves away from linear narration to dividing the plot into almost autonomous stories, thematically gravitating more and more to the distant historical past. Scientific novelty: the novels of L. Perutz are for the first time examined in relative detail through the prism of the aesthetics of expressionism.


1969 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-234
Author(s):  
María Liliana Franco ◽  
Natalia Acosta ◽  
Lilian Chuaire

Emil Theodor Kocher is considered along with Frank Lahey, Theodor Billroth, William Halsted, Charles Mayo, George Crile and Thomas Dunhill as one of the «Magnificent Seven», referring to the group of surgeons who managed thyroidectomy to make it a safe and efficient intervention that it is now practiced throughout the world. He was author of numerous contributions towards medicine. One of his most important contributions was to elucidate the function of the thyroid gland, through the observation and study of thyroidectomyzed patients, for which he was recognized by the academic and scientific community during the early twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Greg Thomas

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.


Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson

This chapter discusses the Old Rhetoric, sketching the long persistence in the West—from Aristotle to the early twentieth century—of a ‘single meaning model’ of language, one that takes ambiguity for granted as an obstacle to persuasive speech and clear philosophical analysis. In Aristotle's works are the seeds of three closely related traditions of Western thought on ambiguity: the logicosemantic, the rhetorical, and the hermeneutic. The first seeks to eliminate ambiguity from philosophy because it hinders a clear analysis of the world. The second seeks to eliminate ambiguity from speech because it hinders the clear and persuasive communication of argument. The third, an extension of the second, seeks to resolve textual ambiguity because it hinders the reader's ability to grasp the writer's intention. The chapter then considers Aristotle's two types of verbal ambiguity: homonym and amphiboly. The solution to both—whether their presence in a discussion is accidental or deliberate—is what Aristotle calls diairesis or distinction, that is, the explicit clarification of the different meanings involved.


Author(s):  
Michael Allan

This chapter examines the provincialism of a literary world in early twentieth-century Egypt and France by focusing on two scenes of epistolary exchange: the letters exchanged between André Gide and Taha Hussein in 1939, and a series of imagined letters exchanged in the context of Hussein's 1935 novella Adīb (A Man of Letters). It first considers the transformation of theological questions into literature in the correspondence between Gide and Hussein before asking about the world that literature makes thinkable. It then analyzes the imaginary correspondence staged in Adīb that recounts the story of a friendship between two intellectuals from the same village. The Gide–Hussein correspondence invites us to contemplate on the circulation and dissemination of literary writing—the sorts of transnational exchanges by now integral to discourses of world literature and access to texts across languages and nationalities.


Author(s):  
April Pierce

In the middle of the twentieth century, British idealist philosophy was facing a slow but unmistakable decline in popularity. It would be replaced with a hard-nosed, literalist form of language philosophy. One could no longer take The Idea for granted; an analysis of form was required to defend metaphysical claims. Early twentieth-century philosophy had circumnavigated questions of form: How did language attach itself to the world? How did meaning ...


Author(s):  
John M. Coggeshall

This chapter presents the story of Liberia during the early twentieth century, through the Depression and the world wars. As the nation’s economy changes, African Americans continue to abandon the region for better economic opportunities as they are also forced out by restrictive Jim Crow segregation and racialized attacks. Both Soapstone Baptist Church and Soapstone School continue, critical anchors for community identity. Some residents return to care for aging relatives. The story of Liberia is presented through the memories of elderly residents and some local historical sources, including obituaries.


Author(s):  
Finn Fordham

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.


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