A Righteous Consensus, Whig Style

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
George M. Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
State Universities ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
Protestant Denominations

Various Protestant denominations founded hundreds of colleges during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even two-thirds of presidents of state universities were clergymen. Though those in the Reformed tradition tended to be the leading educators, denominational diversity and necessities of attracting varieties of students weakened doctrinal distinctives. The prevailing “Whig” ideal emphasized combining building a modern civilization with Christian morality. Educators, such as Francis Wayland or Mark Hopkins, confidently assumed that the best of objective common sense and modern science would support traditional Christianity. Colleges still promoted the evangelical tradition, as in campus revivals. They taught the classics as a way of developing moral faculties, as the Yale Report of 1828 advocated. Specifically Christian perspectives were found in capstone moral philosophy courses.

Dugald Stewart on intellectual character

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TANNOCH-BLAND
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Character ◽  
History Of

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) lectured in astronomy and political economy, held the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1775 to 1785, then the chair of moral philosophy from 1785 to 1810, and wrote extensively on metaphysics, political economy, ethics, philology, aesthetics, psychology and the history of philosophy and the experimental sciences. He is commonly regarded as the last voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, the articulate disciple of Thomas Reid, father of Scottish common sense philosophy. Recently some historians have begun to rediscover elements of the contribution Stewart made to early nineteenth-century British intellectual culture, and his Collected Works have been republished with a new introduction by Knud Haakonssen.

Samuel Stanhope Smith and Common Sense Philosophy at Princeton

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Bradford Bow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Educational Expectations ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Board Of Trustees ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Early American ◽  
Philosophy Professor ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

In this article, I discuss how Samuel Stanhope Smith advanced Reidian themes in his moral philosophy and examine their reception by Presbyterian revivalists Ashbel Green, Samuel Miller, and Archibald Alexander. Smith, seventh president and moral philosophy professor of the College of New Jersey (1779–1812), has received marginal scholarly attention regarding his moral philosophy and rational theology, in comparison to his predecessor John Witherspoon. As an early American philosopher who drew on the ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment including Common Sense philosophy, Smith faced heightened scrutiny from American revivalists regarding the danger his epistemology presented to the institution of religion. The Scottish School of Common Sense was widely praised and applied in nineteenth-century American moral philosophy, but before the more general American acceptance of Common Sense, Smith already appealed to Reidian themes in his methodology and treatment of external sensations, internal sensations, intellectual powers, and active powers of the human mind. In this paper, I argue that Smith's use of Reidian themes for grooming his student's morality conflicted with the educational expectations from revivalists on Princeton's board of trustees who demanded more attention on orthodox theology. I identify Smith's notions of causation, liberty, and the moral faculty as primary reasons for this tension over Princeton's educational purpose during the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Natural Kinds

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Cluster Theory ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Homeostatic Property Cluster ◽  
Natural Groups ◽  
Scientific Classification

Science posits entities that are neither individuals nor properties but kinds of individuals that share a number of distinct properties. Philosophers have designated them “natural kinds” and have held different views about how to distinguish them from arbitrary collections of individuals. The doctrine of “kinds” or “natural groups” was first explicitly introduced by nineteenth-century philosophers interested in taxonomy or scientific classification and continues to be the subject of lively debate in contemporary philosophy. After canvassing some of the philosophical controversies regarding natural kinds, the article presents two influential contemporary theories of natural kinds: essentialism and the homeostatic property cluster theory. The article goes on to defend naturalism, which is more in tune with the findings of modern science.

scholarly journals W poszukiwaniu początków oraz prób zrozumienia „zachowań symbolicznych”. Zarys problematyki

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Bożena Józefów-Czerwińska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Animal World

In academic literature there is a whole range of hypotheses relating to the genesis of the symbolic behavior, which are usually also associated with the beginnings of the development of spirituality. In the nineteenth century, the considerations conducted in this area were often influenced by negative stereotypes (relating, among others, to hunter-gatherers), which were later deconstructed. Although the discussion on this subject has been ongoing since the nineteenth century, even in the light of research and achievements of the modern science, the problem of the origins of symbolic behavior has still not been unequivocally resolved. However, it is assumed that they should be attributed primarily to the changes that were initiated in our ancestors from the Homo Sapiens family. In recent years, however, some ethologists and primatologists believe that the genesis of symbolic behavior should be sought in the animal world. I devote my article to this diversified subject matter.

The Idealism of Caird and Jones

Philosophy ◽  
1926 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
A. D. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

In the history of English Idealism in the nineteenth century a great place must be given to the work of two men who held the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow for two periods of twenty-eight years, from 1866 to 1922, Edward Caird and Henry Jones.

The Theological Mediation

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-41
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Hans Urs Von Balthasar ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
Late Modern

This chapter examines late modern reappropriations of the classical theology of the cross. In continuity with medieval and Reformation theology, these hold that Christ’s suffering was a divinely willed redemptive act, in vicarious satisfaction for human sin. The neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, in line with the Reformed tradition, emphasizes election and covenant. The theme of divine kenosis, found in nineteenth century German an English thinkers, is taken up into Orthodox trinitarian soteriology by the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov, with strong attention to Patristic dogma. Hans Urs von Balthasar stresses Christ’s “descent into hell” as the central symbol of the divine entry into the lost human condition. Jürgen Moltmann sees the suffering of God as the only possible theological response to the horrors of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust.

Wheat Breeding : Coalescence of a Modern Science, 1900-1939

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Plant Breeding ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
Wheat Breeding ◽  
Ecological Impacts ◽  
New Science ◽  
Slow Decline ◽  
Political Economic

Plant breeding in general and wheat breeding specifically were rudimentary activities on many grounds in the nineteenth century. Not many people engaged in the activity. Those who did were self-taught. because no formal educational programs existed in the subject. For the most part, they had only a few very modest institutional bases within which to work. Many farmers paid them little or no attention, and governments usually ignored their contributions and gave them next to no support. They had no organized way of broadly disseminating their results, which in any case were few in number. By 1970, wheat and other plant breeders occupied a very different position within both the scientific and political economic landscapes. Many people worked as breeders. They were highly trained in educational programs dedicated to the reproduction of plant breeders. Elaborate networks of institutions gave them employment. A substantial proportion of farmers cared very much what they did, and governments gave substantial, sometimes lavish, support. They had means of communicating their work that included both scientific and popular outlets. And they had substantial results to convey to farmers and the general public, some of them remarkable either for their scientific cleverness or for their broad political, economic, and ecological impacts, or both. Another way of gaining perspective on the change in status of wheat and other plant breeders is to suggest that their absence might not have been noticed by anybody but their families had they suddenly disappeared in the nineteenth century. In contrast, the twentieth century came increasingly to depend upon the plant breeders. Cessation of wheat breeding after 1970, for example, would have put some agricultural systems in distinct danger of slow decline or even collapse and failure. In both political economic and ecological terms, an increasing portion of the global human community became absolutely dependent upon wheat breeders and other plant scientists, certainly for prosperity as we now know it and possibly for survival and security. The transformation of wheat breeding from nearly invisible to virtually indispensable resulted from two mutually interacting events: a commercial-industrial revolution in agriculture and construction of a new science of plant breeding.

Ferrier, James Frederick (1806–64)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Haldane
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid

Ferrier represents the transition within nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy from the tradition of common-sense realism begun by Thomas Reid, the last major exponent of which was Ferrier’s mentor, Sir William Hamilton, to versions of idealism influenced by German philosophers, especially Hegel. Although he is largely forgotten, Ferrier merits study for at least two reasons. First, he had a role in importing Hegelian ideas into British thought; and second there are parallels between his arguments and those advanced by antirealist philosophers in the analytical tradition.

“The bourgeois nature in difficulties”: The Crisis of Liberalism in Robert Browning's Aristophanes’ Apology

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-575
Author(s):  
Joseph Hankinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Age Of Liberty ◽  
Crisis Of Liberalism

Nathan K. Hensley's recent study, Forms of Empire (2016), posits that liberalism, as the nineteenth century progressed, came up against the “wayward meanings” generated by its own contradictions, particularly the “curious intimacy between legality and harm” that characterized a doctrine of individual freedom inextricably rooted in violent imperial expansion. For Hensley, “the dogged persistence of killing in an age of liberty disrupted the conceptual assumptions of progressive idealism”; while “the very inseparability of law and violence, never more painfully evident than in episodes of colonial war and legal emergency, collapsed the logical principles of non-contradiction and identity that remain our common sense.”

Emerson's Rhetoric of War

Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 293-320
Author(s):  
Michael Lopez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
William James ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Brute Fact ◽  
Individual Author ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Sea Wave

Recent literary theory has questioned the way we look at a text as the product of an individual “author.” But for William James—who was, like Emerson, a thoroughly nineteenth-century mind-any utterance, even the most complicated philosophical system, was at bottom the expression of the personality of the author. The history of philosophy, James believed, was in essence the “clash of human temperaments,” and temperament seems to gravitate to either the “idealistic” or what James denned as the “materialistic” pole:Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution, materialism by another.… [I]dealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our personal selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe is essentially thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-prevading intimacy. … That element in reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there because it calls forth powers that he owns-the rough, harsh, sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the democratizer-is banished because it jars too much on the desire for communication. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on the reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we can act with; others, on the capacity of brute fact that we must react against.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document