The Concept of a Person in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy

Persons ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 187-231
Author(s):  
Udo Thiel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
The One ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Moral Questions

Most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, including major players such as Locke and Leibniz, discuss the concept of a person in the context of theological and moral questions. Particularly prominent are questions about the immortality of the soul and a life after death and about moral responsibility. These questions in turn connect to metaphysical issues, such as individuation and diachronic identity. This chapter examines how the three most important eighteenth-century German philosophers, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant, deal with these themes. Apart from many significant differences between these philosophers, especially with respect to Kant versus Leibniz and Wolff, there are also several important positive connections. These relate to the question of animal and human souls, the role consciousness plays in the constitution of personhood, and the link between the concept of a person in epistemology and metaphysics on the one hand and in practical philosophy on the other.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

A Comparison of Wolff’s and Kant’s Receptions of Emanuel Swedenborg

Kant-Studien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura Follesa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Emanuel Swedenborg ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The One

Abstract Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum, the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.

COMMUNICATING EMPIRE: THE HABSBURGS AND THEIR CRITICS, 1700–1919

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Power Base ◽  
The One ◽  
At Home

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

Spiritual Crisis of the Beginning of the 20th Century: From Philosophical to Religious Interpretations

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Alexander V. Koltsov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Spiritual Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The One

The paper is an attempt to narrow down the notion of spiritual crisis which is now widely applied in research on history of culture of the 19th–20th centuries, with respect to history of German philosophy and observation of modern reli­giosity. The shift from the history of philosophy to the religious context is ful­filled through analysis of texts of two religious thinkers, A. Reinach and S. Frank, whose thought clearly demonstrates strong interconnection between the both fields. Analysis of contemporary studies on history of phenomenological philos­ophy (C. Möckel and W. Gleixner) lets firstly observe ways of application of Koselleck’s notion of crisis to investigations in the history of philosophy. Sec­ondly it discovers two possibilities of philosophical contextualization of the con­cept of spiritual crisis – on the one hand, as a constituent rhetorical element of the philosophical statement (Möckel), on the other hand, as a term which de­scribes the uniqueness of an intellectual situation of the beginning of the 20thcentury (Gleixner). Then these aspects of the rhetoric of crisis are applied to reli­gious philosophy of Reinach and Frank, what leads to interpretation of their works as a particular statement discovering the divine (or the holy) as a new cat­egory of religious consciousness.

Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Addition ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Separate Discipline

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”

Dziedzictwo dawnej Rzeczypospolitej w języku pierwszego polskiego przekładu poematu „Metai” Kristijonasa Donelaitisa

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-400
Author(s):  
Jolanta Mędelska
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Journalism ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Influence Of Substrate ◽  
The One ◽  
Made In

The author analysed the language of the first Polish translation of the eighteenth-century poem “Metai” [The Seasons] by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a Lithuanian Lutheran pastor. The translation was made in 1933 by a socialist activist and close associate of Józef Piłsudski, Kazimierz Pietkiewicz. The analysis showed that the language of the translation is peculiar. On the one hand, this peculiarity consists in refraining from archaizing the translation and the use of elements that are close to the translator’s style of social-political journalism (e.g., dorobkiewicz [vulgarian], feministka [feminist]), on the other hand, the presence at all levels of language of peculiarities characteristic for Kresy Polish language in both its territorial variations. These are generally old features of common Polish, the retention of which in the eastern areas of the Polish Rzeczpospolita was supported by the influence of substrate languages, later also Russian, or by borrowing. This layer was natural in the language of the translator, born in Ukraine, who spent part of his life in Vilnius, some in exile in Russia. This is the colourful linguistic heritage of the former Republic of Poland.

Fielding and Richardson

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
General Type ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.

scholarly journals Philosophical remarks about educational materials

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. e055005
Author(s):  
Elena Theodoropoulou
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Teaching Material ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Educational Materials ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
The One

The connection between a non philosophical work and its reception in education through its transformation into a learning/teaching material and a possible philosophical reading, in order to recognize and define the philosophical stance of this very material, could not but be a challenge for philosophy of education itself, namely, in its relation to (or as) practical philosophy. This kind of reduction to the state of material could instrumentalize the latter raising practical, ethical and methodological issues about the pedagogical intention itself; subsequently, the art, literature, philosophy, and science lying behind materials become equally instrumentalized and evacuated. This article attempts, on the one hand, to circumscribe and describe this movement of “becoming material” as a question philosophically and pedagogically challenging and, on the other, to reflect about a critical understanding of this very question as an example of research in practical philosophy. 

Naked or Clothed? Eschatology and the Doctrine of Creation

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Young
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Eastern Orthodox ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Apocalyptic Literature ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Full Circle ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul

A Paper on life after death in the early church should probably begin with the underworld: Sheol in the Hebrew Bible, Hades, in Greek mythology, with parallels in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia. It should reflect on the universally connected theme of judgment and its importance for theodicy, and address the wide variety of beliefs discernible in the New Testament and its background, especially in the apocalyptic literature. It should consider the so-called intermediate state, and the supposed distinction between the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul and the Hebrew idea of resurrection: which takes us full circle, since the latter notion assumes the picture of shades in the underworld brought back to full-bodied living – as indeed the traditional Anastasis icon of the Eastern Orthodox tradition makes dramatically clear, Christ springing up from the grave and hauling Adam up with one hand and, often though not invariably, Eve with the other.

scholarly journals Dynamics of Continuity and Change: Shifts in Labour Relations in the Potosí Mines (1680–1812)

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The One

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.

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