scholarly journals The Consciousness of Being Alive as a Source of Knowledge

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Ursula Renz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Epistemic Relation ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
Moral Importance

This chapter addresses the question whether our consciousness of being alive can be a source of knowledge, and if so, of what kind of knowledge. It examines this question as it is discussed by a sequence of early modern philosophers who all implicitly consider the issue. The chapter begins with a discussion of the early modern idea of consciousness, viewed as an epistemic relation. It goes on to show that interest in the notion that we are immediately aware of being alive arose in reaction to Descartes’ dualism. For example, the Cartesian Louis de La Forge attempted, but failed, to accommodate the feeling of being alive within a dualist framework. Against this background, the chapter turns to discuss Spinoza’s early attempts to appeal to our consciousness of being alive in order to refute Cartesian scepticism. It concludes that our consciousness of being alive can be considered a source of knowledge, and that, however simple this lesson appears, it may be of moral importance.

Modern Literariness

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Idea

This chapter explores the meaning of literariness in the aftermath of Kantian aesthetics. It focuses on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and J. M. Coetzee. It argues that, despite the strong formal differences between the texts of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Coetzee, all are engaged in a conversation about the kinds of belief we address to things that we make, and all three contribute to the construction of a specifically modern, formalist idea of literariness. This modern idea of literariness represents a declension from the heroic idea of poetic making characteristic of the early modern period.

Before Infrastructure: The Poetics of Paving in John Gay's Trivia

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (5) ◽  
pp. 1134-1148 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Alff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Waste Disposal ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
John Gay ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.

scholarly journals Teologia pracy: asceza, kenoza, apokalipsa

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 13-45
Author(s):  
Agata Bielik-Robson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Creative Destruction ◽  
Theology Of Work ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Classic Approach ◽  
The Subject

The subject of this essay is the modern theology of work. Contrary to neoplatonism that condemned matter as unworthy of spiritual investment, theology of work states that matter is an ontological material that deserves further processing. Therefore, if modernity is to be understood as the beginning of the materialistic philosophy of immanence, early modern theological transformations have deeply contributed to this. Namely, the appreciation of matter as a realistically existing material to work through, the not yet ready and not fully shaped element of creation justifying the creatio continua in the human version, has certainly inaugurated a turn towards temporality, far less random than Max Weber thought. In Weber’s classic approach, Puritan theology played the role of a catalyst for modernity, creating the concept of “intra-world asceticism”. It stood for work conceived as Beruf which, in line with the Lutheran concept, means “profession and vocation”. However, the author points to another – no more ascetic – theological genealogy of the modern idea of work, whose sources lie in the vision of the delayed apocalypse or, in other words, creative destruction. This extraordinary theology of work has its roots in the nominalism of Duns Scotus, the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, then transformed into the Christian Kabbalah, Goethe’s Faust and particularly in Hegel’s dialectical concept of work performed by the destructive and yet suppressed negativity.

Providence as Mystery, Providence as Revelation: Puritan and Anglican Modifications of John Calvin's Doctrine of Providence

1978 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald J. VanderMolen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Philosophical Questions

Acceptance of providence, the belief that an ultimate being determines the course of events, has always created problems for moralists and advocates of free will, and for obivous reasons. If any events has been foreordained, how can hemans be free? If all is determined, why should humans try to do what is right? Aside from the philosophical questions raised by a belief in provedence, however, scholars such as the distinguished economists Jacob Viner have begun to examine the doctrine of providence from the point of view of its broad ideological and social impact. Though Professor Viner modestly claimed that his study of providence was simply an intellectual history pursued for its own sake, he demonstrated many of the doctrine's implications for early modern thought and social structures. Similar emphasis on the significance of the early modern idea of providence is also found in Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic.

scholarly journals Andrés Laguna: Translation and the Early Modern Idea of Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
José María Pérez Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Intellectual Production

The life and work of Andrés Laguna (1499–1559) illustrate the role played by scholars, diplomats, and translators in the construction of a multilingual idea of Europe stitched together through the textual networks facilitated by printers and publishers. Laguna also exemplifies the intersection of science and literature with translation and the book market. His intellectual production, in particular his philological abilities placed at the service of scientific and literary translation, are linked to moves towards the establishment of a via media in the theological and political worlds, and with the advocacy of a middle style that frequently resorted to common narrative techniques for the distribution of scientific knowledge.

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