The Ramist Context of Berkeley’s Philosophy

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-55
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Daniel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Abstract Ideas ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Berkeley’s doctrines about mind, the language of nature, substance, minima sensibilia, notions, abstract ideas, inference, and freedom appropriate principles developed by the sixteenth-century logician Peter Ramus and his seventeenth-century followers (e.g. Alexander Richardson, William Ames, John Milton). Even though Berkeley expresses himself in Cartesian or Lockean terms, he relies on a Ramist way of thinking that is not a form of mere rhetoric or pedagogy but a logic and ontology grounded in Stoicism. This chapter summarizes the central features of Ramism, indicates how Berkeley adapts Ramist concepts and strategies, and chronicles Ramism’s pervasiveness in Berkeley’s education, especially at Trinity College Dublin.

J. Geoffrey Aspin: Bibliophile, Bookseller and Benefactor of the Old Library, Trinity College Dublin

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-188
Author(s):  
William Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
French Theatre

Geoffrey Aspin was a bookseller specializing in French literature and thought of the classical period. He was also a collector of seventeenth-century French theatre, including the works of Quinault and the Corneille brothers, and he sold his collection to the Library of Trinity College Dublin. This piece briefly reviews some aspects of Aspin the man, gives examples of the rich knowledge deployed in his catalogue and pencilled on the endpapers of his books, and argues that the coverage of this subject area in the Old Library of Trinity College is now amongst the best in the world.

Beckett's Racinian Fictions: “Racine and the Modern Novel” Revisited

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Moorjani
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
The Creation

Reading Beckett's fictions through Racine's tragedies is facilitated by Beckett's own reading of the seventeenth-century dramatist through the lens of the modern novel. Using the notes of three students in Beckett's 1931 course at Trinity College Dublin and Jorge Luis Borges's view on the 'creation' of literary precursors, this essay examines the effect of Beckett's Racines on his own fiction.

Reading and Writing History in Sixteenth-Century France: The Case of La Legende des Flamens (1522)

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-85
Author(s):  
Catherine Emerson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Lost Work ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
The Way

A rare copy of a first edition of La Légende des Flamens, now in Trinity College Dublin, reveals a number of facts about its position in that library, probably a mid-nineteenth-century acquisition but acquired in the context of existing similar holdings of medieval and early modern French historical writings. Unlike these writings, however, the text takes an explicitly anti-Flemish and pro-French royalist stance. Criticism levelled at the two most recently deceased popes — or at the English — may explain why the author has decided to remain anonymous, or the text may have been conceived as a compilation of documentary sources without need for an author. This article examines the way that the text deploys sources, including a lost work by Giles of Rome, and draws some conclusions about the situation of the author of the text. Publisher François Regnault is considered as a possible author.

Academic Feud, Bloodfeud, and William Welwood: Legal Education in St Andrews, 1560–1611-Part I

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Joint Meeting ◽  
Academic Education

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.

Racine Lighting Beckett

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-242
Author(s):  
Cal Revely-Calder
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The Trinity

Critics have recently begun to pay attention to the influence Jean Racine's plays had on the work of Samuel Beckett, noting his 1930–31 lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and echoes of Racine in early texts such as Murphy (1938). This essay suggests that as well as the Trinity lectures, Beckett's later re-reading of Racine (in 1956) can be seen as fundamentally influential on his drama. There are moments of direct allusion to Racine's work, as in Oh les beaux jours (1963), where the echoes are easily discernible; but I suggest that soon, in particular with Come and Go (1965), the characteristics of a distinctly Racinian stagecraft become more subtly apparent, in what Danièle de Ruyter has called ‘choix plus spécifiquement théâtraux’: pared-down lighting, carefully-crafted entries and exits, and visual tableaux made increasingly difficult to read. Through an account of Racine's dramaturgy, and the ways in which he structures bodily motion and theatrical talk, I suggest that Beckett's post-1956 drama can be better understood, as stage-spectacles, in the light of Racine's plays; both writers give us, in Myriam Jeantroux's phrase, the complicated spectacle of ‘un lieu à la fois désert et clôturé’. As spectators to Beckett's drama, by keeping Racine in mind we can come to understand better the limitations of that spectatorship, and how the later plays trouble our ability to see – and interpret – the figures that move before us.

Are We Doing Diversity Justice? A Critical Exchange

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi ◽  
Emma Penney
Keyword(s):  
Trinity College ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Race Analysis

This critical exchange is based on a conversation between the authors which took place during the Irish University Review Roundtable Discussion: Displacing the Canon (2019 IASIL Conference, Trinity College Dublin). As authors we give first-hand accounts of our experience writing, editing, and teaching in Ireland, attempting to draw out concerns we have for the future of Irish literature and Irish Studies that specifically relate to race. The conversation here suggests that race directly impacts what we consider valuable in our literary culture. We both insist on decentring universalism as a governing literary critical concept and insist on the urgent application of critical race analysis to the construction of literary value systems in Ireland.

Poetry and Science: William Wordsworth and his Irish Friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth, c. 1829

Romanticism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Yen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The Relationship

Through hitherto neglected manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Library, and the Wordsworth Trust, this paper explores the relationship between William Wordsworth and his Irish friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth around 1829. It details the debates about poetry and science between Hamilton (Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland) and Edgeworth (the novelist Maria Edgeworth's half-brother), in which Wordsworth was embroiled when he visited Ireland in the autumn of 1829. By examining a variety of documents including letters, poems, lectures, and memoirs, a fragment of literary history may be restored and a clearer understanding may be reached of the tensions between poetry and science in Wordsworth's poetry, particularly in The Excursion, and of the Irish provenance of a memorable passage in ‘On the Power of Sound’.

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