A Composite Portrait of a True American Philosophy on Magnanimity

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-265
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Corsa ◽  
Eric Schliesser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Characteristic Features

This chapter offers a composite portrait of the concept of magnanimity in nineteenth-century America, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. A composite portrait, as a method in the history of philosophy, is designed to bring out characteristic features of a group’s philosophizing in order to illuminate features that may still resonate in today’s philosophy. Compared to more standard methods in the historiography of philosophy, the construction of a composite portrait de-privileges the views of individual authors. These American philosophers saw the virtue of magnanimity as a remedy for a number of modern ills. They suggest that the best sort of magnanimity is acquired by adopting the correct relation to the natural world, including new forms of inquiry, or by adopting a life of voluntary poverty. Magnanimous individuals are critics of capitalism and offer themselves as exemplars of a better, experimental life.

Zur Lage der Gegenwartsphilosophie in den USA

1981 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rorty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Role

AbstractAnalytic philosophy has taken for granted an account of the history of philosophy which jumps straight from Kant to Frege, leaving out Hegel and most of the nineteenth century. Such an understandig (e.g., that of Reichenbach’s Rise of Scientific Philosophy) depends upon viewing philosophy as the solution of certain discrete and specific “problems” raised by e.g., discoveries in physics or mathematics. But the rejection of traditional positivist doctrines (those invoked by Reichenbach) brought about by the work of Wittgenstein, Quine, and others, makes this latter conception of philosophy difficult to sustain. Consequently, analytic philosophy has become a movement without a clear self-image and sense of mission. Its old ideological roots have been cut, and it now sustains itself through a sense of professionalism rather than by a sense of cultural or historical role. However, it still retains the Reichenbachian account of the history of philosophy. This has led to problems in American philosophy departments, particularly an unwillingness to regard Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other “Continental” figures as being “really philosophers” and thus an unwillingness to include them in the curriculum.

scholarly journals Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the Philebus

Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Romanticism

This book presents innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the later writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.

Specimen Collectors

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-188
Author(s):  
Reed Gochberg
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Comparative Zoology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Philosophical Writings

This chapter examines the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and broader conversations about the representation of the natural world as fixed and stable. While the museum’s founder, Louis Agassiz, emphasized the value of preserved specimens to research and teaching, many collectors and writers questioned such practices. After donating turtles to the museum, Henry David Thoreau contemplated the ethical and scientific implications of freezing nature for extended study. In children’s fiction, Louisa May Alcott emphasized the relationship between collecting specimens and moral order, while highlighting the growing gendered divide between scientific practice in the museum and the parlor. And in philosophical writings, William James drew on classification to consider more flexible possibilities to fixed theories. These accounts show how writers sought to promote a deeper understanding of flux and change both within the museum and beyond.

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.

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