Contexts (II)

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-132
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man

Chapter 3, continuing Chapter 2’s intellectual history of the impression, begins by exploring British aestheticism and its roots in Kant and romanticism (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth). It then turns to twentieth-century theories of performativity, which, it argues, combine elements of the empiricist and the aesthetic (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). James followed Pater in resurrecting the ‘impression’. Pater found in Hume’s impression a role for the imagination at the heart of consciousness. But the interpretive excesses of James’s protagonists’ cognitive impressions must also be understood alongside the more flamboyant aestheticism of Pater’s disciple Wilde, and his ‘critic as artist’. The most active of James’s impressions, however, are performative: they are impressions made, not received. Performativity helps frame an account of the impression that encompasses both the receiving and making of impressions, and the confusion between the two.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

scholarly journals O CONCEITO DE “INFÂNCIA” NO CONTEXTO DA MODERNIDADE EUROPEIA (SÉCULOS XVII-XIX)

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dulce Regina Baggio Osinski ◽  
Amanda Siqueira Torres Cunha
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Locke ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Education History ◽  
Port Royal ◽  
Friedrich Froebel ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts

Este artigo analisa o conceito de “infância” a partir de formulações que marcaram a modernidade, inserindo-se no campo das pesquisas em história intelectual da educação e relacionando-se de modo mais específico com a história dos conceitos. A investigação tratará do contexto europeu, definindo como recorte temporal o período entre os séculos XVII e XIX. As reflexões de Reinhart Koselleck a partir do campo da história dos conceitos serão cotejadas com as de autores como Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin e Kohan, que discutem a infância em perspectiva histórica. Como fontes, serão analisados os discuros de intelectuais envolvidos com a infância e sua formação, tais como os mestre de Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John  Locke, Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi e Friedrich Froebel, os quais evidenciam a construção, manutenção ou ressignificação do conceito de infância no decorrer do tempo, graças a movimentos de circulação e apropriação. Foi possível perceber, no período analisado, que o conceito de infância em circulação no século XVII e início do século XVIII, relacionado a um número maior de aspectos negativos e concebido como um momento da vida imperfeito, pecaminoso e separado da vida adulta, cedeu paulatinamente lugar, até meados do século XIX, à ideia de um período com características próprias e relevante para a concretização do projeto de homem moderno.Palavras-chave: História da educação; história dos conceitos; conceito de infância; infância e modernidade.THE CONCEPT OF "CHILDHOOD" IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN MODERNITY (XVII-XIX CENTURIES)AbstractThis article analyzes the concept of "childhood" from formulations that marked modernity, inserting itself in the field of research in the intellectual history of education and relating more specifically to the history of concepts. The research will deal with the European context, defining as temporal cut-off the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Reinhart Koselleck's reflections from the field of concept history will be compared with authors such as Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin and Kohan, who discuss childhood in historical perspective. As sources, the discourses of intellectuals involved with childhood and its formation, such as the Masters of Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel and Jean Jacques Rousseau, will be analyzed, which put in evidence the construction, maintenance or re-signification of the concept of childhood in the course of time, thanks to movements of circulation and appropriation. It was possible to perceive, in the analyzed period, that the concept of childhood in circulation in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, related to a greater number of negative aspects and conceived as a moment of imperfect, sinful life separated from adult life, gradually gave place, until de nineteenth century, to the idea of a period with its own characteristics and relevant to the realization of the modern man project.Key-words: History of education; history of concepts; concept of childhood; childhood and modernity.EL CONCEPTO DE "INFANCIA" EN EL CONTEXTO DE LA MODERNIDAD EUROPEA (SÉCULOS XVII-XIX) Resumen Este artículo analiza el concepto de "infancia" a partir de formulaciones que marcaron la modernidad, insertándose en el campo de las investigaciones en historia intelectual de la educación y relacionándose de modo más específico con la historia de los conceptos. La investigación tratará del contexto europeo, definiendo como recorte temporal el período entre los siglos XVII y XIX. Las reflexiones de Reinhart Koselleck a partir del campo de la historia de los conceptos serán cotejadas con autores como Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin y Kohan, que discuten la infancia en perspectiva histórica. Como fuentes, se analizarán los discursos de intelectuales involucrados con la infancia y su formación, como los maestros de Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel y Jean Jacques Rousseau, que evidencian la construcción, el mantenimiento o la resignificación del concepto de infancia en el transcurso del tiempo, gracias a movimientos de circulación y apropiación. En el período analizado, el concepto de infancia en circulación en el siglo XVII y el inicio del siglo XVIII, que se relacionó con un número mayor de aspectos negativos, siendo concebido como un momento de la vida imperfecto, pecaminoso y separado de la vida adulta, cedió paulatinamente lugar, hasta el siglo XIX, a la idea de un período con características propias y relevantes para la concreción del proyecto de hombre moderno.Palabras clave: Historia de la educación; historia de los conceptos; concepto de infancia; la infancia y la modernidad.   

Henry James and the Art of Impressions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Henry James ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
William James ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
History Of

Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement which championed impressionist criticism, he placed the impression at the heart of his own aesthetic project, as well as his narrative representation of consciousness. This book tries to understand the anomaly that James represents in the wider history of the impression. To do this it charts an intellectual and cultural history of the ‘impression’ from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, drawing in painting, philosophy (John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J.L Austin), psychology (James Mill, J.S. Mill, William James, Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano), literature (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), and modern critical theory (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). It then offers close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872–88), his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). It concludes that the term ‘impression’ crystallizes James’s main theme of the struggle between life and art. Coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when it is comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics—bound together by James’s attempt to reconcile the novel’s value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity.

Varia: Beauty and/(n)or Truth: A (Hermeneutic) Rhetoric of the Aesthetic

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Divine Encounters ◽  
De Man ◽  
Hans Georg Gadamer

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –,” a line of poetry by the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson can be used as a signpost for this article, which attempts a hermeneutic regress from the postmodern to the archaic, in search of a rhetoric for the aesthetic. In this textual tour, some of the master narratives of our culture examining various versions of the story of beauty and truth are visited, and more specifically (always in backward motion), the work of the postmodern theorists Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, the German philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the English Romantic poet John Keats, the Greek philosophers Plato and Parmenides, and, last but not least, the Greek poet Sappho. Paul de Man, the “sad” patriarch of postmodernism, who engaged deeply with the cardinal problem of the truth of poetry and its relation to reality, contests that all language is figurative and rhetorical, and hence unable to represent the real. De Man demystifies aesthetics exploding a whole tradition of aesthetic theory based on the ontology of language, that is, the relation between “word” and “thing.” Along the same lines, the deconstructive critique of Jacques Derrida supports that linguistic figurality contaminates not only literature but philosophy as well, playing mimetic games of seduction that limit reality to a textual frame. On the far side of deconstruction, the hermeneutic theory of Hans- Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger give figurality an overwhelming power by establishing a rhetoric of ontology and presence. Heidegger’s radical reformulation of truth as aletheia and its conjunction with beauty, not only reflects the romantic identification of “beauty is truth,” as best expressed by the poet John Keats, but also points back to Plato who “aporetically” devoted a lifetime to a search for the beautiful and the true, coming up with multiple and contradictory views. As we move into archaic times, the whispering voice of Parmenides unexpectedly recommends the rhetoric of persuasion as the way to truth, while Sappho, celebrating presence and union, employs an erotic rhetoric that names not only human, but natural and divine encounters of beauty and truth.

Scurvy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
History Of

Scurvy, a disease often associated with long stretches of maritime travel, generated sensations exceeding the standard of what was normal. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions veered between disgust and delight. This book presents an intellectual history of scurvy to tell the story of the disease that its victims couldn't because they found their illness too terrible and, in some cases, too exciting. The book traces the cultural impact of scurvy during the eighteenth-century age of geographical and scientific discovery. It explains the medical knowledge surrounding scurvy and the debates about its cause, prevention, and attempted cures. The book vividly describes the phenomenon and experience of “scorbutic nostalgia”, in which victims imagined mirages of food, water, or home, and then wept when such pleasures proved impossible to consume or reach. It argues that a culture of scurvy arose in the colony of Australia, which was prey to the disease in its early years, and identifies a literature of scurvy in the works of such figures as Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift. The book shows how the journeys of discovery in the eighteenth century not only ventured outward to the ends of the earth, but were also an inward voyage into the realms of sensation and passion.

Humphry Davy, nitrous oxide, the Pneumatic Institution, and the Royal Institution

2014 ◽  
Vol 307 (9) ◽  
pp. L661-L667 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. West
Keyword(s):  
Nitrous Oxide ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Royal Institution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
Respiratory Gases ◽  
Joseph Black ◽  
Michael Faraday

Humphry Davy (1778–1829) has an interesting place in the history of respiratory gases because the Pneumatic Institution in which he did much of his early work signaled the end of an era of discovery. The previous 40 years had seen essentially all of the important respiratory gases described, and the Institution was formed to exploit their possible value in medical treatment. Davy himself is well known for producing nitrous oxide and demonstrating that its inhalation could cause euphoria and heightened imagination. His thinking influenced the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and perhaps we can claim that our discipline colored the poetry of the Romantic Movement. Davy was also the first person to measure the residual volume of the lung. The Pneumatic Institution was the brainchild of Thomas Beddoes, who had trained in Edinburgh under Joseph Black, who discovered carbon dioxide. Later Davy moved to the Royal Institution in London formed, in part, to diffuse the knowledge of scientific discoveries to the general public. Davy was a brilliant lecturer and developed an enthusiastic following. In addition he exploited the newly described electric battery to discover several new elements. He also invented the safety lamp in response to a series of devastating explosions in coal mines. Ultimately Davy became president of the Royal Society, a remarkable honor for somebody with such humble origins. Another of his important contributions was to introduce Michael Faraday (1791–1867) to science. Faraday became one of the most illustrious British scientists of all time.

scholarly journals “A subject dead is not worth presenting”: Cromwell, the Past, and the Haunting of Thomas Carlyle

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David McAllister
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
The Past ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
De Man ◽  
Authorial Voice

This essay examines Thomas Carlyle’s painful struggle to write a book on Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan era in the years 1838 to 1845, and seeks to discover why this otherwise prolific author found it so difficult to produce a history of the man who occupied the central place in his pantheon of heroes. It does so by examining his metaphoric conception of the past as a body that could, if treated correctly by the historian, be presented “alive” rather than “dead,” and his feeling that the past and the voices of its “dead heroes” were haunting him like ghosts. The metaphoric construction and progress of this haunting is explored using critical approaches derived from Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. By placing Carlyle’s crisis of authorship in conversation with these thinkers, I attempt to cast a new light on his relationship to the past and his sense of the difficulties involved in giving voice to the dead. It was only through a subjugation of his own authorial voice to that of his dead subject that Carlyle was able to bring an end to the haunting that had threatened to silence him in the early 1840s.

Literature and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Milnes
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Romantic Era

This chapter proposes that our very notions of ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’ are, to a great extent, forged in the Romantic era. The chapter surveys the eighteenth-century background to this issue in the sceptical empiricism of David Hume and the German transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, F. W. von Schelling, and J. G. Fichte. In examining the writings of William Blake, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt, it also charts the ways in which the revolutionary debates of the 1790s politicized the disciplines of philosophy and ‘theory’, leading to an anti-philosophical rhetoric in the work of writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Charles Lamb, and Lord Byron. Finally, the chapter scrutinizes the boundaries between Romantic philosophy and the Scottish common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, before examining the philosophical significance of the idea of ‘Literature’ in the work of Romantic writers, particularly Percy Shelley and John Keats.

From Braudel to Derrida: Mohammed Arkoun's Rethinking of Islam and Religion

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carool Kersten
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The West ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Scientific Reason ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Southern Mediterranean ◽  
History Of ◽  
Annales School

AbstractThis article examines Mohammed Arkoun as one of the pioneers of a new Muslim intellectualism seeking new ways of engaging with Islam by combining intimate familiarity with the Islamic civilizational heritage (turath) and solid knowledge of recent achievements by the Western academe in the humanities and social sciences. It will show how his groundbreaking and agendasetting work in Islamic studies reflects a convergence of the spatiotemporal concerns of an intellectual historian inspired by the Annales School with an epistemological critique drawing on structuralist and poststructuralist ideas. Influenced by Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics and the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Arkoun evolved from a specialist in the intellectual history of medieval Islam into a generic critic of epistemologies, advocating a concept of so-called 'emerging reason' which transcends existing forms of religious reason, Enlightenment rationalism and the tele-techno-scientific reason of the postmodern globalizing world. This article concludes that Arkoun's proposals challenge the intellectual binary of the West versus Islam and the historical dichotomy between the northern and southern Mediterranean.

Sources of the Self From the Renaissance to the 20th Century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elwin Hofman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Locke ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Absence Of Power

The history of the self studies continuities and changes in ideas about and experiences of the individual mind through time, attending to questions of individuality, identity, stability, self-possession, and interiority. Traditionally, this subject has often been approached as an intellectual history, analyzing philosophers’ explicit writings about the self. Through the work of people such as René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, scholars have traced a growing sense of individuality and self-possession since the 16th century, and an increasing feeling of inner depth since the 18th century. The focus on intellectual sources of the self has been criticized, however, by scholars who stress the importance of practices and of social differences. They have broadened the scope of the field by looking at cultural sources, such as autobiographical writing, literature, art, rituals, and festivities. Still other historians have criticized the absence of power in many accounts of the history of the self and stress the institutional and political sources of the self, including religious institutions, schools, and legal systems. Throughout these different approaches, debates continue about whether a “modern self” can be traced, and when such a modern self can be situated. While many recent scholars stress the need to examine different cultures of the self at any given time in their own right, others argue that it remains important to trace grand shifts in this history.

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