Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-1750

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
General Point ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Enlightenment

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....

Rethinking Lessing's Laocoon

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
250Th Anniversary ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Words And Images

Ever since its publication in 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s treatise Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry has shaped debates about aesthetic experience and the medial distinctions between words and images. Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon provides a reassessment of this seminal work on its 250th anniversary, examining Lessing’s interpretation of ancient art and poetry, the Enlightenment contexts of the treatise, and its subsequent legacy in the fields of aesthetic, semiotics, and philosophy. Lessing’s essay is focused on an ancient statue and its interpretation, revisiting Greek and Roman texts and images to think about the spatial and temporal ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of what Lessing calls ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’. Yet the text is also embedded within Enlightenment theories of art, perception, and historical interpretation—as well as within the nascent eighteenth-century study of classical antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon is concerned not just with Lessing’s reception of antiquity, but also with the reception of that reception up to the present day. It examines Lessing’s work from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, highlighting the importance of Lessing’s Laocoon not only to the Enlightenment, but more generally also within shifting attitudes to the classical past.

Orthodoxy, rationalism and the world in eighteenth-century Holland

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
J. Van Den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Other ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Road ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Revival Movements

As far as the protestant countries are concerned the eighteenth century, the ‘age of reason’, might as well be called ‘the age of revival’. On the one hand, we meet with a strong desire to escape the snares of this world by concentrating upon the mysteries of salvation: the road to sanctity is a narrow road, to be trodden in fear and trembling. On the other hand there are those for whom this world is a world full of new and unexpected possibilities, a world to be explored and to be made instrumental to the fulfilment of the divine plan with regard to the development of humanity in its secular context. Naturally, also in the eighteenth century ‘sanctity’ and ‘secularity’ were not seen as in themselves mutually exclusive concepts. While many revivalists looked forward to the enlightenment of this world by the knowledge of God, many men of the enlightenment saw before them the prospect of the sanctification of the world by the combined influences of reason and revelation. Some of the fathers of the enlightenment - notably Locke and Leibniz - were essentially committed to the cause of Christianity, while on the other hand protagonists of the pietist and revival movements such as Francke and Edwards cannot in fairness be accused of an anti-rational attitude and of a lack of interest in the well-being of this world. Nevertheless, within the circle of eighteenth-century protestant Christianity there were conspicuous differences with regard to the evaluation of and the attitude towards the world in which the Christian community, while living in the expectation of the kingdom, still had to find its way and its place.

Secular Discontents

Worldview ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-8
Author(s):  
James Finn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Equality Rights ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Enlightenment

The West is today what it has been for a number of decades, the center and source of powerful ideas incarnated in institutions and practices from whose effects no corner of the globe is wholly immune. It is the great disturber of other cultures. Thus, mutatis mutandis, the West takes its place with the ancient Orient, with classical Greece, with Islam, with the great civilizations that extended and imposed themselves through differing proportions of military power, commerce, and high cultural confidence.In its development the West has been informed by the profound contributions of the Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian traditions, and it cannot be understood without reference to them. But the factors that allowed the West first to become a great economic force and second to extend that force into the ecumene have their immediate causes in the eighteenth century. This period in Europe, variously termed the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, elevated to prominence and gave particular meaning to such abstract social concepts as “liberty,” “equality,” “rights,” and “authority.”

Disgrace, grief and other ills: Herakles' rejection of suicide

1994 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 135-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumio Yoshitake
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Methodological Basis ◽  
Attitudes Towards Suicide

Although the incidence of suicide in classical antiquity has been studied for over a century, a proper methodological basis for such a study has been established only recently. The scholars who have been most concerned with this issue are Hirzel, Katsouris, Aigner, Walcot, Seidensticker, and, recently, van Hooff, and they have approached the topic in various ways. Although their interpretations have contributed to our knowledge of suicide in ancient Greece, they have rarely done more than analyse and classify examples of suicide as these occur in classical literature: we have not used our knowledge of the topic to re-examine the literature. The task of investigating the ways in which poets made use of contemporary notions about—and attitudes towards—suicide for their own dramatic purposes still needs to be carried out.

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

The “New Empire of Common Sense”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul B. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

Although the rise of Scottish common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments of the Enlightenment, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the reception of Scottish common sense philosophy in the Atlantic world during the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter focuses on the British context in the period 1764–93, and examines published responses to James Oswald, James Beattie, and, especially, Thomas Reid. The chapter contextualizes the polemics of Joseph Priestley against the three Scots and argues that it was Joseph Berington rather than Priestley who was the first critic to claim that the appeal to common sense was the defining feature of “the Scotch school” of philosophy. It also shows that Reid was widely acknowledged to be the founder and most accomplished exponent of the “school”, whereas Beattie and Oswald were typically dismissed as being derivative thinkers.

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