Philosophical and Oriental Tales

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
External Stimulus ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Oriental Tale

This chapter discusses philosophical and oriental tales. The philosophical and oriental tale offer alternative means of exploring the same preoccupations as those that drive the more familiar realist and domestic fiction of the second half of the eighteenth century: a fiction that self-consciously explores relations between reader and text, between disciple and mentor, between past and present generations. Where philosophical and oriental tales differ from the domestic realist fictions is in exploring these relations on the level of form and plot rather than the level of character. It is not that character is insignificant in these tales but that it tends to demonstrate the universality of the human mind and its responses to external stimulus rather than to promote the belief in the plausibility or authenticity of persons through individualizing marks or impressions.

Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Addition ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Separate Discipline

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”

Epilogue

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 191-196
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Slow Mode ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Political Justice ◽  
The Many

This epilogue studies William Godwin's theory of ideology, assessing his book Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1796), which identifies unfelt and active forces holding humanity back from social happiness. The virtuality of feeling for Godwin is a potential menace. The very mechanism of the human mind perpetuates a tacit politics of nonconsciousness, a politics embedded in tacitness, and “it is this circumstance that constitutes the insensible empire of prejudice.” In the interaction between felt and unfelt, perceptible and imperceptible, lie the deepest roots of oppression. The many kinds of writing surveyed in this book that use the idiom of the insensible in some ways anticipate what must look to people now like Godwin's theory of ideology. What the writers discussed in this book—from the late seventeenth century onward—have treated as natural changes wrought by the slowness of time can be seen through Godwin's eyes as entailing a political dimension: an oppressively slow mode of acquired and reinforced beliefs that humanity is desperate to overcome. Beyond that, the four areas of eighteenth-century prose treated in this book's four chapters each employs the idiom to describe what could look like the basic components of an ideology of modern Western liberalism.

Tetens, Johann Nicolaus (1736–1807)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunter Zoller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Second Career ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Descriptive Account ◽  
German School ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
School Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

Tetens was a German philosopher, mathematician and physicist, with a second career as a Danish government official, who was active in Northern Germany and Denmark during the second half of the eighteenth century. Together with Johann Heinrich Lambert and Moses Mendelssohn, Tetens forms the transition from the German school philosophy of Leibniz, Wolff and Crusius to the new, critical philosophy of Kant. Tetens’ philosophical work reflects the combined influence of contemporary German, British and French philosophical currents. His main contribution to philosophy is a detailed descriptive account of the principal operations of the human mind that combines psychological, epistemological and metaphysical considerations. While showing a strong empiricist leaning, Tetens rejected the associationist and materialist accounts of the mind, favoured in Britain and France, and insisted on the active, spontaneous role of the mind in the formation and processing of mental contents.

The Aesthetics of Mental Illness in Defoe’s Crusoe Trilogy

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (301) ◽  
pp. 709-728
Author(s):  
Anne M Thell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract This essay studies Robinson Crusoe’s ‘chronical Distemper’ of wanderlust in the context of early eighteenth-century concepts of mental illness, which often hinge on unruly passions and, even more specifically, an overactive imagination. Defoe describes Crusoe’s insatiable urge to ramble as a type of insanity that is rooted in fancy, not reason, yet simultaneously indicates that the expression of this impulse differentiates his character and generates magnificent gains. Although at odds with religious and medical warnings about the dangers of excessive passion, then, Defoe suggests that Crusoe’s ‘unconquerable’ wanderlust is a beneficial kind of madness that counteracts idleness and cements his distinctly English, merchant capitalist identity. More largely, the Crusoe trilogy as a whole contributes to early novelistic discourse by aligning mental illness, self-analysis, and the production of narrative, thereby stitching together evolving concepts of the human mind and literary form.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, F. R. S

1984 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-49 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
General Nature ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Prime Concern ◽  
The World ◽  
Special Concern ◽  
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Professor of Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy and Natural Philosophy at Göttingen University, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1793. At his death, on 24 February 1799, he left numerous writings of scientific and general nature, as well as many letters and, most important of all, copious personal notes. It is for these that he is mainly remembered. They include reflections on practically all the topics which were of special concern in the Age of Enlightenment. Due to their diversity it is not easy to obtain a comprehensive overview of his ideas and opinions, especially as they are often contained or developed in articles on assorted matters. Many of his themes lost their topicality, though by no means their relevance to Lichtenberg’s prime concern, to understand the world and in particular the human mind, in order to achieve realistic improvements. He jotted down his notes from 1764 until he died, in what he called his ‘waste books’, a term he borrowed from English tradesmen (1). Many of his notes are pointed, witty and unusually candid. Thus they allow remarkable insights into the trends of the last decades of the eighteenth century. They also demonstrate the importance of the Royal Society in establishing Göttingen as the leading scientific university in Germany and spreading English philosophical, literary and cultural influence.

Prose Fiction and English Interest in the Near East, 1775–1825

PMLA ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 827-836
Author(s):  
Wallace Cable Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Near East ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Travel Books ◽  
Oriental Tale

One of the most important literary manifestations of that direct interest in the Near East which travellers and travel books created, appears in English prose fiction of the early nineteenth century. The prose fiction thus supplements the Near East poetry of Byron, Moore, Southey, and numerous minor versifiers as well as the travel books themselves, which may be considered a kind of minor literature. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century English readers had shown considerable interest in the Near East, particularly in the oriental tale; yet this interest was almost wholly indirect—the product of French accounts or French translations of the Arabian Nights. It was not until the last quarter of the century that new developments brought “the Orient much nearer to England than ever before … In letters, this modern spirit was first expressed by the increased number of travelers' accounts.”

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