Levinas and Early Modern Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 172-194
Author(s):  
Inga Römer
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy

The present study claims that Levinas’s engagement with early modern philosophy can be understood as an attempt to appropriate the tradition of modern rationalism by transforming it on the basis of its own internal limits. The article shows this by analysis especially of Levinas’s interpretations of Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant but also of Rousseau, Berkeley, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Pascal. Levinas’s appropriation of early modern rationalism is a transformation from a rationality of ontology and totality to an ethical rationality, anchored in the desire of the infinite and threatened by the rationality of totality. In Levinas’s eyes, it is Immanuel Kant who proves that this particular rationality of a practical infinite does not have its only origin in a religious tradition (that of the Talmud), but it also has another origin in the philosophical tradition of rationalism itself.

scholarly journals The standard narrative of early modern philosophy: The main flaws and Kant’s influence

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Milica Smajevic-Roljic
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Creation ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Made In

During the twentieth century, a standard narrative of early modern philosophy was established in the English-speaking world, according to which all authors of this period were divided into two schools of thought: rationalist and empiricist. The main goal set in this text is to examine the central features of this narrative to show its incompleteness and inadequacy in presenting the relations that existed between the figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will see that convincing critiques of this theory have been made in the last few decades, which point out its main flaws. The second goal of this paper is to show, by analyzing the texts of Immanuel Kant, that he is not responsible for the creation and dissemination of this narrative, although in the secondary literature the opposite is often claimed.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Levinson
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
Field Theories ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy

The Introduction explains the combination of a narrative arc and conceptual structure in the organization of the book. The former, primarily diachronic, discussion is concerned with the development of the field of Romanticism since the 1980s, presented through both a review of scholarship and exemplary readings of well-known lyric poems. The latter, predominantly synchronic, presentation entails an argument for the analytical value of field theories of form—that is, frameworks drawn from early modern philosophy (Spinoza) and postclassical life- and physical sciences, especially models of self-organization. As an alternative to the external, retrospective perspective provided by, for example, Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, it draws on the work of Martin Heidegger, Pierre Macherey, and the poet-critic J. H. Prynne to offer a conjunctural approach.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

scholarly journals Foreword

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-160
Author(s):  
Jorge Ledo
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Relationship ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
History Of

The aim of this volume is not to offer a comprehensive overview of the multifarious aspects of fiction and its implications for early modern philosophy, but to be an invitation, from the standpoint of the history of philosophy, to survey some of the fundamental problems of the field, using six case-studies written by some of the finest international scholars in their respective areas of Renaissance studies. Although perhaps not evident at a first reading, these six studies are linked by common concerns such as the theoretical relationship between (literary) history, rhetoric, poetics, and philosophy; the tensions between res, verba, and imago; and the concept of enargeia. They have been arranged according to the chronology of the corpus each one considers.

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