Joseph Butler

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Religious Imagination ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Joseph Butler

This chapter emphasizes the life-long significance of Newman’s relationship with the works of Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752). His reading and re-reading of Butler influenced Newman’s critique of natural theology, his understanding of religious knowledge and the role of conscience, and his sensitivity to the importance of language in the cultivation of a religious imagination. Newman nuanced and contested other nineteenth-century interpretations of Butler’s concepts of analogy, probability, and certitude in the process of developing his own distinctive approach to delineating the intellectual context of faith and reflecting rigorously on moral philosophy, psychological intuition, and pastoral engagement. His ongoing conversation with Butler provided intellectual and affective underpinning for Newman’s reflection on his religious journey and his mediation of Catholicism and Englishness.

Science and popular education in the 1830s: the role of theBridgewater Treatises

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Topham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economist ◽  
Best Sellers ◽  
The Creation

As is widely known, theBridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation(1833–36) were commissioned in accordance with a munificent bequest of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the Rev. Francis Henry Egerton (1756–1829), and written by seven leading men of science, together with one prominent theological commentator. Less widely appreciated is the extent to which theBridgewater Treatisesrank among the scientific best-sellers of the early nineteenth century. Their varied blend of natural theology and popular science attracted extraordinary contemporary interest and ‘celebrity’, resulting in unprecedented sales and widespread reviewing. Much read by the landed, mercantile and professional classes, the success of the series ‘encouraged other competitors into the field’, most notably Charles Babbage's unsolicitedNinth Bridgewater Treatise(1837). As late as 1882 the political economist William Stanley Jevons was intending to write an unofficialBridgewater Treatise, and even an author of the prominence of Lord Brougham could not escape having hisDiscourse of Natural Theology(1835) described by Edward Lytton Bulwer as ‘thetenthBridgewater Treatise’.

Who They Were and Why They Wanted to Suppress Obscene Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Voluntary Organizations ◽  
Antisocial Behaviors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

After examining who supported the Society for the Suppression of Vice, this chapter explores why so many social leaders and prominent liberal ministers, usually recognized as leading social and cultural progressive voices in their particular fields, wholeheartedly supported the censorship activities of the Watch and Ward Society. Four key sources shaped the anti-vice reformers’ rationale for the censorship of obscene literature: liberal Protestant theology, nineteenth-century moral philosophy, the Whig-Republican view of the public role of religion in society, and their Victorian view of literature. To the anti-vice activists, licentious literature fostered an animalism that hindered the gradual Christianization of society, ruined individuals moral character, encouraged other antisocial behaviors, and contradicted the basic canons of what constituted good literature. For these reasons, the moral reformers argued, voluntary organizations and the state had a moral obligation to suppress obscene works that threatened the well-being of society.

Religion, Evolution and Scottish Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
The Chairs

This paper explores developments in the defence of theism within Scottish philosophy following Hume's Dialogues and the advent of Darwinian evolutionary biology. By examining the writings of two nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, it aims to show that far from Darwinian biology completing Hume's destruction of natural theology, it prompted a new direction for the defence of philosophical theism. Henry Calderwood and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison occupied, respectively, the Chairs of Moral Philosophy and Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in the late nineteenth century. Their books reveal that the challenge of articulating new grounds for philosophical theism was not motivated by a conservative desire to see off a new intellectual threat, but by a desire for a proper understanding of evolutionary biology.

The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-172
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
The Self ◽  
Altruistic Behavior ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
Internal Coherence

In a notebook of 1877, George Eliot at one point muses on moral philosophy, asking “Of what stuff is virtue made?” and ending with the dramatic “What is the scourge of the unwilling?” Such questions show Eliot engaging one of the great questions of nineteenth-century moral philosophy: where does the obligatoriness of moral obligations come from? Or, more simply, why should one care about morality? Henry Sidgwick’s magisterial 1874 treatise The Methods of Ethics ultimately conceded defeat on this issue, concluding that there was no way to show the rational egoist that altruistic behavior was more rational than self-interested action. Eliot’s own attempts to answer this question, reflected in the narratives of Esther Lyon, Fred Vincy, and ultimately Gwendolen Harleth, depend on the role of shame in moral psychology, and in particular on the conditions necessary for maintaining the self-approval necessary for internal coherence and autonomy.

scholarly journals The reception of William Paley's Natural Theology in the University of Cambridge

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
AILEEN FYFE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
College Examinations ◽  
The University

In order to pass the BA examination, it was, also, necessary to get up Paley's Evidences of Christianity, and his Moral Philosophy. This was done in a thorough manner, and I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book and, as I may add, of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind.Charles DarwinAutobiographyOne of the books Charles Darwin read at Cambridge University was William Paley's Natural Theology (1802). Many scholars have assumed that this was a set text at the university in the early nineteenth century. However, a study of the examination papers of the university, and contemporary memoirs, autobiographies and correspondence, reveals no evidence that this was so, though it did appear in some of the college examinations. This contrasts with other books by Paley which did appear for many years in both university and college examinations. This paper uses the misapprehension about Paley's text as a starting point to investigate the role of natural theology in a Cambridge education in the first three decades of the nineteenth century.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

Andrew Lang and Scottish Historiography: Taking on Tradition

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona M. M. Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
European Context ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
University Setting ◽  
Andrew Lang

The career and posthumous reputation of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) call into question Scottish historiographical conventions of the era following the death of Sir Walter Scott which foreground the apparent triumph of scientific methods over Romance and the professionalisation of the discipline within a university setting. Taking issue with the premise of notions relating to the Strange Death of Scottish History in the mid-nineteenth century, it is proposed that perceptions of Scottish historiographical exceptionalism in a European context and presumptions of Scottish inferiorism stand in need of re-assessment. By offering alternative readings of the reformation, by uncoupling unionism from whiggism, by reaffirming the role of Romance in ‘serious’ Scottish history, and by disrupting distinctions between whig and Jacobite, the historical works and the surviving personal papers of Andrew Lang cast doubt on many conventional grand narratives and the paradigms conventionally used to make sense of Scottish historiography.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

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