Epicurus in Nineteenth-Century Germany

2020 ◽  
pp. 760-790
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Unique Point ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

Epicurus marks a unique point of convergence for three unlikely bedfellows in the nineteenth century: Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Each sees a different “Epicurus” in this fourth-century successor to Democritus, the fifth-century co-founder of atomism. Each renders Epicurus and his materialism into a symptom of modernity’s engagement with antiquity, a role that atomism increasingly played from the Enlightenment onwards. Fresh readings of each of these philosophers contribute to a better understanding of their ways of construing the history of ideas, and in particular their bold reinterpretations of Epicurus himself, in addition to correcting a number of misconceptions surrounding their individual readings of Epicurus, be this in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy and his Science of Logic, Marx’s dissertation, or Nietzsche’s sprawling corpus of published and unpublished writings.

Kant and the Science of Logic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huaping Lu-Adler
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Logical Pluralism ◽  
Philosophy Of Logic ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Transcendental Logic ◽  
If Logic ◽  
General Logic ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Debates

This book is both a history of philosophy of logic told from the Kantian viewpoint and a reconstruction of Kant’s theory of logic from a historical perspective. Kant’s theory represents a turning point in a history of philosophical debates over the following questions: (1) Is logic a science, instrument, standard of assessment, or mixture of these? (2) If logic is a science, what is the subject matter that differentiates it from other sciences, particularly metaphysics? (3) If logic is a necessary instrument to all philosophical inquiries, how is it so entitled? (4) If logic is both a science and an instrument, how are these two roles related? Kant’s answer to these questions centers on three distinctions: general versus particular logic, pure versus applied logic, pure general logic versus transcendental logic. The true meaning and significance of each distinction becomes clear, this book argues, only if we consider two factors. First, Kant was mindful of various historical views on how logic relates to other branches of philosophy (viz. metaphysics and physics) and to the workings of common human understanding. Second, he first coined “transcendental logic” while struggling to secure metaphysics as a proper “science,” and this conceptual innovation would in turn have profound implications for his mature theory of logic. Against this backdrop, the book reassesses the place of Kant’s theory in the history of philosophy of logic and highlights certain issues that are still debated today, such as normativity of logic and the challenges posed by logical pluralism.

GEOGRAPHY, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND IMPROVEMENT Geography and Enlightenment. Edited by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii+455. ISBN 0-226-48720-2 (hb). $52·00. 0-226-48721-0 (pb). $25·00. Nature's government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world. By Richard Drayton. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi+346. ISBN 0-300-05976-0. £25·00. Enlightenment geography: the political languages of British geography, 1650–1850. By Robert J. Mayhew. London: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. viii+324. ISBN 0-333-79186-X. £45·00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
FELIX DRIVER
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Lecture Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

scholarly journals Self-portrait of the philosopher in the context of the enlightement

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Vanja Radakovic
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Literary History ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

In the history of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mainly considered as an atypical philosopher of the Enlightenment, as a pioneer of the revolutionary idea of a free civilian state and natural law; in literary history, he is considered the forerunner of Romanticism, the writer who perfected the form of an epistolary novel, as well as a sentimentalist. However, this paper focuses on the biographical approach, which was mostly excluded in observation of those works revealing Rousseau as the originator of the autobiographical novelistic genre. The subject of this paper is the issue of credibility of self-portraits, and through this problem it highlights the facts from the author?s life. This paper relies on a biographical approach, not in the positivistic sense but in the phenomenological key. This paper is mainly inspired by the works of the Geneva School theorists - Starobinski, Poulet and Rousset.

scholarly journals M. Mandelbaum and Historiography of Philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 222-244
Author(s):  
Marina N. Volf
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Philosophical Position ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Holistic Approaches ◽  
History Of

The views of M. Mandelbaum on the historiography of philosophy have undergone a certain evolution. The paper shows the epistemological foundations of Mandelbaum’s historical and philosophical position. From the standpoint of critical realism and its application to social sciences Mandelbaum shows the advantages and disadvantages of the monistic or holistic approaches, partial monisms and pluralism. He considers A. O. Lovejoy's history of ideas to be the most reasonable pluralistic conception, although its use as a historical and philosophical methodology is limited. Intellectual history, which replaced it, should be called a partial monism, however, according to Mandelbaum, it gets a number of advantages if it begins to use a pluralistic methodology. In this version of methodology, the history of philosophy and intellectual history can be identified. The paper also presents some objections of analytic philosophers against this identification.

scholarly journals Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Beaumont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Problems ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the ‘insomniac’ as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term ‘insomnia’ itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about ‘neurasthenia’, as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle .

scholarly journals pre-eighteenth-century traditions of revivalism: damascus in the thirteenth century

2005 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
konrad hirschler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Large Sections

this article examines whether it is possible to trace eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalist thought to earlier ‘medieval’ examples. the discussion is centred on the issue of ijtiha¯d/taqli¯d, which featured prominently in revivalist thought. taking the example of scholars in thirteenth-century damascus, it firstly compares the respective readings of ijtiha¯d/taqli¯d, by focusing on one individual, abu¯ sha¯ma (d. 1267). it secondly asks whether a scholar like abu¯ sha¯ma, who had adopted a reading similar to later revivalists, also took a critical and oppositional stand against large sections of his contemporary society, i.e. a revivalist posture. it is this article's main contention that the example of abu¯ sha¯ma shows the need to study in more detail possible revivalist traditions prior to the ‘grand’ movements. the combination of the history of ideas and social history might allow a deeper understanding of how and in what contexts calls for reform and opposition to the current state of affairs were expressed.

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