scholarly journals Elements of a History of the Soul in North-West Semitic Texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-176
Author(s):  
Joachim Schaper
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
North West ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract Amongst Hebrew Bible scholars the question of the understanding of biblical key terms and concepts pertaining to the human condition has attracted a fair amount of interest. And amongst those key terms and concepts it is the concept of nefeš that has proved to be particularly attractive and challenging. New light is thrown on the biblical concept by the recent discovery of the Katumuwa stele in Zincirli. The present article examines the evidence and draws conclusions with regard to the history of the concept of nefeš in the Hebrew Bible and in North-West Semitic literature and religion generally.

Holiness and Ethics

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-153
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter explores the connection between holiness and ethics or between holiness and goodness. Drawing on a theory of holiness in Judaism, it considers how holiness relates to other values, including moral ones, and whether holiness is more primordial or primitive than ethics. The discussion is anchored on two texts: the first from the Book of Leviticus, and the second from the modern Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel. The chapter argues that holiness and morality are equally primordial, equally original to the human condition, and goes on to propose a natural history of holiness in which the human experiences of love and awe, of goodness and holiness arise together against man's evolutionary background as a social primate. It also examines the concepts of primordial morality, natural morality, ethical naturalism, and moral realism before concluding with an analysis of intuition in relation to the good, the right, and the holy.

Frances Burney and the Art of Accident

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Katarina O'Briain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct—as a crucial marker of human character, Burney insists on filling her novels with a succession of unexpected events and a multitude of characters surprised by their own actions. By refusing to treat accident as a mistake to be improved upon—in the realm of either characterological conduct or authorial craft—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article suggests that this ethics marks a key change within the rise of the novel that continues well into late capitalism.

scholarly journals Parallel Narratives and the Question of Novelness in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Reading of its Genre

2016 ◽  
Vol 216 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Instr. Amer Rasool Mahdi / Ph.D.
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

The present study attempts to probe into a genre reading of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress as this is deemed as one of the founding texts in English letters. It thus tries to have Bunyan's work re-contextualised within the historical and formal debate of the rise of the novel and the very idea of Novelness. Within the framework and practice of novelness, it is proposed here that formal (generic) self-consciousness is pre-structured within the allegorical renditions of the human condition; these renditions are more likely to be seen as gearing toward being part of the pre- or parallel-history of the novel vis-à-vis the debatable norms of formal realism.

Global Beckett

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rónán McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Production History ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Human Condition

Beckett, arguably the most important playwright of the twentieth century, has achieved an international reputation that goes well beyond his achievement as a writer. There is in effect a ‘Beckett brand’, a marketable image of the man and his works. The abstraction of his theatre work, its lack of definite geographical or specific referents, has led to a tenacious discourse of universalism. His global fame developed from the first production ofWaiting for Godot, seen as the epitome of modernist experiment, delivering a profound image of the human condition free of historical specificity and thus available to any number of different interpretive schemes. The production history of Beckett’s work in recent times, however, has shown that it is at its most effective in its trans-historical capacity, represented most tellingly in instances such as the productions ofGodotin Sarajevo or New Orleans. Beckett is ‘glocal’ rather than global.

The Individual/Agent and Culture/Structure in the History of the Social Sciences

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline B. Brettell
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Individual Agent ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Human Condition

In facing up to the problem of structure and agency social theorists are not just addressing crucial theoretical problems in the study of society, they are also confronting the most pressing social problem of the human condition.

ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
David Schmidtz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Old Field ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractOur modern observation-based approaches to the study of the human condition were shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment. Political Economy emerged as a discipline of its own in the nineteenth century, then fragmented further around the dawn of the twentieth century. Today, we see Political Economy’s pieces being reassembled and reunited with their philosophical roots. This issue pauses to reflect on the history of this new but also old field of study.

Santayana, George (1863–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lachs
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
George Santayana ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
Naturalistic Account ◽  
The Human Condition

George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, novelist and poet. Born in Spain, he moved to America as a child and attended Harvard, studying under William James and Josiah Royce. The philosophical world first took note of Santayana for his work in aesthetics. The Sense of Beauty (1896), his attempt to give a naturalistic account of the beautiful, remains influential. He wrote exquisitely crafted essays on literature and religion, viewing both as articulating important symbolic truths about the human condition. His mature philosophical system is a classical edifice constructed out of positions adopted from Plato and Aristotle, which he modified in light of the naturalistic insights of his beloved Lucretius and Spinoza and steeped in pessimism reminiscent of Schopenhauer. Although in close touch with the philosophical developments of his day, he always viewed human life and its problems in a calming cosmic perspective.

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