scholarly journals Senecan Moods: Foucault and Nietzsche on the Art of the Self

2007 ◽  
pp. 19-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael V. Ure
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practices Of The Self

This paper examines Foucault's history of the ancient practices of the self. It suggests that his historical reconstruction usefully distinguishes quite different models of self-cultivation in antiquity, and in doing so helps us to identify and understand the parameters and ambitions of much nineteenth-century German philosophy, especially the ethics of self-cultivation Nietzsche formulates in his middle works. However, it also shows how FoucaultÕs casual formulation of an 'aesthetic of existence' is seriously misleading as a guide to the ancient practices of the self, most notably the Stoic tradition. This paper argues that Foucault does not properly take into account how Stoicism conceives the desire to flee from or break with oneself, which Foucault places at the centre of his own askesis, as a pathological agitation that requires therapy. From the Stoic perspective, in other words, Foucault's askesis of constantly losing oneself is symptomatic of a failure to care for oneself.

scholarly journals Children, Emotion, Identity and Empire: Views from the Blechyndens' Calcutta Diaries (1790–1822)

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-201
Author(s):  
PETER ROBB
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Family History ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
The Self ◽  
British Library ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Imperial Identity ◽  
History Of

The voluminous Blechynden diaries, in the British Library, offer incomparable opportunities for studying (among other things) domestic life among middle-level British residents of Calcutta around the start of the nineteenth century. This paper is concerned with a small part of the history of the Blechynden household, focusing on Arthur Blechynden, son of Richard and his successor as superintendent of roads. Richard's diary runs to more than 70 volumes and Arthur's to seven. These sources permit none of the structural analysis that was made the basis of family history by Peter Laslett and others; but they touch several points of the richer canvas painted by Laurence Stone, and those genres that are concerned with individual lives, with emotion, with relationships, and with identity, the kinds of subject approached by the contributors to Roy Porter's collection Rewriting the Self. In this paper some of these issues will be taken up, with particular reference to ideas of individuality and of race. That discussion will then lead on to another, on the construction of British imperial identity outside Britain and in the context of the formation of empire, an aspect that seems worthy of more attention than it has received.

Wondrous Depths: Judging the Mind in Nineteenth-Century America

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (03) ◽  
pp. 828-849
Author(s):  
Catherine L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind

Susanna L. Blumenthal’sLaw and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture(2016) is a history of the self in nineteenth-century America. When judges considered a person’s criminal responsibility or civil capacity in court, they created a body of legal and political thought about the self, society, the economy, and American democracy. This essay uses Blumenthal’s book to explore recent work on law and the mind in Britain and North America, and argues that abstract questions about free will, the self, and the mind were part of the everyday jurisprudence of the nineteenth century. Debates about responsibility were also debates about the psychological consequences of capitalism and the borders of personhood and citizenship at a time of rapid economic, political, and social change.

After Hegel

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
New Era ◽  
Wilhelm Dilthey ◽  
History Of

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. This book argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. This innovative concise history of German philosophy, from 1840 to 1900, focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period's five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Transcendental Arguments ◽  
Concrete Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Philosophy

Best known as the self-styled philosopher of Fascism, Gentile, along with Benedetto Croce, was responsible for the ascendance of Hegelian idealism in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. His ‘actual’ idealism or ‘actualism’ was a radical attempt to integrate our consciousness of experience with its creation in the ‘pure act of thought’, thereby abolishing the distinction between theory and practice. He held an extreme subjectivist version of idealism, and rejected both empirical and transcendental arguments as forms of ‘realism’ that posited the existence of a reality outside thought. His thesis developed through a radicalization of Hegel’s critique of Kant that drew on the work of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa. He argued that it represented both the natural conclusion of the whole tradition of Western philosophy, and had a basis in the concrete experience of each individual. He illustrated these arguments in detailed writings on the history of Italian philosophy and the philosophy of education respectively. He joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and thereafter placed his philosophy at the service of the regime. He contended that Fascism was best understood in terms of his reworking of the Hegelian idea of the ethical state, a view that occasionally proved useful for ideological purposes but which had little practical influence.

scholarly journals МЕТОДОЛОГІЧНІ ТА СОЦІАЛЬНО-ФІЛОСОФСЬКІ ПРОБЛЕМИ САМОРЕАЛІЗАЦІЇ ТА САМОМОТИВАЦІЇ

World Science ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (7(35)) ◽  
pp. 32-38
Author(s):  
Ободовська С. В. ◽  
Бохан Ю. В.
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
The Self ◽  
Professional Activity ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Self Development ◽  
Effective System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Individual

The article deals with the socio-philosophical aspects and proposes an analysis of the ideas and views of thinkers of different historical epochs and times on the problems of self-realization and self-motivation. The theoretical basis for the study of the aspects of this problem was the fundamental approaches to the self-knowledge and motivation of the personality of the philosophers of antiquity (Epicurus, Socrates, Plato), the Middle Ages (K. Alexandria, St. Augustine), the Renaissance (D. Alighieri, F. Petrarca, M. Montaigne), New Time (B. Pascal, B. Spinoza) and German Philosophy (I. Kant, I. G. Fichte, A. Schopenhauer). The proof of the history of studying the problem of self-realization and personality motivation during its formation allows to emphasize the important essence of the aspiration of individuals to self- motivation as to the ultimate realization of the personal potential of a person. The analysis of motivation and self-motivation as an effective system of self-development and self-realization of the personality is conducted. An attempt has been made to generalize author's studies and representations of the essence of the processes of motivation and self- motivation of the individual and highlighted a number of aspects that focus the attention of researchers in explaining the essence of these processes. The disclosure of the ideas reflected in the study contributes to the further study and development of the structure of the process of self-motivation of the person, the mechanisms for its activation, the creation of pedagogical conditions that stimulate this process in professional activity.

scholarly journals The silent child: Reform pedagogy, the self and the problematization of shyness in the classroom

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-321
Author(s):  
Pieter Verstraete
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Maria Montessori ◽  
Reform Pedagogy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sociological Studies

 In the existing historical and sociological studies devoted to shyness scholars have identified the second half of the Twentieth century as an important period in which shy feelings have become a problem for Wes­tern societies. On the basis of the work of the American cultural histo­rian Warren Susman, and especially his ideas about the move from a character society towards a personality society, it is argued that the turn of the nineteenth century also played an important role in the emergence of negative interpretation of being and acting shy. In this article Susman’s attention for what happened at the start of the twentieth century is being taken up by examining the ideas about timidity in the work of one of the most important reform educators at that time, namely Maria Montessori. Montessori’s ideas are being contextualized by referring to the more en­compassing culture of personality and the self that paralleled the progres­sive era in education. By contraposing Montessori’s ideas to an eighteen­th-century ego-document written by someone who identified himself as a shy person we’d like to plea for a nuanced account with regard to the history of the problematization of shyness in general and shy children in particular.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-171
Author(s):  
Alex Gourevitch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
The Self ◽  
Free State ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
The Real ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
State Coercion ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
Real Danger

This chapter argues that debates around republicanism and civic virtue are structured around two unwarranted assumptions. First, neo-republicans and their critics assume that civic virtues are qualities that stabilize a free state. Second, they assume that the cultivation of virtue primarily requires coercive inculcation. I contest both assumptions through historical reconstruction of nineteenth-century ‘labour republicanism’. Labour republicans thought about civic virtue as qualities that agents exercise to transform rather than stabilize a regime. And they argued that virtue developed out of the self-education and activity of citizens themselves, not state coercion. The real danger lies not in the defence of an illiberal state but of the kinds of demands that the oppressed make on each other to act virtuously. As such, labour republicans offer us a model for thinking about the role—and risks—of virtue in emancipatory politics.

Can Quadroon Balls Represent Acquiescence or Resistance?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
White Men ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
Domestic Servitude ◽  
Free Women

This chapter seeks to reconcile the persistent myth of the self-directed quadroon—women possessing one fourth black and three fourths white “blood”—finding love and quasi-marriage at a glamorous and respectable quadroon ball with the known history of the sexual exploitation of black women, both slave and free. White men frequently engaged in sexual relationships with women of color, including free women of color, in pre-Civil War Louisiana, yet fictionalized representations of the balls distort and obscure important realities about race, sex, and power in the nineteenth century. White men exercised sexual access to women of color in a variety of blurred and overlapping forms, including slavery, domestic servitude, prostitution, and other relationships, all of which could be placed under the rubric of what Louisiana law termed concubinage.

Finer’s Comparative History of Government

1997 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. S. Hayward
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Close Affinity ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comparative Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
The University

‘IF YOU WANT QUICK RESULTS, PLANT LETTUCE; ENDURING results take longer.’ So said Léon Walras, France's greatest nineteenth-century economist and predecessor at Lausanne of Pareto, whom Sammy Finer wrote about with admiration. Finer's last and greatest work in three volumes and over 1,600 pages will be published in May 1997 by Oxford University Press. Unlike his contemporary political scientists, Sammy Finer had the self-confidence and breadth of vision singlehandedly to take on an immense work and almost bring it to completion before death imposed its own premature conclusion. As a foretaste of its contents, the first Finer Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Keele on 10 May 1995, is published in this journal, with which he had an especially close affinity. It can only suggest, in the most succinct way, what is to come. I am confident that the study of comparative government will never be the same once the whole breathtaking work appears in all its magnitude.

scholarly journals “The Statute of Westminster, 1931: An Irish Perspective”

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 749-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mohr
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Self ◽  
Free State ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
White Settlement

The enactment of the Statute of Westminster in 1931 represents one of the most significant events in the history of the British Empire. The very name of this historic piece of legislation, with its medieval antecedents, epitomizes a sense of enduring grandeur and dignity. The Statute of Westminster recognized significant advances in the evolution of the self-governing Dominions into fully sovereign states. The term “Dominion” was initially adopted in relation to Canada, but was extended in 1907 to refer to all self-governing colonies of white settlement that had been evolving in the direction of greater autonomy since the middle of the nineteenth century. By the early 1930s, the Dominions included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State.

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