The Devil's Tabernacle

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ancient Religion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
European Thought ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Huge Variety

This is the first book to examine in depth the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. The book shows how the study of the oracles influenced, and was influenced by, some of the most significant developments in early modernity, such as the Christian humanist recovery of ancient religion, confessional polemics, Deist and libertine challenges to religion, antiquarianism and early archaeology, Romantic historiography, and spiritualism. The book examines the different views of the oracles since the Renaissance—that they were the work of the devil, or natural causes, or the fraud of priests, or finally an organic element of ancient Greek society. The range of discussion on the subject, as he demonstrates, is considerably more complex than has been realized before: hundreds of scholars, theologians, and critics commented on the oracles, drawing on a huge variety of intellectual contexts to frame their beliefs. A central chapter interrogates the landmark dispute on the oracles between Bernard de Fontenelle and Jean-François Baltus, challenging Whiggish assumptions about the mechanics of debate on the cusp of the Enlightenment. With erudition and an eye for detail, the book argues that, on both sides of the controversy, to speak of the ancient oracles in early modernity was to speak of one's own historical identity as a Christian.

Introduction

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Actual Process ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
The Subject ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Significant Attention

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. It identifies a conflict between the conservative and the radical, the orthodox and the heterodox, with the latter usually glorified, explicitly or not, as the harbinger of Enlightenment. It devotes significant attention to the actual process and texture of argument, and to those who lost the debate. It argues that heterodoxy is not as transparent as it may seem, and has often been taken for granted without justification, or sought in the wrong places. The book also engages with texts outside the canons of libertine and antilibertine thought. The extent of historical interest in the oracles may come as a surprise: alongside the poets and preachers who reworked conventional tropes from antiquity, hundreds of scholars, theologians, and critics commented on the subject, drawing on all manner of intellectual contexts to frame their beliefs.

Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Barducci
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
International History ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
European Thought

This book is a reconstruction of the way Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was read and used by English political and religious writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The book is broad in approach, covering the reception of all of Grotius’ key works and a wide range of topics. It has much to say also about the search for peace in an age of religious conflict and about the cultural roots of the Enlightenment. Most of all, this book aims to deepen our understanding of the connections that made English political thought part of the history of European thought. To this end, it brings together a succinct account of Grotius’ own thinking on key topics; maps these accounts onto English debates, to show why his ideas were seen to be relevant at key moments; shows awareness of the possibilities for misappropriation inherent in reception; and adds something new to our understanding of why seventeenth-century Englishmen argued in the ways that they did. The subject the book covers is potentially of wide interest to historians of political thought, religion, and culture; to British and European historians; and to historians with an interest in international history, specifically the cultural and intellectual links between England and the Dutch Republic.

Evil Lords and the Devil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumi Shimahara
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biblical Commentaries ◽  
Political Principles ◽  
The Devil

Perceptions of tyranny are also the subject of this chapter, which discusses the ways in which terms deriving from the root ‘tyran-’ were employed in biblical commentaries and other sources of the Carolingian era. The chapter shows that eighth- and ninth-century authors developed a distinct discourse on tyranny by blending pagan and patristic views with their own ethical-political principles. Carolingian conceptions of tyranny were grounded in considerations pertaining both to legality and to morality, with vice, eschatological concerns, and the association with the devil playing as important a role as issues of illegitimacy, usurpation, or malfeasance. These conceptions were moreover fairly elastic, as related terms not only had a wide connotative range but were also used to describe a variety of abusive behaviors of a royal, secular, or ecclesiastical origin.

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 Mytens tvang

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Albinus
Keyword(s):  
Blind Spot ◽  
The Other ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

The purpose of the article is to show how the negative dialectics of Adorno gets involved with a concept of myth that is questionable in several respects. First of all, Adorno tries to combine, but rather conflates, two understandings of myth. On the one hand, the concept of myth is defined as the ancient Greek mythos, in which the subject of man is projected on to nature; on the other hand, myth is defined as the backfire of enlightenment, in which self-reflection becomes the blind spot of instrumental reason. Along these lines of argument, Adorno’s interpretation of Homer, which, at any rate, is highly inspiring, attempts to demonstrate that Odysseus is already enlightened in that he keeps the myth at bay in order to gain his self. The point is, as a matter of dialectic necessity, that he just ends up in myth once again, albeit in the second sense, namely by being a victim of his own self-denial. A question that seems to remain unanswered, though, is how the two kinds of myth are related. Further, Adorno draws on a problematic distinction between myth and literature in order to claim that Homer separates himself from the realm of myth. By adopting Adorno’s own game of interpretation, however, it is possible to regard myth as such, including the Homeric one, as being contingently open-ended rather than just a matter of dialectic determination.

scholarly journals Acre and Alphito: to the question of Greek scary stories for children

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Vladislava Igorevna Makeeva
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Murdered Children

This article is describes the Ancient Greek mythological characters Acre (Ἀκκώ) and Alphito (Ἀλφιτώ). Both of them are commonly attributed to surly persons who frighten and posed treat to the little ones, by analogy with Lamia, Mormo and Gello, who murdered children. The goal of this research is to determine the differences between the tales about Acre and Alphiro and the tales about demons who murdered children. The object of this work is the mythological representations of Ancient Greeks, while the subject is the Greek scary stories for children. The author analyzes the testimonies of ancient authors about Acre and Alphito. The conclusion is made that these characters differed from the typical children's monsters. Special attention is given to the tale of Acre due to better preservation of its history in the sources. She was a stupid woman, known for her absurd actions. Her name was associated with the origin of the words denoting stupidity; it also became a common name and was of proverbial nature. The foolish acts of Acre made her a fitting example of the wrong pastime. The tales of Acre and Alphito were not typical scary stories for children; their motif was not to frighten the little ones with their terrible doings as Lamia, Mormo and Gello, but to demonstrate not to waste their time in a foolish way.

The Great Migration and Individual Travels: Precursors of Serbian Modernity?

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-169
Author(s):  
Dragana Grbić
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
South Slavs ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought

This chapter situates the travels of Dimitrije Dositej Obradović in the context of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Serbian Great Migration, which facilitated the dissemination of Western European thought throughout Serbia. Obradović’s travels typified this process. As a young man, he fled from a monastery and spent much of his life traveling through Germany, France, Italy, England and elsewhere in Europe. He paid his way by teaching languages, and when he returned home, he translated European works into the Serbian vernacular. His oeuvre brought the Enlightenment thought of Voltaire, Leibniz, and Kant to Serbian literature and introduced readers to the works of Fénelon, Rousseau, and Marmontel. Obradović’s writings, particularly his autobiography, not only shaped eighteenth-century Serbian culture, but also influenced South Slavs, Greeks, and Romanians in the Balkans. .

Greek civilisation and slavery

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Slave System ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Predominant Form ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Greek Civilization

This chapter examines whether Greek civilization was based on slavery. The silence of classicists on the subject is not surprising. The discussion here is limited to Anglo-American scholarship, in an attempt to achieve a manageable focus, though a great deal of the last half-century's work on ancient Greek slavery has been written in French and German. Slavery may cover very different types of unfreedom, such as the chattel slave system of Athens and the helotage that was the predominant form of servitude practised by Sparta. Whether slaves, especially chattel slaves, are to be seen principally as living property or as socially dead outsiders evokes further levels of definition, which are also contested.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....

The Mach-Planck debate revisited: democratization of science or elite knowledge?

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayo Siemsen
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
Popularization Of Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First World

Is scientific knowledge the domain of the intellectual elite or is it everyman’s concern, thus making the popularization of science a democratic activity integrally required of science itself? This is a question whose history extends back even longer than the enlightenment period. As technology starts to permeate every inch of daily life, the issues involved for our future development become more pressing and a matter of socio-political development. Dostoyevsky brought this to the point in a fictional dispute between a Great Inquisitor and Christ. This was also the subject of fierce scientific debates, the most prominent of which was probably the debate between Ernst Mach and Max Planck at the turn of the century, before the first world war, when the new Physics (quantum theory and relativity) was discovered and its relevance for our view of the world and our place in it was hotly discussed. For Mach, the job of popularization should rest with science - an informed public cannot be manipulated as easily by ‘pop science’. This article focuses on the mostly neglected political epistemological level of the debate, its sporadic later flare-ups in different places with different protagonists (Wagenschein, Wittenberg), and its relevance for the popularization of science today.

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