scholarly journals Towards the New Paradigm of Existence, Human to Posthuman: Reflections on Subash Chandran’s A Preface to Man.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Dhanesh M
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Vitruvian Man ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Western Humanism

The term “Posthumanism” is a contemporary theoretical term put forward by researchers with disciplinary backgrounds in philosophy, science and technology and literary studies, for these groups, Posthumanism designates a series of breaks with foundational assumptions of modern Western culture. It claims to offer a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centred in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological. The postmodern theorist Ihab Hassan coined the term and offered a seminal definition in an article entitled "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?". As its name suggests, a defining characteristic of Posthumanism is its rejection of the values held on top by the traditional Western Humanism. In the words of Rosi Braidotti, “From Protagoras’ assertion that it is “the measure of all things”, to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the privileging of the human instils a set of “mental, discursive and spiritual values” (13). This notion comes to form the basis for political policies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Man is understood as an “intrinsically moral” being, functioning as a kind of vessel for perfect rationality and reason. Armed with these tools, man is capable of a limitless expansion toward his own perfection, and entitled to claim, as his own, whatever objects or others he encounters along the way. This privileging of man as the centre of everything is what Posthumanism aims to attack. Hassan says that posthuman does not mean the literal end of man but the end of an image of man shaped by Descartes, Thomas More and Erasmus. Braidotti in her book The Posthuman outlines that with the rise of ideologies like Fascism and Communism, Humanism started its ascending in the 1960s and 70s. Both these former ideologies represent a significant break from European Humanism: Fascism promoted a “ruthless” departure from the Enlightenment reverence for human reason, while Communism advocated a “communitarian notion of humanist solidarity” (17).

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism and the German Enlightenment

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Leander Fillafer ◽  
Jürgen Osterhammel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
German Society ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Innate Ideas ◽  
The Universe

The European Enlightenment has long been regarded as a host of disembodied, self-perpetuating ideas typically emanating from France and inspiring apprentices at the various European peripheries. This article focuses on the idea of cosmopolitanism in the context of the German Enlightenment. There clearly was a set of overarching purposes of emancipation and improvement, but elaborating and pursuing ‘the Enlightenment’ also involved a ‘sense of place’. The Enlightenment maintained that human reason was able to understand nature unaided by divine revelation, but attuned to its truths; many Enlighteners agreed that God, like Newton's divine clockmaker, had created the universe, but thereafter intervened no more. John Locke's critique of primordialism challenged the existence of innate ideas and original sin. This article moves on to explain notions of religion, empire, and commerce, as well as the laws of nation. Transitions in the German society in the nineteenth century and after that are explained in details in this article.

The End of the Catholic Nineteenth Century in 1968

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Law Making

This chapter narrates the promulgation of Pope Paul VI’s famous letter on birth control in 1968, and the unfavorable response it received by Catholic theologians. It offers a historical overview of how St. Thomas Aquinas utilized Aristotle’s idea of natural law, making that concept basic in Catholic sexual teaching. The author describes the nineteenth-century followers of Aquinas as “neo-scholastics” who prided themselves on a systematic interpretation of Catholic doctrine in light of an unchanging law embedded in an almost objectivist understanding of “nature” by God, discoverable by human reason, the moral implications of which were equally unchanging. The author argues that it was this rigid nineteenth-century neo-scholastic natural law tradition that helped to set up the collapse within the American Catholic community in the decades after the 1960s.

Beyond Barr ‐ Biblical Hebrew Semantics at its Crossroads

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Carsten Ziegert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Frame Semantics ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Conceptual Metaphors ◽  
Wilhelm Von Humboldt ◽  
Survey Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Summary This survey article comments on the history of biblical semantics from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present time. This period of 200 years is divided into three phases, each of which is governed by a predominant paradigm: 1) The era of biblical philology was heavily influenced by the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt. 2) Linguistic structuralism was promulgated to biblical scholars by James Barr since the 1960s. 3) The present time, still dominated by structuralism, has nevertheless seen the rise of a new paradigm, namely, cognitive linguistics. Within this domain, particularly frame semantics and the theory of conceptual metaphors have the potential to bring fresh insights to biblical semantics, exegesis and theology. This development is illustrated by means of some examples from the field of biblical Hebrew.ZusammenfassungIn diesem Überblicksartikel wird die Geschichte der biblischen Semantik vom Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis in die Gegenwart nachgezeichnet. Dieser Zeitraum von 200 Jahren lässt sich in drei Phasen einteilen, in denen jeweils ein Paradigma maßgeblich ist: 1) Die Epoche der biblischen Philologie war stark von den Ideen Wilhelm von Humboldts geprägt. 2) Der linguistische Strukturalismus wurde in den Bibelwissenschaften seit den 1960er Jahren durch James Barr vorherrschend. 3) In der Gegenwart, die immer noch vom Strukturalismus beherrscht wird, zeichnet sich die kognitive Linguistik als ein neues Paradigma ab. Vor allem die Frame-Semantik und die Theorie der konzeptuellen Metaphern haben das Potential, die biblische Semantik, Exegese und Theologie durch neue Erkenntnisse zu bereichern. Das wird durch einige Beispiele aus dem Bereich des biblischen Hebräisch veranschaulicht.RésuméCe survol examine l’histoire de la sémantique biblique du début du XIXe siècle à nos jours. Cette période de 200 ans comporte trois phases, chacune dominée par un paradigme différent: 1) L’époque de la philologie biblique est fortement marquée par les idées de Wilhelm von Humboldt. 2) Dans les années soixante, c’est le structuralisme linguistique de James Barr qui se répand parmi les exégètes. 3) Aujourd’hui, bien que le structuralisme ait encore l’avantage, un nouveau paradigme est né et se développe, savoir la linguistique cognitive. Dans ce domaine, la sémantique des schémas et la théorie des métaphores conceptuelles en particulier peuvent offrir tant à la sémantique biblique, qu’à l’exégèse et à la théologie des perspectives nouvelles. La preuve en est donnée par des exemples tirés du domaine de l’hébreu biblique.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Religion and Toleration from the Enlightenment to the Post-Secular Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Forst
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses the classical question of the relationship between enlightenment and religion. In doing so, the chapter compares Jürgen Habermas's thought to that of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. For, although Habermas undoubtedly stands in a tradition founded by Bayle and Kant, he develops a number of important orientations within this tradition and has changed his position in his recent work. The chapter studies this change to understand Habermas's position better. It also draws attention to a fundamental question raised by the modern world: what common ground can human reason establish in the practical and theoretical domain between human beings who are divided by profoundly different religious (including antireligious) views?

scholarly journals ‘A Kind of Geological Novel’: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ongoing Work ◽  
Geological Map ◽  
Humphry Davy

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition.

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 .

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