scholarly journals Transformation of representations on the normative content of morality in moral philosophy of the Early Modern Age

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Andrey Vyacheslavovich Prokofyev
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Appropriate Behavior ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Normative Content

The object of this research is the philosophical representations on the normative content of morality in their historical dynamics. Unlike its formal and functional characteristics that include objectivity, universality, priority with regards to other regulators of human behavior, the content of morality implies the general requirements and criteria for approval that form the image of a morally perfect individual and set the parameters of morally appropriate behavior. Although on the level of utmost generalizations, Western European idea of morality retains the normative content typical to the Judeo-Christian tradition; its instantiation constantly varies. The goal of this work consists in tracing the changes of such instantiation occurred in Western moral philosophy of the XVI – XVIII centuries (Early Modern Age). The indicated historical process is the subject of analysis. Research methodology suggests determination of the long-term trends in the history of normative ethics and their correlation with the socio-historical context. The analysis of sources on the topic demonstrates that understanding of ethical requirements and criteria for approval in understanding of moral philosophers of the Early Modern Age have experienced the following fundamental changes: 1)  displacement to periphery of the morality of responsibilities of moral figure before himself, 2) transition towards understanding of the good of other person through the prism of his wellbeing and opportunities for unhindered personal fulfillment, 3) emergence of correlation between responsibilities to other person and regards of his individual rights. In relation to the latter change, the three factors had crucial significance:  advancement of the idea of religious tolerance beyond the religious wars, countering the paternalistic custody by absolutist regimes, as well as the development of universal empathy based on the new forms of description of inner experience of a human. Although some conclusions acquired in evolution of the ideas of recent decades contradict to the explanation of the process of implementation of the individual rights into the moral legal discourse, which relies on the aforementioned three factors, it remains most promising according to the author.

scholarly journals Name & sign: About Zaharija Orfelin’s pseudonym

2016 ◽  
pp. 75-87
Author(s):  
Vladimir Simic
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
General Characteristic ◽  
Name Change ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

The problem of representation of intellectuals and artists in the early modern period has long occupied historians and researchers of various disciplines. One of the forms of artistic expression of intellectual self-consciousness was creation of pseudonyms. That was the metaphorical way of deliberation of individual identity, but also a signifier of cultural processes that took place between self, creativity and historical context. Onomastic studies had a long tradition and pre-modern intellectuals very early accepted idea that name reveals the essence of things and indicates the character of its wearer. The name was considered as a strong denotative force, which could affect private or public life of an individual. That was further confirmed in the manual of Adrien Baillet Auteurs Deguisez Sous Des Etrangers Noms published in 1690, for all those who wanted to create an alias. Zaharija Orfelin (1726-1785), as one of the early Serbian intellectuals and artists of the Enlightenment, also rejected his last name which remained unknown to date. Only one uncertain explanation was provided and that by Metropolitan Stefan Stratimirovic which stated that Zaharija?s last name was ?Stefanovic?, and that he himself invented the pseudonym ?Orfelin?. In the lack of other sources that thesis was accepted, but never did explain the motives behind the act. That aspect of his artistic personality remained unsolved, so this paper analyze the individual circumstances of his life in the context of onomastic and intellectual history of the early modern period. The invention of pseudonyms was recognized as a general characteristic of the era, so the comparisons and analogies of some biographical details are made between him and few other intellectuals and artists. Signatures that Orfelin put on his pieces are interpreted in the context of his public representation. From today?s perspective, it seems that Orfelins? historical figure stayed hidden behind the personality which was introduced by his chosen name. In that context, the name change referred to deeper internal changes in matters of his identity and public role.

Philosophic Pride

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.

Renaissance Mass Murder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Wars ◽  
Human Tragedy

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.

scholarly journals In the service of secrecy: An enveloped history of priority, proof and patents

2021 ◽  
pp. 135918352110288
Author(s):  
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Property System ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Propriété Industrielle ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Double Envelope ◽  
Double Compartment

This article is about an everyday paper object: an envelope. However, as opposed to most other flat paper containers, the enveloppe Soleau can only be bought from L’Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of €15 you get a perforated, double-compartment envelope allowing you to constitute proof of creation and assign a precise date to your idea or project. But the enveloppe Soleau is something much more than just a simple and cheap way by which you can prove priority in any creative domain. It is a material footprint anchored to centuries of practices associated with disclosure and secrecy, a gateway into the infrastructure of the intellectual property system and its complicated relationship to the forms of knowledge it purports to hold. The purpose of this article is to consider the making of the enveloppe Soleau as a bureaucratic document, a material device performing a particular kind of legal paperwork. In four different vignettes, the article tracks the material becoming of the enveloppe Soleau as an evidentiary receptacle, beginning by going back to early modern practices of secrecy and priority, continuing with its consolidation in two patents (from 1910 and 1911) to the inventor Eugène Soleau (1852–1929), and ending up, in 2016, dematerialized in the e-Soleau. As a bureaucratic document, the enveloppe Soleau shows just how much work a mundane paper object can perform, navigating a particular materiality (a patented double envelope); formalized processes of proof (where perforations have legal significance); the practices of double archiving (in an institution and with the individual) and strict temporal limitations (a decade). Ultimately, the enveloppe Soleau travels between the material and immaterial, between private and public, between secrecy and disclosure, but also between what we perceive of as the outside and inside of the intellectual property system.

The Embalming Art in the Modern Age: The Mummies of Caroline, Letizia and Joachim-Napoleon Agar as Examples of Funerary Rites in the Napoleonic Empire

Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Marinozzi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Kingdom Of Naples ◽  
History Of ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The Right ◽  
Shed Light

In the early 1980s a systematic investigation was begun by G. Fornaciari and his staff of a series of mummies from central and southern Italy, and in particular of important Renaissance remains. The study of a substantial number of artificial mummies has shed light on the human embalming techniques connected with the methods and procedures described by medical and non-medical authors in the early modern period. This has made it possible to reconstruct the history of the art of mummification, from the ‘clyster’ techniques to the partial or total evisceration of the corpse, to the intravascular injection of drying and preserving liquors. In addition to the bodies of Aragonese princes and members of the Neapolitan nobility, interred in the Basilica of San Domenico in Naples are the remains of important French personages dating to the modern age. Among the tombs arranged in two parallel rows to the right of the balcony are four sarcophagi containing the bodies of the wife and three children of Jean Antoine Michel Agar, who served as the Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Naples from 1809 to 1815. The type of wrapping used for the corpses of the children presents strong analogies to those of ancient Egyptian mummies.

scholarly journals Jesuit Sanctity: Hypothesizing the Continuity of a Hagiographic Narrative of the Modern Age

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franco Motta ◽  
Eleonora Rai
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
History Of

Abstract The introduction to this special issue provides some considerations on early modern sanctity as a historical object. It firstly presents the major shifts in the developing idea of sanctity between the late medieval period and the nineteenth century, passing through the early modern construction of sanctity and its cultural, social, and political implications. Secondly, it provides an overview of the main sources that allow historians to retrace early modern sanctity, especially canonization records and hagiographies. Thirdly, it offers an overview of the ingenious role of the Society of Jesus in the construction of early modern sanctity, by highlighting its ability to employ, create, and play with hagiographical models. The main Jesuit models of sanctity are then presented (i.e., the theologian, the missionary, the martyr, the living saint), and an important reflection is reserved for the specific martyrial character of Jesuit sanctity. The introduction assesses the continuity of the Jesuit hagiographical discourse throughout the long history of the order, from the origins to the suppression and restoration.

scholarly journals “Arabian letters” of Sergiy Donich: from biography of oriental scholar and archaeologist

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 419-435
Author(s):  
Danylo Radivilov ◽  
Olena Romanova
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Professional Activity ◽  
Soviet Republic ◽  
New Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Oriental Studies ◽  
Complete Translation

The paper introduces into academic discourse two letters by S. Donich to the famous Ukrainian orientalist A. Krymskyi. The letters were written in January, 1927, before the Donich’s academic career as an Egyptologist, an archaeologist and a museum curator was started. Both letters were compiled in Arabic; the first letter was more thorough and was compiled as a sample of traditional Arabic letter (it includes coloured basmala and colophon), another letter was brief and written in European style. Such way of communication was chosen by S. Donich (amateur who independently studied oriental languages at that moment) to demonstrate his competence in Arabic to A. Krymskyi, the leading Arabist of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, and USSA at that time. S. Donich wrote about his interest in oriental languages and their study, about his fascination for Oriental Studies, and about his difficult life circumstances that interfered him to become an academic orientalist. Donich emphasized he was a devotee of the Arabic language and informed about his translation of “The Thousand and One Night”. Some fragments of his translation into Russian he included into the letter. Thus S. Donich hoped to declare himself as a potential candidacy for further oriental study. The analysis of the content of the letters in a broader historical context, and in combination with other archive documents related to S. Donich, A. Krymskyi, and the academic Oriental Studies institutions of USSR, make it possible to uncover the circumstances in which of the individual orientalists lived and made their careers in the 1920s. It also provides us with some new facts of the biography and professional activity of S. Donich, as well as it makes possible to verify some previously known information about him. An assumption was made that these letters led to a new period of the Donich’s life, his turning to the Oriental Studies, with his later career as an Egyptologist, a museum curator and an archaeologist with his continuous interest in Arabic studies and other fields of Oriental Studies. The appendix provides a complete translation of the Arabic letters into Ukrainian together with and photographs of the documents. Key words: Ukrainian Museum Egyptology, History of Ukrainian Science, History of Ukrainian Humanities, History of Egyptology, History of Oriental Studies in Ukraine, S. Donich, A. Krymskyi.

Philippe Hurault de Cheverny (1528–99) and the Making of Memoirs in Early Modern France

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolae Virastau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Private Life ◽  
First Person ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
History Of

Abstract Memoirs occupy a privileged position in the history of French literature. Historians of French memoirs consider the Memoires d’Estat of Chancellor Philippe Hurault de Cheverny to be a stepping stone in the history of self-writing because they seem to mark a transition from self-narratives focusing on the author’s public persona to a self-writing that emphasizes the author’s private life, that is, to something more akin to modern autobiography. Unlike most autobiographical works printed at the time, Cheverny’s memoirs integrate details about the author’s private life and family affairs into the more common first-person chronicle of his public career. A closer examination reveals, however, that multiple practices of self-writing are at work in Cheverny’s book, and that its apparent originality in the history of memoirs and their relation to autobiography more generally are an effect of editorial changes made after the author’s death. The article argues that practices of collective writing and editing of personal documents were common in the early modern age.

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