Faith, Reason and Peace in Lessing's Late Works

Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (159) ◽  
pp. 117-141
Author(s):  
Cat Moir

This article argues that G. E. Lessing should be viewed as one of the German Enlightenment’s foremost thinkers of peace alongside his contemporary Immanuel Kant, whose contribution to thinking peace in the eighteenth century is already well recognised. It makes this case by examining two of Lessing’s late works: the 1779 drama Nathan the Wise and the 1780 essay The Education of the Human Race. The dialogue between faith and reason characteristic of Enlightenment discourse is at the heart of both texts, but here it is argued that peace is a crucial third moment. While in Nathan Lessing asserts the need to find peace between the forces of faith and reason in a literary register, in the Education essay he does so in a more explicitly theoretical mode.

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Grant

In recent years, music theorists and analysts have devoted a great deal of attention to the phenomenon of hypermeter, drawing some of their most representative examples from the late works of Haydn. Although this recent trend in analysis has shed much light on Haydn’s music, it has left questions of history distinct from the mode of listening it engages. This article argues that the way we understand conceptualizations of listening and aesthetic experience can greatly inform the way that we understand hypermeter and the question of style in history. Drawing on eighteenth-century theories of music and literature, it recontextualizes Haydn’s hypermetric style with respect to a larger world of aesthetic experience.


Author(s):  
Rainer Forst

This chapter compares two Enlightenment theories of religious toleration: the theories of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. Both Bayle and Kant argued for an autonomous conception of morality as the ground of reciprocal and universal toleration, but they differed in the ways in which they thought of the relation between faith and reason. The chapter discusses how in that latter regard, a Baylean perspective is superior to a Kantian one, whereas it concludes that the Kantian approach has a better way to connect morality and a politics of public justification when it comes to think about a political regime of toleration.


Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines the change in science's image and the revelation of the philosophers of science's so-called epistemologia imaginabilis in the context of eighteenth-century science and philosophy. Many eminent scholars, from Thomas Hobbes to Denis Diderot, have engaged in the epistemological debate over extending the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human experience. The idea of the unity of knowledge across all disciplines on the basis of scientific methodology reached its peak with Immanuel Kant. Among the great historians, Marc Bloch was the one who best understood the role that a radically new conception of science could play in redefining and reviving the legitimacy of historical knowledge. The chapter considers the intense intellectual debate between historians of science and philosophers of science on the foundations of knowledge and how modern science acquired definitive legitimacy as a new form of knowledge over the course of the eighteenth century.


1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Kramer

In 1903, Otto Weininger, twenty-three, Viennese, Jewish, and an imminent suicide, published his misogynist manifesto Sex and Character and created an international sensation. ‘One began’, reported a contemporary, ‘to hear in the men's clubs of England and in the cafés of France and Germany – one began to hear singular mutterings among men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared.’ Weininger's new gospel tied the spiritual progress of the human race to the repudiation of its female half. Women, said Weininger, are purely material beings, mindless, sensuous, animalistic and amoral; lacking individuality, they act only at the behest of a ‘universalised, generalised, impersonal’ sexual instinct. For humanity to achieve its spiritual destiny, men – particularly ‘Aryan’ men, who had not suffered a racial degeneracy that made the task impossible – must achieve the individualistic supremacy first revealed by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In order to do this, they must both rid themselves of the femininity within them and reject their sexual desires for the women around them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-178
Author(s):  
Riccardo Pozzo

A peculiar feature of the philosophy of Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777) lies in its being based on rhetorical principles. We are in front of an important construct that claims for attention in the context of the growing literature on eighteenth-century rhetoric. The syntagm ‘rhetoricised logic’ indicates a specific function of rhetoric as the basis for rethinking philosophical discourse. The paper shows that Meier's philosophical programme is consistently based on the trivium. On top of this, the paper compares Meier and Immanuel Kant on the ancient topos of the artes liberales, thus making it clear that the position of Meier can be assessed as a model for a rhetorically founded theory of knowledge, which was transformed and overcome by Kant.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOMAS MCAULEY

ABSTRACT1770s Berlin saw the birth of a new theory of rhythm, first stated in Johann Georg Sulzer'sAllgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste(1771–1774), and later labelled theAkzenttheorie(theory of accents). Whereas previous eighteenth-century theories had seen rhythm as built up from the combination of distinct units, theAkzenttheoriesaw it as formed from the breaking down of a continual flow, achieved through the placing of accents on particular notes. In hisPhilosophie der Kunst(1802–1803) the philosopher Friedrich Schelling used Sulzer's definition of rhythm to suggest, astonishingly, that music can facilitate knowledge of the absolute, a philosophical concept denoting the ultimate ground of all reality. In this article I show how Schelling could come to interpret theAkzenttheoriein such extravagant terms by examining three theories of time and their relationships to rhythm: that of Sulzer and his predecessor Isaac Newton, that of Immanuel Kant and that of Schelling. I conclude by arguing that in Schelling's case – an important one, since his is the earliest systematic presentation of a view of music that came to predominate in the decades after 1800 – his view of music was driven neither by developments in contemporary music nor by changes in the philosophy of art as a discrete intellectual enterprise, but by revolutions in philosophy by and large unconcerned even with art in general.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL SONENSCHER

The first issue of theDécade philosophiqueappeared on 29 April 1794. In all, fifty-four volumes of the journal were published between that date and 1807, when, on Napoleon's orders, it was forced to merge with theMercure français. TheDécadewas published three times a month (taking its name from its appearance on the tenth day of each month of the French republican calendar) and the periodical soon became one of the intellectual powerhouses of the French republic after Robespierre. But quite what, in this particular setting, an intellectual powerhouse might have been is still an open question. Alongside Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham, and their vast and varied intellectual legacies, the significance of the dozens of writers, including Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours and Jean-Baptiste Say, who contributed to theDécade, is now more difficult to specify. There have, of course, been several fine studies of theDécadeand its contributors, notably by Joanna Kitchen and Marc Régaldo, and more broadly by Sergio Moravia, Martin Staum and Cheryl Welch. But it is still somewhat easier to associate the periodical with a number of keywords, such asidéologieandscience sociale, than with anything comparable to those more comprehensively articulated bodies of thought that came to be labelled “idealism” or “utilitarianism”. “Ideologism” never seems to have existed, and certainly never caught on. But this very indeterminacy may still be an advantage. It may help to open up, both historically and analytically, rather more of the intellectual space once covered by the broad range of subjects and arguments that first helped to shape—and then came to be buried by—idealism and utilitarianism.


Author(s):  
Declan Marmion

This chapter locates those known as ‘trasncendental Thomists’ against the broad background, first, of the revival of Thomism in the late nineteenth century and, second, of debates concerning the relationship between faith and reason in Catholic circles since the late eighteenth century. The chapter then explores how Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Maréchal sought to bring Kant’s discussion of the intellect’s dynamism into conversation with Thomas’s philosophy. Karl Rahner was influenced by Maréchal’s work, but developed a far more comprehensive theological project. Lonergan’s own transcendental project focused on a dynamic vision of human knowing and thinking, trying to adapt Thomist thought to a more historicist philosophical context. These two theologians continue to offer great promise for the future of Catholic theology.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY NOVEMBER

AbstractFrom the nineteenth century onwards the stereotype of Haydn as cheerful and jesting has dominated the reception of his music. This study contributes to the recent scholarship that broadens this view, with a new approach: I set works by Haydn in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about melancholy, those of Edmund Burke, Francisco Goya, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Their conceptions of melancholy were dialectical, involving the interplay of such elements as pleasure and pain, freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and absorption. I consider the relevance of these dialectics to Haydn’s English songs, his dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos and two late chamber works. Musical melancholy arises, I argue, when the protagonist of a work – be it the vocal character in a song or the ‘composer’s voice’ in an instrumental work – exhibits an ironic distance from his or her own pain. The musical dialectics in these works prompt listeners, for their part, to take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication.


Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines how Michel Foucault reformulated the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment by moving from a deliberate rereading of the Hegelian Centaur to an advocacy of the “death of man”—the extinction of a rational platform of knowledge along the lines developed by Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. It considers Foucault's genealogical historiography, a new and original tool for the analysis of history, and his arguments against the idea of a necessary and defining connection between knowledge and virtue, which had been the core identity of the Enlightenment, the link between power and knowledge, and the rise of disciplinary violence in the history of the Western world. Finally, it explores Foucault's view that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its exercise of power, and to question power on its discourses of truth.”


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