The Invention of National Languages

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otto Dann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Western World ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Ethnic Consciousness ◽  
Etienne Bonnot De Condillac ◽  
National Languages

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a qualified kind of ethnogenesis can be observed among the educated classes of the Western world. In the course of their social emancipation a new political identity emerged, one orientated towards the fatherland, the state, and its population. This new ethnic consciousness bridged older identities such as estate, profession or religion. It originated in connection with the great eighteenth-century social movement of patriotism, which became more and more politicised. The philosophical discourse about the nature of language, which had existed since antiquity, intensified immensely during the eighteenth century. John Locke and George Berkeley in Britain and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in France provided important stimuli in this respect. Johann Gottfried Herder was the first to take vernacular languages and popular poetry seriously as expressions of the culture of illiterate peoples. This chapter examines how national languages were invented and looks at the divergent situations in which the first national languages were used in Europe.

Kant and a Philosophical History of Logic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huaping Lu-Adler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
History Of Logic ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Systematic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Kantian Theory

This chapter discusses certain exegetical challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus, which comprises the Logic compiled by Jäsche, Kant’s notes on logic, transcripts of his logic lectures, and remarks about logic in his own publications. It argues for a “history of philosophical problems” method by which to reconstruct a Kantian theory of logic that is maximally coherent, philosophically interesting, and historically significant. To ensure a principled application of this method, the chapter considers Kant’s conception of history against the background of the controversy between eclecticism and systematic philosophy that shaped the German philosophical discourse during the early eighteenth century. It thereby looks for an angle to make educated decisions about how to select materials from each of the periods considered in the book and builds a historical narrative that can best inform our understanding of Kant’s theory of logic.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
New System

This chapter frames the arguments of the book, defines terms, and outlines the story that will follow. In the eighteenth century, the Ottoman state and its Russian rival, through conflict and diplomacy, worked out a new system of regional international law. Ransom was abolished; soldiers became prisoners of war; some slaves gained new paths to release, while others were left entirely unprotected. These rules delineated sovereignty, redefined individuals’ relationships to states, and prioritized political identity over economic value. In the process, the Ottomans marked out a parallel, non-Western path toward elements of modern international law. This story has important implications, the Introduction argues, for our understanding of Ottoman history and the histories of both international law and slavery and abolition.

scholarly journals Eighteenth-Century Swiss Peasant Meets Bard: Ulrich Bräker's A Few Words About William Shakespeare's Plays (1780)

2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-265
Author(s):  
Lukas Erne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gerhart Hauptmann ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Ludwig Tieck ◽  
Sturm Und Drang ◽  
Dramatic Technique ◽  
English I

Britain began making Shakespeare her national poet early in the eighteenth century, and Germany followed suit a few decades later, progressively turning ‘unser Shakespeare’ into one of three national poets, with Goethe and Schiller. As early as 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder included his essay on ‘Shakespear’ in a collection entitled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. The drama of the ‘Sturm und Drang’, which Herder's collection programmatically inaugurated, appropriated what Goethe (Götz von Berlichingen), Schiller (The Robbers) and their contemporaries (mis)understood to be Shakespeare's dramatic technique. By the end of the century, the assimilation had advanced far enough for August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the famous translator of seventeen of Shakespeare's plays, to indulge in no slight national chauvinism: ‘I am eager’, he writes in a letter to his cotranslator Ludwig Tieck, ‘to have your letters on Shakespeare.… I hope you will prove, among other things, that Shakespeare wasn't English. I wonder how he came to dwell among the frosty, stupid souls on that brutal island? … The English critics understand nothing about Shakespeare.’ Even though Tieck failed to prove that Shakespeare was not of English birth, the conviction that Shakespeare was best understood by German rather than by English critics only grew in the course of the nineteenth century. Appropriately, it was in Germany that the first periodical devoted exclusively to Shakespeare, the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was founded in 1865. Fifty years later, the German novelist Gerhart Hauptmann could still claim that ‘there is no people, not even the English, that has the same right to claim Shakespeare as the German. Shakespeare's characters are a part of our world, his soul has become one with ours: and though he was born and buried in England, Germany is the country where he truly lives.’

Prologue

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Western World ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Secular Terms

This prologue provides an overview of the Secular Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions toward secular ones. By seeking answers in secular terms—even to many religious questions—it vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference. In the Western world, art, music, science, politics, and even the categories of space and time had undergone a gradual process of secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Enlightenment built on this process and made it into an international intellectual cause. This book then aims to understand the major intellectual currents of the century that gave birth to the label “secular.”

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

The Empiricism of Locke and Newton

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
G. A. J. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between John Locke and Isaac Newton, his co-founder of, in the apt phrase of one recent writer, ‘the Moderate Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, has many dimensions. There is their friendship, which began only after each had written his major work, and which had its stormy interlude. There is the difficult question of their mutual impact. In what ways did each draw intellectually on the other? That there was some debt of each to the other is almost certain, but its exact extent is problematic. Questions may be asked over a whole range of intellectual issues, but not always answered. Thus their theology, which was in many respects close, and which forms the bulk of their surviving correspondence, may yet reveal mutual influence. There is the question of their political views, where both were firmly Whig. But it is upon their philosophy, and certain aspects of their philosophy in particular, that this paper will concentrate. My main theme is the nature of their empiricism, and my main contention is that between them they produced a powerful and comprehensive philosophy.

Recording the History of Secret Thoughts in Early Modern France

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Modern France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Registers

Chapter 2.5 begins with Pierre Huet’s early eighteenth-century description of the school of Montaigne, which he says has been flourishing for more than a century. He denounces the Essais as ‘the breviary of urbane loafers and ignorant pseudointellectuals’, of undisciplined, over-free literates who do not want to pursue proper scholarship and knowledge. The chapter goes on to offer two further case-studies of the life-writing of such free literates in early modern France (Jean Maillefer and Pierre de L’Estoile), as well as a coda on Pierre Coste and John Locke. Both read Montaigne’s work while writing manuscript journals to domestic and private ends; both combined reading and writing in books with the keeping and reviewing of personal records. L’Estoile reveals the significance of Montaigne’s references to the Essais as a registre––both institutional and personal registers were ubiquitous in this period.

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