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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > General
The Long Quarrel: Past and Present in the Eighteenth Century
examines how the intellectual clashes emerging from the Quarrel of
the Ancients and the Moderns continued to reverberate until the end
of the eighteenth century. This extended Quarrel was not just about
the value of ancient and modern, but about historical thought in a
broader sense. The tension between ancient and modern expanded into
a more general tension between past and present, which were no
longer seen as essentially similar, but as different in nature.
Thus, a new kind of historical consciousness came into being in the
Long Quarrel of the eighteenth century, which also gave rise to new
ideas about knowledge, art, literature and politics. Contributors
are: Jacques Bos, Anna Cullhed, Hakon Evju, Vera Fasshauer, Andrew
Jainchill, Anton M. Matytsin, Iain McDaniel, Larry F. Norman, David
D. Reitsam, Jan Rotmans, Friederike Vosskamp, and Christine Zabel.
This collection brings together two of Schopenhauer's most
respected works, wherein the philosopher shares his views on life
and what he believes to be follies of human behavior. Writing with
incisive poise and a great sense of humor, Schopenhauer introduces
the various ideas present in his pessimistic philosophy. Holding
the usual goals of life - money, position, material and sexual
pleasures - in low regard, he explains how the cultivation of one's
individuality and mind are far better pursuits, albeit those that
most people neglect. Rather than simply criticize the state of
humanity, Schopenhauer uses wit and lively argument to convince the
reader of the value in his outlook. The practice of an ordinary
life and career is thereby demonstrated as spiritually draining, in
contrast to concentration upon a wise mind and strong body, plus a
moderated or even ascetic approach to material things.
The Bible is the crucible within which were forged many of the
issues most vital to philosophy during the early modern age.
Different conceptions of God, the world, and the human being have
been constructed (or deconstructed) in relation to the various
approaches and readings of the Holy Scriptures. This book explores
several of the ways in which philosophers interpreted and made use
of the Bible. It aims to provide a new perspective on the subject
beyond the traditional opposition "faith versus science" and to
reflect the philosophical ways in which the Sacred Scriptures were
approached. Early modern philosophers can thus be seen to have
transformed the traditional interpretation of the Bible and
emphasized its universal moral message. In doing so, they forged
new conceptions about nature, politics, and religion, claiming the
freedom of thought and scientific inquiry that were to become the
main features of modernity. Contributors include Simonetta Bassi,
Stefano Brogi, Claudio Buccolini, Simone D'Agostino, Antonella Del
Prete, Diego Donna, Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, Guido Giglioni,
Franco Giudice, Sarah Hutton, Giovanni Licata, Edouard Mehl, Anna
Lisa Schino, Luisa Simonutti, Pina Totaro, and Francesco Toto.
Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and
philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of
idealist thought require artistic form for their full development
and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic
form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from
intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical
critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist
thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist
Idealism intervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as
well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist
production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space
for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual
culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but
also early cinema. The author's main contention is that, in various
media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural
aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as
sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews
in aesthetic form.
Anxiety looms large in historical works of philosophy and
psychology. It is an affect, philosopher Bettina Bergo argues,
subtler and more persistent than our emotions, and points toward
the intersection of embodiment and cognition. While scholars who
focus on the work of luminaries as Freud, Levinas, or Kant often
study this theme in individual works, they seldom draw out the deep
and significant connections between various approaches to anxiety.
This volume provides a sweeping study of the uncanny career of
anxiety in nineteenth and twentieth century European thought.
Anxiety threads itself through European intellectual life,
beginning in receptions of Kant's transcendental philosophy and
running into Levinas' phenomenology; it is a core theme in
Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. As a symptom
of an interrogation that strove to take form in European
intellectual culture, Angst passes through Schelling's romanticism
into Schopenhauer's metaphysical vitalism, before it is explored
existentially by Kierkegaard. And, in the twentieth century, it
proves an extremely central concept for Heidegger, even as Freud is
exploring its meaning and origin over a thirty year-long period of
psychoanalytic development. This volume opens new windows onto
philosophers who have never yet been put into dialogue, providing a
rigorous intellectual history as it connects themes across two
centuries, and unearths the deep roots of our own present-day "age
of anxiety."
Primitive Man as Philosopher by Paul Radin, Ph. D. Research Fellow
of Yale University and sometime Lecturer in Ethnology in Cambridge
University editor of Crashing Thunder, the Autobiography of an
American Indian with a foreword by John Dewcy Professor of
Philosophy in Columbia University New York and London D, Appleton
and Company 1927 COPYRIGHT, 1927, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY PRINTED
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY WIFE PREFACE When a modern
historian desires to study the civilization of any people, he
regards it as a necessary preliminary that he divest himself, so
far as possible, of all prejudice and bias. He realizes that
differences between cultures exist, but he does not feel that it is
necessarily a sign of inferiority that a people differs in customs
from his own. There seems, how ever, to be a limit to what an
historian treats as legitimate difference, a limit not always easy
to determine. On the whole it may be said that he very naturally
passes the same judgments that the majority of his fellow
countrymen do. Hence, if some of the differences between admittedly
civil ized peoples often call forth unfavorable judgments or even
provoke outbursts of horror, how much more must we expect this to
be the case where the differences are of so funda mental a nature
as those separating us from people whom we have been accustomed to
call uncivilized. The term uncivilized is a very vague one, and it
is spread over a vast medley of peoples, some of whom have
comparatively simple customs and others extremely com plex ones.
Indeed, there can be said to be but two charac teristics possessed
in common by all these peoples, the absence of a written language
and the fact of originalposses sion of the soil when the various
civilized European and Asiatic nations came into contact with them.
But among all aboriginal races appeared a number of customs which
undoubtedly seemed exceedingly strange to their European and
Asiatic conquerors. Some of these customs they had never heard of
others they recognized as similar to observ vli viii PREFACE ances
and beliefs existing among the more backward mem bers of their own
communities. Yet the judgments civilized peoples have passed on the
aborigines, we may be sure, were not initially based on any calm
evaluation of facts. If the aborigines were regarded as innately
inferior, this was due in part to the tremendous gulf in custom and
belief separating them from the con querors, in part to the
apparent simplicity of their ways, and in no small degree to the
fact that they were unable to offer any effective resistance.
Romance soon threw its distorting screen over the whole primitive
picture. Within one hundred years of the dis covery of America it
had already become an ineradicably established tradition that all
the aborigines encountered by Europeans were simple, untutored
savages from whom little more could be expected than from
uncontrolled children, individuals who were at all times the slaves
of their passions, of which the dominant one was hatred. Much of
this tradi tion, in various forms, disguised and otherwise, has
persisted to the present day. The evolutionary theory, during its
heyday in the iSyos and Sos, still further complicated and
misrepresented the situation, and from the great classic that
created modern ethnology Tylors Primitive Culture, published in
1870 future ethnologists were to imbibe the cardinal andfunda
mentally misleading doctrine that primitive peoples represent an
early stage in the history of the evolution of culture. What was,
perhaps, even more dangerous was the strange and uncritical manner
in which all primitive peoples were lumped together in ethnological
discussion simple Fuegians with the highly advanced Aztecs and
Mayans, Bushmen with the peoples of the Nigerian coast, Australians
with Poly nesians, and so on. PREFACE ix For a number of years
scholars were apparently content with the picture drawn by Tylor
and his successors...
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