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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy
Digitizing Enlightenment explores how a set of inter-related
digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment.
The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and
longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of
'digital humanities', a field that has, particularly since 2010,
been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional
academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public
worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities
argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our
ability to answer some of the 'big questions' that drive humanities
research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were
hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse
relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways. In the book's
opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects'
institutional and intellectual histories, the techniques and
methodologies they specifically developed, the sometimes-painful
lessons learned in the process, future trajectories for their
research, and how their findings are revising previous
understandings. A second section features chapters from early
career scholars working at the intersection of digital methods and
Enlightenment studies, an intellectual space largely forged by the
projects featured in part one. Highlighting current and future
research methods and directions for digital eighteenth-century
studies, the book offers a monument to the current state of digital
work, an overview of current findings, and a vision statement for
future research. Featuring contributions from Keith Michael Baker,
Elizabeth Andrews Bond, Robert M. Bond, Simon Burrows, Catherine
Nicole Coleman, Melanie Conroy, Charles Cooney, Nicholas Cronk, Dan
Edelstein, Chloe Summers Edmondson, the late Richard Frautschi,
Clovis Gladstone, Howard Hotson, Angus Martin, Katherine McDonough,
Alicia C. Montoya, Robert Morrissey, Laure Philip, Jeffrey S.
Ravel, Glenn Roe, and Sean Takats.
In a speech delivered in 1794, roughly one year after the execution
of Louis XVI, Robespierre boldly declared Terror to be an
'emanation of virtue'. In adapting the concept of virtue to
Republican ends, Robespierre was drawing on traditions associated
with ancient Greece and Rome. But Republican tradition formed only
one of many strands in debates concerning virtue in France and
elsewhere in Europe, from 1680 to the Revolution. This collection
focuses on moral-philosophical and classical-republican uses of
'virtue' in this period - one that is often associated with a
'crisis of the European mind'. It also considers in what ways
debates concerning virtue involved gendered perspectives. The texts
discussed are drawn from a range of genres, from plays and novels
to treatises, memoirs, and libertine literature. They include texts
by authors such as Diderot, Laclos, and Madame de Stael, plus
other, lesser-known texts that broaden the volume's perspective.
Collectively, the contributors to the volume highlight the central
importance of virtue for an understanding of an era in which, as
Daniel Brewer argues in the closing chapter, 'the political could
not be thought outside its moral dimension, and morality could not
be separated from inevitable political consequences'.
Over the past sixty years the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre have
probably been more influential in the West than those of any other
philosopher and literary figure. In his theoretical writings,
Sartre laid the foundation for an original doctrine of
Existentialism. His concern, however, was to relate his theory to
human response and the practical demands of living. To achieve
this, he carried his philosophical concepts into his novels and
plays, and there subjected them to the test of imagined experience.
His uniqueness lies in the success with which he demonstrated the
utility of Existentialist doctrine while creating, at the same
time, works of the highest literary merit. Thus Sartre became the
populariser of his own literary thought. Originally delivered as a
lecture in Paris in 1945, "Existentialism and Humanism" is
Jean-Paul Sartre's seminal defence of Existentialism as a doctrine
true to Humanism, as opposed to a purely nihilistic creed, and a
plan for its practical application to everyday human life. This
exploration of one of the central tenets of his philosophical
thought has become the essential introduction to his work, and a
fundamental text for all students of philosophy.
The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a
form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity's
displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis's homesickness
more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more
than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in
eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material
enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the
degradation we humans have wrought-and in saving the earth we can
once again dwell in the nearness of our own being. Unsettling
Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological
homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives
of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the
Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology-along with its well-trod
categories of home, dwelling, and world-produces uncanny effects in
settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature's
defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as
symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at
once critiques Heidegger's phenomenology and brings it forward
through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner,
Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in
fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth
embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a
speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into
"exo-phenomenology"-an experiential mode that engages deeply with
the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.
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