Download or read book Fallen Nature Fallen Selves written by Michael Moriarty and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-05-25 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves is an investigation of psychological and ethical thought in seventeenth-century France, emphasizing both continuities and discontinuities with ancient and medieval thought. Michael Moriarty's examination discusses most of the period's major authors, some well-known, others less so: the abstract and general analyses of philosophers and theologians (Descartes, Jansenius, Malebranche) are juxtaposed with the less systematic and more concrete investigations of writers like Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, not to mention the theatre of Corneille, Moliere, and Racine. This study will be of interest to all researchers working in early modern French literature and in the history of ideas."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Fallen Nature Fallen Selves written by Michael Moriarty and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-05-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, French writing is especially concerned with analysing human nature. The ancient ethical vision of man's nature and goal (we achieve fulfilment by living our lives according to reason, the highest and noblest element of our nature) survives, even, to some extent, in Descartes. But it is put into question especially by the revival of St Augustine's thought, which focuses on the contradictions and disorders of human desires and aspirations. Analyses of behaviour display a powerful suspicion of appearances. Human beings are increasingly seen as motivated by self-love: they are driven by the desire for their own advantage, and take a narcissistic delight in their own image. Moral and religious writers re-emphasize the traditional imperative of self-knowledge, but in such a way as to suggest the difficulties of knowing oneself. Operating with the Cartesian distinction between mind and body, they emphasize the imperceptible influence of bodily processes on our thought and attitudes. They analyse human beings' ignorance (due to self-love) of their own motives and qualities, and the illusions under which they live their lives. Their critique of human behaviour is no less searching than that of writers who have broken with traditional religious morality, such as Hobbes and Spinoza. A wide range of authors is studied, some well-known, others much less so: the abstract and general analyses of philosophers and theologians (Descartes, Jansenius, Malebranche) are juxtaposed with the less systematic and more concrete investigations of writers like Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, not to mention the theatre of Corneille, Molière, and Racine.
Download or read book Disguised Vices written by Michael Moriarty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-08 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notions of virtue and vice are vital components of the Western ethical tradition. But in early modern France they were called into question, as writers such as La Rochefoucauld argued that what appears as virtue is in fact disguised vice. Disguised Vices analyses the underlying logic of such claims, and explores what is at stake in them.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition written by John Sellars and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient philosophy of stoicism has been a crucial and formative influence on the development of Western thought since its inception through to the present day. It is not only an important area of study in philosophy and classics, but also in theology and literature. The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition is the first volume of its kind, and an outstanding guide and reference source to the nature and continuing significance of stoicism. Comprising twenty-six chapters by a team of international contributors and organised chronologically, the Handbook is divided into four parts: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, including stoicism in Rome; stoicism in early Christianity; the Platonic response to stoicism; and stoic influences in the late Middle Ages Renaissance and Reformation, addressing the impact of stoicism on the Italian Renaissance, Reformation thought, and early modern English literature including Shakespeare Early Modern Europe, including stoicism and early modern French thought; the stoic influence on Spinoza and Leibniz; stoicism and the French and Scottish Enlightenment; and Kant and stoic ethics The Modern World, including stoicism in nineteenth century German philosophy; stoicism in Victorian culture; stoicism in America; stoic themes in contemporary Anglo-American ethics; and the stoic influence on modern psychotherapy. An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the philosophical history and impact of stoic thought, The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition is essential reading for all students and researchers working on the subject.
Download or read book Phantom of Chance written by John D Lyons and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the classical and medieval conceptions of Fortune shifted to the modern notion of chanceIs chance nothing more than a projection of human desire on to the world? In this fascinating new study, John Lyons argues that the idea of chance assumed new vigour in the late Renaissance, when converging philosophical and literary currents demystified the powerful concept of Fortune, sensitizing writers to the relationship between human desire and the world's apparent randomness. Up to now, the story of chance has been written by historians of mathematical thought and has focused on calculation, probability and gambling. Lyons, by contrast, highlights the ethical, aesthetic and even erotic aspects of chance. He offers detailed readings of the works of major French authors - Montaigne, Corneille, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, and La Bruyere.
Download or read book Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire written by Paul Hammond and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we free agents? This perennial question is addressed by tragedy when it dramatizes the struggle of individuals with supernatural forces, or maps the inner conflict of a mind divided against itself. The first part of this book follows the adaptations of four myths as they migrate from classical Greek tragedy to Seneca and on to seventeenth-century France: the stories of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea, and Phaedra. Detailed linguistic analysis charts the playwrights’ contrasting assumptions about agency and autonomy. In the second part, six plays by Corneille and Racine are discussed to show how the problem of agency and free will is explored in scenarios which show protagonists who are in thrall to their past, to their rulers, or to their own ideals.
Download or read book Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France written by Lewis C. Seifert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across inequalities of class and race. The friendships that seem to have exerted an analogous level of fascination in early modern France were those that defied the assumption, inherited from Aristotle and patristic sources, that friendships between men and women were impossible. Together, the essays in Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. The revival of Plato’s friendship texts in the sixteenth century challenged Aristotle’s rigid ideal of perfect friendship between men. In the seventeenth century, a new imperative of heterosociality opened a space for the cultivation of cross-gender friendships, while the spiritual friendships of the Catholic Reformation modeled relationships that transcended the gendered dynamics of galanterie. Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France argues that the imaginative experimentation in friendships between men and women was a distinctive feature of early modern French culture. The ten essays in this volume address friend-making as a process that is creative of self and responsive to changing social and political circumstances. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of friendship are magnified when gender roles and relations are unsettled, the essays in this volume highlight the relevance of early modern friend-making to friendship in the contemporary world.
Download or read book Understanding Barthes Understanding Modernism written by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Barthes, Understanding Modernism is a general assessment of the modern literary and philosophical contributions of Roland Barthes. The first part of the volume focuses on work published prior to Barthes's death in 1980 covering the major periods of his development from Writing Degree Zero (1953) to Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). The second part focuses both on the posthumously published material and the legacies of his work after his death in 1980. This later work has attracted attention, for example, in conjunction with notions of the neutral, gay writing, and critiques of everyday life. The third part is devoted to some of the critical vocabulary of Barthes in both the work he published during his lifetime, and that which was published posthumously.
Download or read book Meditations on First Philosophy written by René Descartes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-05-08 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Descartes's Meditations, the thinker rejects all his former beliefs in the quest for new certainties. He develops new conceptions of body and mind to create a new science of nature. This new translation includes a wide-ranging, accessible introduction, notes and full selections from the Objections and Replies.
Download or read book Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion written by Chad Meister and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second edition is an indispensable guide and reference source to the major themes, movements, debates and topics in philosophy of religion. Considerably expanded for the second edition, over seventy entries from a team of renowned international contributors are organized into nine clear parts: philosophical issues in world religions key figures in philosophy of religion religious diversity the theistic conception of God arguments for the existence of God arguments against the existence of God philosophical theology Christian theism recent topics in philosophy of religion. Covering key world religions including Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and key figures such as Augustine, Aquinas and Kierkegaard, the Companion explores the central topics in theism such as the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence. Three final parts consider Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern orthodoxy and current debates including phenomenology, reformed epistemology, religious experience, and religion and science, making the Companion as a whole essential reading for students of philosophy or religion, and suitable for anyone coming to the subject for the first time. This second edition includes new chapters on Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, Interreligious Dialogue, Death and the Afterlife, Incorporeality, Religion and Global Ethics, New Religious Movements, Religion and the Environment, and Religion and Film.
Download or read book Pascal Reasoning and Belief written by Michael Moriarty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of Blaise Pascal's defence of Christian belief in the Pensées. Michael Moriarty aims to expound—and in places to criticize—what he argues is a coherent and original apologetic strategy. Setting out the basic philosophical and theological presuppositions of Pascal's project, the present volume draws the distinction between convictions attained by reason and those inspired by God-given faith. It also presents Pascal's view of the contradictions within human nature, between the 'wretchedness' (our inability to live the life of reason, to attain secure and durable happiness) and the 'greatness' (the power of thought, manifested in the very awareness of our wretchedness). His mind-body dualism and his mechanistic conception of non-human animals are discussed. Pascal invokes the biblical story of the Fall and the doctrine of original sin as the only credible explanation of these contradictions. His analysis of human occupations as powered by the twin desire to escape from painful thoughts and to gratify one's vanity is subjected to critical examination, as is his conception of the self and self-love. Pascal argues that just as Christianity propounds the only explanation for the human condition, so it offers the only kind of happiness that would satisfy our deepest longings. He thus reasons that we have an interest in investigating its truth-claims as rooted in the Bible and in history. The closing chapters of this book discuss Pascal's view of Christian morality and the famous 'wager' argument for opting in favour of Christian belief.
Download or read book The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings written by René Descartes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Those most capable of being moved by passion are those capable of tasting the most sweetness in this life.' Descartes is most often thought of as introducing a total separation of mind and body. But he also acknowledged the intimate union between them, and in his later writings he concentrated on understanding this aspect of human nature. The Passions of the Soul is his greatest contribution to this debate. It contains a profound discussion of the workings of the emotions and of their place in human life - a subject that increasingly engages the interest of philosophers and intellectual and cultural historians. It also sets out a view of ethics that has been seen as a radical reorientation of moral philosophy. This volume also includes both sides of the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, one of Descartes's keenest disciples and shrewdest critics, which played a crucial role in the genesis of The Passions, as well as the first part of The Principles of Philosophy, which sets out the key positions of Descartes's philosophical system. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Download or read book Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France written by Jonathan Patterson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Moliere's famous comedy, L'Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of modernity, avarice was said to be flourishing as never before. Yet by the late sixteenth century, a number of French writers would argue that in some contexts, avaricious behaviour was not straightforwardly sinful or harmful. Considerations of social rank, gender, object pursued, time, and circumstance led some to question age-old beliefs. Traditionally reviled groups (rapacious usurers, greedy lawyers, miserly fathers, covetous women) might still exhibit unmistakable signs of avarice -- but perhaps not invariably, in an age of shifting social, economic and intellectual values. Across a large, diverse corpus of French texts, Jonathan Patterson shows how a range of flexible genres nourished by humanism tended to offset traditional condemnation of avarice and avares with innovative, mitigating perspectives, arising from subjective experience. In such writings, an avaricious disposition could be re-described as something less vicious, excusable, or even expedient. In this word history of avarice, close readings of well-known authors (Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Montaigne), and of their lesser-known contemporaries are connected to broader socio-economic developments of the late French Renaissance (c.1540-1615). The final chapter situates key themes in relation to Moliere's L'Avare. As such, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France newly illuminates debates about avarice within broader cultural preoccupations surrounding gender, enrichment and status in early modern France.
Download or read book The Third Reign of Louis XIV c 1682 1715 written by Julia Prest and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The personal rule of Louis XIV, following on from a long period of royal minority and apprenticeship, lasted 54 years from 1661 to 1715. But the second half of this personal rule has, until recently, received significantly less scholarly attention than the 1660s and 1670s. This has obscured some of the very real changes and developments that occurred between the early 1680s and the mid-1690s, by which time a new generation of younger royals had come to prominence, France was engulfed in international war on a greater scale than ever before, and the king was visibly no longer as vigorous or healthy as he had once been. The essays in this volume take a close look at the way a new set of political, social, cultural and economic dispensations emerged from the mid-1680s to create a different France in the final decades of Louis XIV’s reign, even though the basic ideological, social and economic underpinnings of the country remained very largely the same. The contributions examine such varied matters as the structure and practices of government, naval power, the financial operations of the state, trade and commerce, social pressures, overseas expansion, religious dissent, music, literature and the fine arts.
Download or read book Women and Irony in Moli re s Comedies of Marriage written by John D. Lyons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about how Molière, France's most celebrated author of comedies, made something strikingly new out of the traditional comedy plot of thwarted courtship. Though justly celebrated for his mastery of physical comedy and farce, one of Molière's key moves was to pay attention to the way women could use language. Seventeenth-century France was a time when speaking well became exceptionally important, and in this arena women were the trend-setters. Among the most important places to display taste and social skills were the salons, gatherings presided over by women. Yet women still enjoyed little in the way of rights, particularly regarding a central decision in their lives: the choice of a husband. French regulations of marriage contracts became increasingly restrictive, largely to the detriment of women. To draw attention to their plight, women novelists and essayists presented case studies in how men and women misunderstood one another, how women were coerced to wed, how marriages could become nightmares, and how courtships could fail. Against this fraught social background Molière showed women using one of the few assets they had, their mastery of words, and in particular the rhetoric of irony, to frustrate the plans of fathers, guardians, and other authority figures. The comedies discussed here include very well-known plays such as The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The Learned Ladies, The School for Wives and Don Juan, and also less known but revealing and thought-provoking works such as The School for Husbands, George Dandin and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque written by John D. Lyons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 907 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few periods in history are so fundamentally contradictory as the Baroque, the culture flourishing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in Europe. When we hear the term âBaroque,â the first images that come to mind are symmetrically designed gardens in French chateaux, scenic fountains in Italian squares, and the vibrant rhythms of a harpsichord. Behind this commitment to rule, harmony, and rigid structure, however, the Baroque also embodies a deep fascination with wonder, excess, irrationality, and rebellion against order. The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque delves into this contradiction to provide a sweeping survey of the Baroque not only as a style but also as a historical, cultural, and intellectual concept. With its thirty-eight chapters edited by leading expert John D. Lyons, the Handbook explores different manifestations of Baroque culture, from theatricality in architecture and urbanism to opera and dance, from the role of water to innovations in fashion, from mechanistic philosophy and literature to the tension between religion and science. These discussions present the Baroque as a broad cultural phenomenon that arose in response to the enormous changes emerging from the sixteenth century: the division between Catholics and Protestants, the formation of nation-states and the growth of absolutist monarchies, the colonization of lands outside Europe and the mutual impact of European and non-European cultures. Technological developments such as the telescope and the microscope and even greater access to high-quality mirrors altered mankindâs view of the universe and of human identity itself. By exploring the Baroque in relation to these larger social upheavals, this Handbook reveals a fresh and surprisingly modern image of the Baroque as a powerful response to an epoch of crisis.
Download or read book Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth Century French Comedy written by Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study devoted to this topic, Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy offers an important contribution to scholarship on the theatre as well as on early modern attitudes in France, specifically on the subject of lying and deception. Unusually for a scholarly work on seventeenth-century theatre, it is particularly alert to plays as performed pieces and not simply printed texts. The study also distinguishes itself by offering original readings of Molière alongside innovative analyses of other playwrights. The chapters offer fresh insights on well-known plays by Molière and Pierre Corneille but also invite readers to discover lesser-known works of the time (by writers such as Benserade, Thomas Corneille, Dufresny and Rotrou). Through comparative and sustained close readings, including a linguistic and speech act approach, a historical survey of texts with an analysis of different versions and a study of irony, the reader is shown the manifest ways in which different playwrights incorporate the comedic tropes of lying and scheming, confusion and unmasking. Drawing particular attention to the levels of communicative or mis-communicative exchanges on the character-to-character axis and the character-to-audience axis, this work examines the process whereby characters in the comedies construct narratives designed to trick, misdirect, dazzle, confuse or exploit their interlocutors. In the different incarnations of seducer, parasite, cross-dresser, duplicitous narrator/messenger and deluded mythomaniac, the author underscores the way in which the figure of the liar both entertains and troubles, making it a fascinating subject worthy of detailed investigation.
