Download or read book Pierre Nicole Jansenist and Humanist written by E.D. James and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present study had its origins long ago in a doctorate thesis presented at the University of Cambridge. The work has been considerably enlarged in scope, if not in bulk, but has always been conceived as a whole. Nicole's thought is, in any case, remarkably coherent. I make use of articles of mine published in French Studies for April 1960 and July 1967, and my thanks are due to the General Editor of that journal for permission to do so. lowe a great debt of gratitude to Dr M. G. Wallas, who guided my researches in the early years. The penetration and lucidity of her criticism were equalled only by her kindness and patience. To Mr N. J. Abercrom bie, who had himself worked on Nicole for a number of years, I am deeply grateful for the gift of books, notes and analyses. Probably every section of this study owes something to his work, hints of the importance of the influence on Nicole of St Fran~ois de Sales proving particularly fruitful. One of the most pleasant moments in the course of my researches was spent at the Rijksarchief in Utrecht, to the staff of which, and to Dr AJ. van de Yen, Keeper of the Archives of the Oud-Bisschoppelijke Clerezij, I am much indebted for their kind help. May 1971 E. D. J.
Download or read book Putting On Virtue written by Jennifer A. Herdt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-12 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. Putting On Virtue reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument of broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, Putting On Virtue traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence.
Download or read book Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History written by Steven L. B. Jensen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.
Download or read book Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric written by Thomas M. Carr and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2009-03-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A careful analysis of the rhetorical thought of René Descartes and of a distinguished group of post-Cartesians. Covering a unique range of authors, including Bernard Lamy and Nicolas Malebranche, Carr attacks the idea, which has become commonplace in contemporary criticism, that the Cartesian system is incompatible with rhetoric. Carr analyzes the writings of Balzac, the Port-Royalists Arnauld and Nicole, Malebranche, and Lamy, exploring the evolution of Descartes’ thought into their different theories of rhetoric. He constructs his arguments, probing each author’s writings on rhetoric, persuasion, and attention, to demonstrate the basis for rhetorical thought present in Descartes’ theory of persuasion when it is combined with his psychophysiology of attention.
Download or read book Self knowledge written by Ursula Renz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-knowledge is often taken to constitute both the beginning and the end of humans' search for wisdom. Not surprisingly, the Delphic injunction 'Know thyself' has fascinated philosophers of different times, backgrounds, and tempers. This book explores how the search for wisdom is reflected in conceptions of self-knowledge throughout the history of philosophy and human culture.
Download or read book Passion and Action written by Susan James and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1997-10-16 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passion and Action explores the place of the emotions in seventeenth-century understandings of the body and mind, and the role they were held to play in reasoning and action. Interest in the passions pervaded all areas of philosophical enquiry, and was central to the theories of many major figures, including Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, and Locke. Yet little attention has been paid to this topic in studies of early modern thought. Susan James surveys the inheritance of ancient and medieval doctrines about the passions, then shows how these were incorporated into new philosophical theories in the course of the seventeenth century. She examines the relation of the emotions to will, knowledge, understanding, desire, and power, offering fresh analyses and interpretations of a broad range of texts by little-known writers as well as canonical figures, and establishing that a full understanding of these authors must take account of their discussions of our affective life. Passion and Action also addresses current debates, particularly those within feminist philosophy, about the embodied character of thinking and the relation between emotion and knowledge. This ground-breaking study throws new light upon the shaping of our ideas about the mind, and provides a historical context for burgeoning contemporary investigations of the emotions.
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 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notions of virtue and vice are essential components of the Western ethical tradition. But in early modern France they were called into question, as writers, most famously La Rochefoucauld, argued that what appears as virtue is in fact disguised vice: people carry out praiseworthy deeds because they stand to gain in some way; they deserve no credit for their behaviour because they have no control over it; they are governed by feelings and motives of which they may not be aware. Disguised Vices analyses the underlying logic of these arguments, and investigates what is at stake in them. It traces the arguments back to their sources in earlier writers, showing how ancient philosophers, particularly Aristotle and Seneca, formulated the distinction between behaviour that counts as virtuous and behaviour that only seems so. It explains how St Augustine reinterpreted the distinction in the light of the difference between pagans and Christians, and how medieval and early modern theologians strove to reconcile Augustine's position with that of Aristotle. It examines the restatement of Augustine's position by his hard-line early modern followers (especially the Jansenists), and the controversy to which this gave rise. Finally, it examines La Rochefoucauld's critique of virtue and assesses the extent of its links with the Augustinian current of thought.
Download or read book Locke Shaftesbury and Hutcheson written by Daniel Carey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Carey examines afresh the fundamental debate within the Enlightenment about human diversity. Three central figures - Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson - questioned whether human nature was fragmented by diverse and incommensurable customs and beliefs or unified by shared moral and religious principles. Locke's critique of innate ideas initiated the argument, claiming that no consensus existed in the world about morality or God's existence. Testimony of human difference established this point. His position was disputed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury who reinstated a Stoic account of mankind as inspired by common ethical convictions and an impulse toward the divine. Hutcheson attempted a difficult synthesis of these two opposing figures, respecting Locke's critique while articulating a moral sense that structured human nature. Daniel Carey concludes with an investigation of the relationship between these arguments and contemporary theories, and shows that current conflicting positions reflect long-standing differences that first emerged during the Enlightenment.
Download or read book Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty written by Paul Anthony Rahe and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fresh examination of the world of Montesquieu seeks to understand the short-comings of modern democracy in light of the French philosopher's insightful critique of commercial republicanism.
Download or read book Writings by Pre Revolutionary French Women written by Colette H. Winn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume covers 30 Pre-Revolutionary French women, providing a representative sampling of their manifold and varied contributions to intellectual and cultural history. This volume is unique in its grouping of essentially French writers from the Pre-Revolutionary period. The authors included here range from those prominent because of their social position or literary fame, to those slowly becoming part of a new canon of Old Regime women writers - authors whose works were known to their contemporaries but who have slipped into near invisibility in the following centuries until their recent rediscovery and reassessment.
Download or read book Greed Self Interest and the Shaping of Economics written by Rudi Verburg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2008, profound questions have been asked about the driving forces and self-regulating potential of the economic system, political control and morality. With opinion turning against markets and self-interest, economists found themselves on the wrong side of the argument. This book explores how the past of economics can contribute to today’s debates. The book considers how economics took shape as philosophers probed into the viability of commercial society and its potential to generate positive-sum outcomes. It explains how dreams of affluence, morality and happiness were built upon human greed and vanity. It covers the bumpy road of the construction and reconstruction of this dream, exploring the debate on the foundations, conditions and limitations of the idea of the social utility of greed and vanity. Revisiting this debate provides a rich source of ideas in rethinking economics and the basic beliefs concerning our economic system today.
Download or read book La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth century France written by Henry C. Clark and published by Librairie Droz. This book was released on 1994 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Historical Approach to Casuistry written by Carlo Ginzburg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a much larger historical presence before and since it was given a name in the Renaissance. The contributors to this volume examine a series of case studies to explain how different cultures and religions, past and present, have wrestled with morality's exceptions and margins and the norms with which they break. For example, to what extent have the Islamic and Judaic traditions allowed smoking tobacco or gambling? How did the Spanish colonization of America generate formal justifications for what it claimed? Where were the lines of transgression around food, money-lending, and sex in Ancient Greece and Rome? How have different systems dealt with suicide? Casuistry lives at the heart of such questions, in the tension between norms and exceptions, between what seems forbidden but is not. A Historical Approach to Casuistry does not only examine this tension, but re-frames casuistry as a global phenomenon that has informed ethical and religious traditions for millennia, and that continues to influence our lives today.
Download or read book The Strategy of Letters written by Mette Hjort and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although literary theories describe a world of strategies--textual, discursive, interpretive, and political--what is missing is the strategist. Poststructuralists try to explain agency as the effect of large-scale systems or formations; as a result, intuitions about individual action and responsibility are expressed in terms of impersonal strategies. Mette Hjort's book responds to this situation by proposing an alternative account of strategic action, one that brings the strategist back into the picture. Hjort analyzes influential statements made by Derrida, Foucault, and others to show how proposed conceptions of strategy are contradictory, underdeveloped, and at odds with the actual use of the term. Why, then, has the term acquired such rhetorical force? Since "strategy" evokes conflict, Hjort suggests, its very use calls into question various pieties of idealism and humanism, and emphasizes a desired break between modernism and postmodernism. It follows that a theory of strategy must explore some of the psychological implications of conflict, and Hjort pursues these implications through traditions as diverse as game theory, discourse ethics, and the philosophy of war. Unstable frames, self deception, promiscuous pragmatism, and social emotion are some of the phenomena she explores as she develops her account of strategic action in the highly competitive domain of letters. In her reflection on strategy, Hjort draws on such literary examples as Troilus and Cressida, Tartuffe, the autobiographical writings of Holberg, and early modern French and English treatises on theater. For its well-informed and incisive arguments and literary historical case studies, this book will be invaluable to literary theorists and will appeal to readers interested in drama, philosophy and literature, aesthetics, and theories of agency and rationality.
Download or read book The Aesthetic Body written by Erec R. Koch and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Those two developments converge to construct an aesthetic body; that is, in its full etymological sense, a body whose principal functions are the production of sensation and affectivity. This study examines the importance of the body in the determination of sensibility and passion in French culture of the seventeenth century." "The Aesthetic Body will engage readers with interests in literature, philosophy, the history of ideas, the history of science and medicine, cultural history, and political theory of the French early modem period."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Power of Distraction written by Alessandra Aloisi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pascal to contemporary anxieties about attention, we have constantly been urged to avoid distraction if we want to live and work better. But Alessandra Aloisi argues that we are missing the point.Drawing on a broad range ofEuropean philosophy and literature, this book considers distraction not as an expression of human imperfection, but as a creative, subversive, and aesthetic capability. In contrast to the traditional accounts, from Saint Augustine to Robert Burton, which either associated distraction with sin or considered it as a symptom of melancholy, Aloisi argues that it is often precisely when we stop thinking about something that inspiration finds us. Why else are artists described as having their heads in the clouds? This book demonstrates the serendipity of distraction through close readings of cultural and visual sources ranging from the mathematician Poincaré to the Netflix show, Black Mirror. With inspiration from La Bruyère, Rousseau, Leopardi, Stendhal, Baudelaire, and others, Aloisi further examines the political value of distraction. After all, in an age of ubiquitous technology and 24/7 availability fighting for our attention, distraction provides what Bergson called a 'slight revolt' from the codes and behaviors that society dictates. Combining philosophy, literature, art, and politics, The Power of Distraction encourages us to think differently about our attention and considers just how productive daydreams can be.
Download or read book Blaise Pascal written by D. Adamson and published by Springer. This book was released on 1994-12-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This chronological survey explores Pascal's (162362) achievement as mathematician, physicist and religious thinker; it also has a chapter on his life. His work on conic sections, the probability calculus, number theory, cycloid curves and hydrostatics is considered in detail. Analyses of the Provincial Letters and the Thoughts bring out the many distinctive features, thematicnn and technical, of each text. Pascal's lesser known works are also studied. There is a chapter on the Wager argument. A wide-ranging bibliography completes the book.
