Download or read book The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist written by Zachary Sng and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century Europe, preoccupied with both the origins and the defense of reason, was naturally concerned with what might be the root of all error. A topic any systematic account of knowledge must grapple with, error became a frequent point of debate in new scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical investigations. Taking John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as his point of departure, Sng examines a number of such debates, focusing on literary and philosophical accounts of the relationship between language and thought. Rather than approaching its topic conceptually or historically, he takes on canonical texts of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and engages with their rhetorical strategies. In so doing, Sng elucidates how people wrote about error and how texts claimed to produce reliable and error-free modes of knowledge. The range of authors addressed—Leibniz, Adam Smith, Coleridge, Kant, and Goethe—demonstrates the diversity and heterogeneity underlying the textual production of the age.

Download or read book Theaters of Error written by Pascale LaFountain and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period’s changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century. Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot’s Le Fils naturel, Schiller’s Die Räuber, and Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.

Download or read book Error and Uncertainty in Scientific Practice written by Marcel Boumans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessment of error and uncertainty is a vital component of both natural and social science. This edited volume presents case studies of research practices across a wide spectrum of scientific fields. It compares methodologies and presents the ingredients needed for an overarching framework applicable to all.

Download or read book Kant and the Metaphors of Reason written by Patricia Kauark-Leite and published by Georg Olms Verlag. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten hat die Metapher in der Philosophie zunehmend Beachtung gefunden und wurde zu einem zentralen Thema, mit dem Kant sich in seiner kritischen Philosophie in Begriffen von Analogie und Symbolisierung beschäftigt. Sein Beitrag zur Entwicklung unseres Verständnisses der Rolle, die Bilder, Metaphern und Symbole in theoretischer und praktischer Hinsicht leisten, ist bedeutend; zudem ist Kant selber auch als Schöpfer von Metaphern weithin bekannt. Symbole, Analogien und ästhetische Ideen sind unleugbar metaphorische Verfahren, die eine ebenso grundlegende wie systematische Funktion in Kants philosophischer Sprache einnehmen. – Dieser Sammelband ist das Ergebnis einer neueren Initiative seitens einer internationalen Gruppe von mit Kant befassten Philosophen und Kant-Spezialisten, um die Erforschung von Themen zu befördern, die noch nicht umfassend bearbeitet sind. Das trifft mit Sicherheit auf die „Metapher“-Thematik in Kants Philosophie zu, der der vorliegende Band gewidmet ist. In recent decades, metaphor has become a respectable and central theme in philosophy. In his critical philosophy, Kant treats this theme in terms of the notions of analogy and symbolization. In addition to contributing significantly to the development of our understanding of the role played by images, metaphors and symbols in both theoretical and practical issues, Kant is also widely recognized as a great creator of metaphors in his own right. Symbols, analogies and aesthetic ideas are undeniably metaphorical processes, which fulfill a function in Kant’s philosophical language that is as fundamental as it is systematic. This collected volume is the result of a recent initiative on the part of an international group of Kantian philosophers and scholars to promote research on topics that have yet to be thoroughly explored in academic research. This is certainly true of the topic of metaphor in Kant’s philosophy, to which the present volume is devoted.

Download or read book The Pathogenesis of Fear written by Elizabeth Ann Hollis Berry and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pathogenesis of Fear gathers together diverse conversations about cultural constructions of the monstrous. Interdisciplinary essays map the margins of monstrosity as follows: the cannibalistic paradox in Kleist's late-Romantic Penthesilea ; intersections of the monstrous-feminine and the new Victorian psycho-physiology of consciousness in George Eliot's early novels; the monster-formed citizens of Dickensian and later dystopias; the killing of African Americans targeted as monstrous entities in US cities; the post-human anguish of a television zombie-world; the monstrous mutilations of a Spanish horror film; psychosocial aberration in Martin Millar's werewolf fiction; the demonization of the Other on the war-torn streets of Ireland; Derridean devouring sovereignty. Discursively correlated with different categories of body and mind, monstrosity, these essays argue, persists in taking many forms. Contributors are Elizabeth Hollis Berry, Niculae Gheran, Sarah Harris, Fiona Harris-Ramsby and Mubarak Muhammad, Michaela Marková, Kimberley McMahon Coleman, Judith Rahn, Cindy Smith and Marita Vyrgioti.

Download or read book The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France written by Sandrine Parageau and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early modern period, ignorance was commonly perceived as a sin, a flaw, a defect, and even a threat to religion and the social order. Yet praises of ignorance were also expressed in the same context. Reclaiming the long-lasting legacy of medieval doctrines of ignorance and taking a comparative perspective, Sandrine Parageau tells the history of the apparently counter-intuitive moral, cognitive and epistemological virtues attributed to ignorance in the long seventeenth century (1580s-1700) in England and in France. With close textual analysis of hitherto neglected sources and a reassessment of canonical philosophical works by Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and others, Parageau specifically examines the role of ignorance in the production of knowledge, identifying three common virtues of ignorance as a mode of wisdom, a principle of knowledge, and an epistemological instrument, in philosophical and theological works. How could an essentially negative notion be turned into something profitable and even desirable? Taken in the context of Renaissance humanism, the Reformation and the "Scientific Revolution"—which all called for a redefinition and reaffirmation of knowledge—ignorance, Parageau finds, was not dismissed in the early modern quest for renewed ways of thinking and knowing. On the contrary, it was assimilated into the philosophical and scientific discourses of the time. The rehabilitation of ignorance emerged as a paradoxical cornerstone of the nascent modern science.

Download or read book Barbarism Revisited written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbarism revisited revisits well-known and obscure chapters in the genealogy of barbarism from Greek antiquity to the present. Through contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives, it recasts the conceptual history of barbarism as a task for literary scholars, art historians, and cultural analysts.

Download or read book The Poetics of Unremembered Acts written by Brian McGrath and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems—specifically romantic poems, such as those by Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, and John Keats—link what goes unremembered in our reading to ethics. In "Tintern Abbey," for example, Wordsworth finds in "little . . . unremembered . . . acts" the chance to hear the "still, sad music of humanity."In The Poetics of Unremembered Acts, Brian McGrath shows that poetry’s capacity to address its reader stages an ethical dilemma of continued importance. Situating romantic poems in relation to Enlightenment debate over how to teach reading, specifically debate about the role of poetry in the process of learning to read, The Poetics of Unremembered Acts develops an alternative understanding of poetry’s role in education. McGrath also explores the ways poetry makes ethics possible through its capacity to pass along what we do not remember and cannot know about our reading.

Download or read book Stranger Fictions written by Rebecca C. Johnson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, Stranger Fictions offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. Rebecca C. Johnson rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translation practices—including "bad" translation, mistranslation, and pseudotranslation—Johnson argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. Examining nearly a century of translations published in Beirut, Cairo, Malta, Paris, London, and New York, from Qiat Rūbinun Kurūzī (The story of Robinson Crusoe) in 1835 to pastiched crime stories in early twentieth-century Egyptian magazines, Johnson shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. Stranger Fictions affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

Download or read book Middling Romanticism written by Zachary Sng and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.

Download or read book The Cudgel and the Caress written by David Farrell Krell and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers philosophical and psychological reflections on cruelty and tenderness. The Cudgel and the Caress explores the enduring significance of tenderness and cruelty in a range of works across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Divided into two parts, the book initially focuses on tenderness, with David Farrell Krell delivering original readings of Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’s Antigone, and writings by Hölderlin, Hegel, Freud, and Derrida that deal with the importance of tenderness and the tragic consequences of its absence. Part One concludes with an extended reading of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, in which Krell analyzes the tender relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. In Part Two, Krell begins by examining Otto Rank’s Birth Trauma, which reflects on the tenderness of gestation in the womb and the cruel necessity of birth. He then turns to an examination of cruelty in general, focusing on Derrida’s challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, his opposition between Kant and Nietzsche, and his analysis (and indictment) of the death penalty. Groundbreaking and insightful, the book provides a rare philosophical treatment of subjects vital to the world we live in. “This book offers nuanced readings from a range of texts important to the continental philosophical tradition. David Farrell Krell is an established and brilliant voice in the field, and the individual chapters reflect a lifetime of reflection, a history of successive interpretations, and a philosophical depth and humanity that are difficult to find today.” — Julia Ireland, cotranslator of Martin Heidegger’s Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance”

Download or read book Distressing Language written by Michael Davidson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics and how physical and intellectual difference challenges generic terms for art and poetry. The book's title combines language that disturbs or causes anxiety with language that is ripped, worn, or damaged. This interplay brings together the social environment in which language is exchanged with the materiality of words that frustrate easy comprehension. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of "sounding good?" This book grows out of the author's experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter in considering how verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge"--

Download or read book Passive Voices On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech written by Kristina Mendicino and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-02-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At least since Aristotle's Peri hermeneias, there has been talk of the pathos of language, of language as "symbols of the affections in the soul." The way these affections are registered, however, suggests that they are themselves structured like language. For Aristotle and others, language is suffered before any sense can be voiced. The pathos of language thus becomes a question of how language affects the subject of speech and, in the last analysis, of how language could respond to these questions of language. Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech) approaches these questions, first, through readings of Augustine's investigations into language and mind and Edmund Husserl's descriptions of passive synthesis. It then traces the further resonance of Augustine's and Husserl's interventions in selected literary experiments by Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, and Maurice Blanchot that recall Husserl and Augustine while exceeding the restrictive fictions of phenomenological "science." In drawing out the echoes that emerge across confessional, philosophical, and fictional writings, this book exposes the ways in which speech occurs in the passive voice and affects any claim to experience.

Download or read book Poetic Force written by Kevin McLaughlin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-17 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant's aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of decisive importance to poetry in the nineteenth century and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two centuries. Inspired by his deep engagement with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, who especially developed this Kantian strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin uses this theory of force to illuminate the work of three of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in their respective national traditions: Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold. The result is a fine elucidation of Kantian theory and a fresh account of poetic language and its aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities.

Download or read book Georg Lukacs The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence written by Timothy Bewes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-03-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of the Soviet period, the vast expansion in the power and influence of capital, and recent developments in social and aesthetic theory, have made the work of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and social critic Georg Lukács more vital than ever. The very innovations in literary method that, during the 80s and 90s, marginalized him in the West have now made possible new readings of Lukács, less in thrall to the positions taken by Lukács himself on political and aesthetic matters. What these developments amount to, this book argues, is an opportunity to liberate Lukács's thought from its formal and historical limitations, a possibility that was always inherent in Lukács's own thinking about the paradoxes of form. This collection brings together recent work on Lukács from the fields of Philosophy, Social and Political Thought, Literary and Cultural Studies. Against the odds, Lukács's thought has survived: as a critique of late capitalism, as a guide to the contradictions of modernity, and as a model for a temperament that refuses all accommodation with the way things are.

Download or read book Awful Parenthesis written by Anne C. McCarthy and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether the rapt trances of Romanticism or the corpse-like figures that confounded Victorian science and religion, nineteenth-century depictions of bodies in suspended animation are read as manifestations of broader concerns about the unknowable in Anne C. McCarthy’s Awful Parenthesis. Examining various aesthetics of suspension in the works of poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, McCarthy shares important insights into the nineteenth-century fascination with the sublime. Attentive to differences between "Romantic" and "Victorian" articulations of suspension, Awful Parenthesis offers a critical alternative to assumptions about periodization. While investigating various conceptualizations of suspension, including the suspension of disbelief, suspended animation, trance, paralysis, pause, and dilatation, McCarthy provides historically-aware close readings of nineteenth-century poems in conversation with prose genres that include devotional works, philosophy, travel writing, and periodical fiction. Awful Parenthesis reveals the cultural obsession with the aesthetics of suspension as a response to an expanding, incoherent world in crisis, one where the audience is both active participant and passive onlooker.

Download or read book Last Things written by Jacques Khalip and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the “arrival” of the so-called era of the Anthropocene, certain contemporary theoretical approaches have led us to think that we are only now properly beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, as well as confronting our fears and anxieties around ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. Reflections on apocalypse and disaster, however, were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, but in Last Things, Jacques Khalip begins with the “end of things” differently, treating lastness otherwise than either a privation or a conclusion. He emphasizes quieter and non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of the world of thought itself. Without fear, foreshadowing, or catastrophe, Khalip explores lastness as a form, structure, or unit that marks the limits of our life and world, and he reads the fate of romanticism (and romantic studies) within the key of the last. Although this is a reading one could never wish for, it is one, Khalip argues, that we urgently have to make today. The book is not an elegy to the human, or to romanticism; rather, it polemically argues that we should read romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a diverse range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between different temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an “archive” that is on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.