Download or read book Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism written by Patrick Coleman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-27 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the public assertion of self by men and women in England, France and Germany from the Renaissance to Romanticism.
Download or read book Grace Talent and Merit written by Anthony J. La Vopa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-27 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poor students experienced a kind of upward mobility that was not uncommon in old-regime Europe. They were also objects of controversy. and as such they reveal the many dimensions of the issue of opening careers to talent. At stake were socially and politically sensitive questions about the relative importance of nature and nurture, of natural talent and 'birth', in realizing human potential; about the proper reconciliation of collective imperatives and individual freedom, of hierarchical stability and progress; about how national systems of education should be structured; about the kind and degree of upward mobility the society and the culture needed and could tolerate. This 1988 book shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience for men whose importance is still celebrated today, as well as for members of the educated elite who were and have remained obscure.
Download or read book Enlightenment and Community written by Benjamin W. Redekop and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2000 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when it has become fashionable to dismiss the Enlightenment as a sinister movement based on instrumental rationality, Benjamin Redekop delves deeper to understand the movement on its own terms. In Enlightenment and Community he shows that the E
Download or read book Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right written by Georg Cavallar and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that Kant’s theory of international relations should be interpreted as an attempt to apply the principles of reason to history in general, and in particular to political conditions of the late eighteenth century. It demonstrates how Kant attempts to mediate between a priori theory and practice, and how this works in the field of international law and international relations. Kant appreciates how the precepts of theory have to be tested against the facts, before the theory is enriched to deal with the complexities of their application. In the central chapters of this book, the starting points are apparent contradictions in Kant’s writings; assuming that Kant is a systematic and profound thinker, Cavallar seeks to use these contradictions to discover Kant’s ‘deep structure’, a dynamic and evolutionary theory that tries to anticipate a world where the idea of international justice might be more fully realized.
Download or read book The World We Want written by Robert B. Louden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World We Want compares the future world that Enlightenment intellectuals had hoped for with our own world at present. In what respects do the two worlds differ, and why are they so different? To what extent is and isn't our world the world they wanted, and to what extent do we today still want their world? Unlike previous philosophical critiques and defenses of the Enlightenment, the present study focuses extensively on the relevant historical and empirical record first, by examining carefully what kind of future Enlightenment intellectuals actually hoped for; second, by tracking the different legacies of their central ideals over the past two centuries. But in addition to documenting the significant gap that still exists between Enlightenment ideals and current realities, the author also attempts to show why the ideals of the Enlightenment still elude us. What does our own experience tell us about the appropriateness of these ideals? Which Enlightenment ideals do not fit with human nature? Why is meaningful support for these ideals, particularly within the US, so weak at present? Which of the means that Enlightenment intellectuals advocated for realizing their ideals are inefficacious? Which of their ideals have devolved into distorted versions of themselves when attempts have been made to realize them? How and why, after more than two centuries, have we still failed to realize the most significant Enlightenment ideals? In short, what is dead and what is living in these ideals?
Download or read book Down from Olympus written by Suzanne L. Marchand and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of Eliza May Butler's Tyranny of Greece over Germany in 1935, the obsession of the German educated elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted, if severely underanalyzed, cliché. In Down from Olympus, Suzanne Marchand attempts to come to grips with German Graecophilia, not as a private passion but as an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope. The book argues that nineteenth-century philhellenes inherited both an elitist, normative aesthetics and an ascetic, scholarly ethos from their Romantic predecessors; German "neohumanists" promised to reconcile these intellectual commitments, and by so doing, to revitalize education and the arts. Focusing on the history of classical archaeology, Marchand shows how the injunction to imitate Greek art was made the basis for new, state-funded cultural institutions. Tracing interactions between scholars and policymakers that made possible grand-scale cultural feats like the acquisition of the Pergamum Altar, she underscores both the gains in specialized knowledge and the failures in social responsibility that were the distinctive products of German neohumanism. This book discusses intellectual and institutional aspects of archaeology and philhellenism, giving extensive treatment to the history of prehistorical archaeology and German "orientalism." Marchand traces the history of the study, excavation, and exhibition of Greek art as a means to confront the social, cultural, and political consequences of the specialization of scholarship in the last two centuries.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Merit written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Literary Supplement’s Book of the Year 2020 A New Statesman's Best Book of 2020 A Bloomberg's Best Book of 2020 A Guardian Best Book About Ideas of 2020 The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that "you can make it if you try". The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time. World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.
Download or read book Dying with an Enlightening Fall written by David Pickus and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dying with an Enlightening Fall is a study of a critical but under-examined moment in German intellectual history. David Pickus encourages readers to discover the connections between the tumultuous events in Poland at the end of the eighteenth century and the critical self-perception of Germany's first generation of truly modern writers. At the same time that the Polish Republic of Nobles was annexed by its neighbors, the German Enlightenment reached its apex. Pickus claims that Poland's manifest failure to adapt to Europe's changing conditions, and its subsequent fall, made Poland a lesson in failure in the eyes of German thinkers. Poland allowed German intellectuals to formulate modern sensibilities; it became a necessary foil, defining what the modern age should be by what it was not.
Download or read book The Longing for Myth in Germany written by George S. Williamson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-07 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the dawn of Romanticism, artists and intellectuals in Germany have maintained an abiding interest in the gods and myths of antiquity while calling for a new mythology suitable to the modern age. In this study, George S. Williamson examines the factors that gave rise to this distinct and profound longing for myth. In doing so, he demonstrates the entanglement of aesthetic and philosophical ambitions in Germany with some of the major religious conflicts of the nineteenth century. Through readings of key intellectuals ranging from Herder and Schelling to Wagner and Nietzsche, Williamson highlights three crucial factors in the emergence of the German engagement with myth: the tradition of Philhellenist neohumanism, a critique of contemporary aesthetic and public life as dominated by private interests, and a rejection of the Bible by many Protestant scholars as the product of a foreign, "Oriental" culture. According to Williamson, the discourse on myth in Germany remained bound up with problems of Protestant theology and confessional conflict through the nineteenth century and beyond. A compelling adventure in intellectual history, this study uncovers the foundations of Germany's fascination with myth and its enduring cultural legacy.
Download or read book Whose Love of Which Country written by Balázs Trencsényi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume, stemming from the long-term cooperation of scholars working on East Central European intellectual history, discusses the patterns of patriotic and national identification in the light of the multiplicity of levels of ethnic, cultural and political allegiances characterizing this region in the early modern period.
Download or read book Bengal in Global Concept History written by Andrew Sartori and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Sartori closely examines the history of political and intellectual life in 19th- and 20th-century Bengal to show how the concept of 'culture' can take on a life of its own in different contexts, weaving the narrative of Bengal's embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept.
Download or read book Religion and the Rise of History written by Leonard S. Smith and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a historical inquiry and synthesis, this intellectual history is the first study to apply the ideal-type or model-building methodology of Otto Hintze (1861-1940) to Western historical thought or to what R. G. Collingwood called The Idea of History, for it contains succinct and useful models for seeing and teaching classical, Christian, and modern professional historiography. Religion and the Rise of History is also the first work to suggest that, in addition to his well-known paradoxical, simul, and/or at-the-same-time way of thinking and viewing life, Martin Luther also held to a way that was deeply incarnational, dynamic, and/or in-with-and-under. This dual vision and a Lutheran ethos strongly influenced Leibniz, Hamann, and Herder, and was therefore a matter of considerable significance for the rise of a distinctly modern form of historical consciousness (commonly called historicism) in Protestant Germany. Smith's essay suggests a new time period for the formative age of modern German thought, culture, and education: The Cultural Revolution in Germany. This age began in the early 1760s and culminated in 1810 with the founding of the University of Berlin, the first fully modern and modernizing university. This university first became the recognized center for the study of history, however, through the work of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). Here the story shows how a young Ranke derived his individualizing way of thinking and viewing life mainly from Luther, how his life-work is the best example in Western literature of the rise of history from a calling to a profession, and how the three-way discussion between Troeltsch, Meinecke, and Hintze concerning the nature of modern historical thought was of central importance for the reorientation of Western social-historical thought in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity written by John R. Hinde and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2000-06-28 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a historian of the Renaissance and the rise of Christianity, Burckhardt was concerned with periods of social, political, and cultural transformation. Writing in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolutions and in the long shadow cast by the French Revolution of 1789, he observed the rise of industrial capitalism and mass politics with trepidation. He especially lamented the fate of the individual, whose creativity had shaped the glories of the Renaissance and ancient Greece but who was increasingly domesticated and commodified in modern society. Unlike conventional accounts, which characterize him as an apolitical aesthete, Hinde shows us that Burckhardt was as a thinker of profound importance whose conservative anti-modernism ranks him with his colleague Friedrich Nietzsche.
Download or read book Dictionary of Doctrinal and Historical Theology written by John Henry Blunt and published by London : Rivingtons. This book was released on 1870 with total page 844 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Aristocracy of Talent written by Adrian Wooldridge and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Times (UK) book of the year! Meritocracy: the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth. While this initially seemed like a novel concept, by the end of the twentieth century it had become the world's ruling ideology. How did this happen, and why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left? In The Aristocracy of Talent, esteemed journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge traces the history of meritocracy forged by the politicians and officials who introduced the revolutionary principle of open competition, the psychologists who devised methods for measuring natural mental abilities, and the educationalists who built ladders of educational opportunity. He looks outside western cultures and shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocratic system. Wooldridge also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.
Download or read book Language and Enlightenment written by Avi Lifschitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilization without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts, and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language and Enlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.
Download or read book The Christian Tradition written by Ralph Keen and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Christian Tradition, formerly published by Pearson/Prentice Hall, introduces students at the beginning of the third millennium to a religion that has evolved over and shaped two previous millennia. With particular focus placed on the social and cultural background to this tradition, the text provides a stimulating survey of the history of Christianity from its Jewish roots to the challenges it faces in the twenty-first century. This innovative text weaves a consideration of the arts, spirituality, religious life and practice—especially among the laity, women, and others outside the dominant institutional tradition—into its rich historical narrative, and offers a comprehensive and diverse view of the course of Christian history
