Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species

Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species PDF Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415955513
Category : Evolution in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species

Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species PDF Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415955513
Category : Evolution in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Evolutionism in Eighteenth-century French Thought

Evolutionism in Eighteenth-century French Thought PDF Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433103735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This book examines how eight eighteenth-century French theorists - Maillet, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire - addressed evolutionism. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually open the door to the mutability of species and a departure from the long-held belief that the chain of beings is fixed. This book describes how the philosophes established a triune relationship among contemporary scientific discoveries, random creationism propelled by the motive and conscious properties of matter, and the notion of the chain of being, along with its corollaries, plenitude and continuity. Also addressed is the contemporary debate over whether apes could ever be taught to speak as well as the issue of race and the family of man.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis PDF Author: David Gallagher
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9042027096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an ‘ascending evolutionary scale’ (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society’s moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse’s Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.

Volition, Rhetoric, and Emotion in the Work of Pascal

Volition, Rhetoric, and Emotion in the Work of Pascal PDF Author: Thomas Parker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135915903
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This study identifies and analyzes a compelling theory and practice of persuasion that integrates the complexity of human desire. It demonstrates how the philosophical component in Pascal's description of the will makes a seamless integration into a vehicle of persuasion and poetics, providing a privileged viewpoint for understanding the author's complete works, arguing that the notion of will is of fundamental importance in Pascal's anthropology as well as in his rhetoric. This avenue of interpretation is both fruitful and difficult, because the word "volonte" means very different things in Pascal and in modern French. Beginning by contextualizing the notion of 'volonte' and explaining its expanded use in the seventeenth-century lexicon, the author then endeavors to show that Pascal borrows an essentially Augustinian paradigm of desire to create a depiction of the will divided against itself, surreptitiously yearning for what its bearer does not want.

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault PDF Author: Chloe Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135892792
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Drawing on the work of Foucault and Western confessional writings, this book challenges the transhistorical and commonsense views of confession as an innate impulse resulting in the psychological liberation of the confessing subject. Instead, confessional desire is argued to be contingent and constraining, and alternatives to confessional subjectivity are explored.

Regimes of Comparatism

Regimes of Comparatism PDF Author: Renaud Gagné
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004387633
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Historically, all societies have used comparison to analyze cultural difference through the interaction of religion, power, and translation. When comparison is a self-reflective practice, it can be seen as a form of comparatism. Many scholars are concerned in one way or another with the practice and methods of comparison, and the need for a cognitively robust relativism is an integral part of a mature historical self-placement. This volume looks at how different theories and practices of writing and interpretation have developed at different times in different cultures and reconsiders the specificities of modern comparative approaches within a variety of comparative moments. The idea is to reconsider the specificities, the obstacles, and the possibilities of modern comparative approaches in history and anthropology through a variety of earlier and parallel comparative horizons. Particular attention is given to the exceptional role of Athens and Jerusalem in shaping the Western understanding of cultural difference. Contributors are: Matei Candea, Philippe Descola, Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Anthony Grafton, Caroline Humphrey, Dmitri Levitin, Geoffrey Lloyd, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Jonathan Sheehan, Marilyn Strathern, Guy Stroumsa, and Phiroze Vasunia.

The Ethics of Need

The Ethics of Need PDF Author: Sarah Clark Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136596666
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs but to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest.

The Mystical in Wittgenstein's Early Writings

The Mystical in Wittgenstein's Early Writings PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135893713
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description


Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity

Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity PDF Author: Serena Parekh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899878
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This volume examines contemporary debates on the foundations of human rights through the lens of Arendt's writings, showing how Arendt’s phenomenological standpoint, unique within these debates, is able to shed new light a number of problems within human rights theory.

The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa

The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa PDF Author: Andrew Nash
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135227721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
This book brings into view the most enduring and distinctive philosophical current in South African history—one often obscured or patronized as Afrikaner liberalism. It traces this current of thought from nineteenth-century disputes over Dutch liberal theology through Stellenbosch existentialism to the prison writings of Breyten Breytenbach, and examines related themes in the work of Olive Schreiner, M. K. Gandhi, and Richard Turner. At the core of this tradition is a defence of free speech in its classical sense, as a virtue necessary for a good society, rather than in its modern liberal sense as an individual right. Out of this defence of free speech, conducted in the face of charges of heresy, treason, and immorality, a range of philosophical conceptions developed—of the self constituted in dialogue with others, of freedom as transcendence of the given, and of a dialectical movement of consciousness as it is educated through debate and action. This study shows the Socratic commitment to "following the argument where it leads," sustained and developed in the storm and stress of a peculiar modernity.