Emerson's Epistemology

Emerson's Epistemology PDF Author: David Van Leer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521308208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Of the many nineteenth-century writers who have come to be known collectively as the American Renaissance, none, writes David Van Leer, 'aspired so relentlessly to the mantle of philosopher as did Ralph Waldo Emerson'. In this, the first book to treat Emerson as a serious philosopher, Dr Van Leer explores Emerson's interest in the subject, while remaining sensitive to the unfolding of Emerson's own complex career. He argues that Emerson's essays can be read quite seriously in terms of their philosophical content; and that in fact such philosophical readings show the individual works to be far more carefully structured than has usually been assumed.

Emerson's Epistemology

Emerson's Epistemology PDF Author: David Van Leer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521308208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Of the many nineteenth-century writers who have come to be known collectively as the American Renaissance, none, writes David Van Leer, 'aspired so relentlessly to the mantle of philosopher as did Ralph Waldo Emerson'. In this, the first book to treat Emerson as a serious philosopher, Dr Van Leer explores Emerson's interest in the subject, while remaining sensitive to the unfolding of Emerson's own complex career. He argues that Emerson's essays can be read quite seriously in terms of their philosophical content; and that in fact such philosophical readings show the individual works to be far more carefully structured than has usually been assumed.

The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Joseph Urbas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429787316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study offers the first comprehensive account of Emerson's philosophy since his philosophical rehabilitation began in the late 1970s. It builds on the historical reconstruction proposed in the author's previous book, Emerson's Metaphysics, and like that study draws on the entire Emerson corpus—the poetry and sermons included. The aim here is expository. The overall though not exclusive emphasis is on identity, as the first term of Emerson's metaphysics of identity and flowing or metamorphosis. This metaphysics, or general conception of the nature of reality, is what grounds his epistemology and ethics, as well as his esthetic, religious, and political thought. Acknowledging its primacy enables a general account like this to avoid the anti-realist overemphasis on epistemology and language that has often characterized rehabilitation readings of his philosophy. After an initial chapter on Emerson's metaphysics, the subsequent chapters devoted to the other branches of his thought also begin with their "necessary foundation" in identity, which is the law of things and the law of mind alike. Perception of identity in metamorphosis is what characterizes the philosopher, the poet, the scientist, the reformer, and the man of faith and virtue. Identity of mind and world is felt in what Emerson calls the moral sentiment. Identity is Emerson's answer to the Sphinx-riddle of life experienced as a puzzling succession of facts and events.

Emerson's Metaphysics

Emerson's Metaphysics PDF Author: Joseph Urbas
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498524516
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book gives the first complete, fully historicized account of Emerson's metaphysics of cause and effect and its foundational position in his philosophy as a whole. Urbas tells the story of the making of a metaphysician and in so doing breaks with the postmodern, anti-metaphysical readings that have dominated Emerson scholarship since his philosophical rehabilitation began in late 1970s. This is an intellectual biography of Emerson the metaphysician but also a chapter in the cultural life-story of a concept synonymous, in the Transcendentalist period, with life itself, the story of the principle at the origin of all being and change. Emerson's Metaphysics proposes an account of Emerson's metaphysical thought as it unfolds in his writings, as it informs his philosophy as a whole, and as it reflects the intellectual and religious culture in which he lived and moved and had his being. This book will be of interest to philosophers, literary scholars, and students of English, philosophy, and intellectual and religious history who are interested in Emerson and the American Transcendentalist movement.

A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Joel Myerson
Publisher: Historical Guides to American Authors
ISBN: 9780195120943
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
Emerson has maintained his place as one of the seminal figures in American history and literature. He was the acknowledged leader of the Transcendentalist movement. These essays discuss Emerson's life as well as women's rights, slavery and religion.

Emerson's Life in Science

Emerson's Life in Science PDF Author: Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson has traditionally been cast as a dreamer and a mystic, concerned with the ideals of transcendentalism rather than the realities of contemporary science and technology. In Laura Dassow Walls's view Emerson was a leader of the secular avant-garde in his day. He helped to establish science as the popular norm of truth in America and to modernize American popular thought. In addition, he became a hero to a post-Darwinian generation of Victorian Dissenters, exemplifying the strong connection between transcendentalism and later nineteenth-century science.In his early years as a minister, Emerson read widely in natural philosophy (or physics), chemistry, geology, botany, and comparative anatomy. When he left the church, it was to seek the truths written in the book of nature rather than in books of scripture. While visiting the Paris Museum of Natural History during his first European tour, Emerson experienced a revelation so intense that he declared, "I will be a naturalist." Once he was back in the United States, his first step in realizing this ambition was to deliver a series of lectures on natural science. These lectures formed the basis for his first publication, Nature (1836), and his writings ever after reflected his intense and continuing interest in science.Walls finds that Emerson matured just as the concept of "the two cultures" emerged, when the disciplines of literature and science were divorcing each other even as he called repeatedly for their marriage. Consequently, Walls writes, half of Emerson's thought has been invisible to us: science was central to Emerson, to his language, to the basic organization of his career. In Emerson's Life in Science, she makes the case that no study of literary history can be complete without embracing science as part of literature. Conversely, she maintains, no history of science is complete unless we consider the role played by writers of literature who helped to install science in the popular imagination.

The Other Emerson

The Other Emerson PDF Author: Branka Arsić , Cary Wolfe,Stanley Cavell
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452914729
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description


Emerson's Essays

Emerson's Essays PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791081184
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the most influential American writer of the nineteenth century. Poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens descend from Emerson, as do thinkers such as John Dewey and William James. This volume of critical interpretations focuses on Emerson's Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), which encompass some of his most important works-"History," "Self-Reliance," "Circles," "The Poet," and "Experience" among others. These essays exemplify Emerson's distinctively rich prose and his radical affirmation of the strength of the individual. The analyses and appreciations collected here place Emerson's essays in the context of literary and intellectual history, grapple with the implications of his epigrams and tropes, and link his shifts of perspective and tone to the changes in Emerson's life. Together they illuminate the complexity and scope of the seminal works of America's most influential writer and thinker. Book jacket.

Emerson's Literary Philosophy

Emerson's Literary Philosophy PDF Author: Reza Hosseini
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030549798
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book situates Ralph Waldo Emerson in the tradition of philosophy as “spiritual exercise”, arguing that the defining feature of his literary philosophy is the conviction that there is an inherent link between moral persuasion and literary excellence. Hosseini persuasively argues that the Emersonian project can be viewed as an extension of Socrates’ call for a return to the beginning of philosophy, to search for a way of revolutionizing our ways of seeing from within. Examining Emerson’s provocative style of writing, Hosseini contends that his prose is shaped by a desire to bring about psychagogia, or influencing the soul through the power of words. This book furthermore examines the evolving nature of Emerson’s thoughts on “scholarly action” and its implications, his religious temperament as an aesthetic experience of the world through wonder, and the reasons for a resounding acknowledgment of despair in his essay “Experience.” In the concluding chapter, Hosseini explores the depth of Emerson’s engagement with the classical Persian poets and argues that what we may call his “literary humanism” is informed by Persian Adab, exemplified in the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. Weaving together themes from Persian philosophy and Emersonian transcendentalism, Hosseini establishes Emerson’s way of seeing as refreshingly relevant, showing that the questions he tackled in his writings are as pressing today as they were in his time.

Emerson's Transatlantic Romanticism

Emerson's Transatlantic Romanticism PDF Author: D. Greenham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137265205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides an original account of Emerson's creative debts to the British and European Romantics, including Coleridge and Carlyle, firmly locating them in his New England context. Moreover this book analyses and explains the way that his thought shapes his unique prose style in which idea and word become united in an epistemology of form.

A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Alan Levine
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813134307
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Get Book Here

Book Description
From before the Civil War until his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was renowned -- and renounced -- as one of the United States' most prominent abolitionists and as a leading visionary of the nation's liberal democratic future. Following his death, however, both Emerson's political activism and his political thought faded from public memory, replaced by the myth of the genteel man of letters and the detached sage of individualism. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered Emerson's antislavery writings and began reviving his legacy as a political activist. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is the first collection to evaluate Emerson's political thought in light of his recently rediscovered political activism. What were Emerson's politics? A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson authoritatively answers this question with seminal essays by some of the most prominent thinkers ever to write about Emerson -- Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Judith N. Shklar, and Wilson Carey McWilliams -- as well as many of today's leading Emerson scholars. With an introduction that effectively destroys the "pernicious myth about Emerson's apolitical individualism" by editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, A Political Companion to Emerson reassesses Emerson's famous theory of self-reliance in light of his antislavery politics, demonstrates the importance of transcendentalism to his politics, and explores the enduring significance of his thought for liberal democracy. Including a substantial bibliography of work on Emerson's politics over the last century, A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is an indispensable resource for students of Emerson, American literature, and American political thought, as well as for those who wrestle with the fundamental challenges of democracy and liberalism.