Reading Renaissance Ethics

Reading Renaissance Ethics PDF Author: Marshall Grossman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134134711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours. Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform are questioned and revised. Taking seriously the question of what to read requires us to consider exactly what it is that we do when we read and when we write about our reading. Reading Renaissance Ethics asks what sorts of events took place when Renaissance texts were first read and how this differs from the way we read and teach them now.

Reading Renaissance Ethics

Reading Renaissance Ethics PDF Author: Marshall Grossman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134134711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours. Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform are questioned and revised. Taking seriously the question of what to read requires us to consider exactly what it is that we do when we read and when we write about our reading. Reading Renaissance Ethics asks what sorts of events took place when Renaissance texts were first read and how this differs from the way we read and teach them now.

Reading Renaissance Ethics

Reading Renaissance Ethics PDF Author: Marshall Grossman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113413472X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Bringing together eminent historicist and formalist critics, this volume examines how Renaissance texts were read, how they were put to use and why this matters for the study of Renaissance literature and for the future of literary studies.

Textual Conversations in the Renaissance

Textual Conversations in the Renaissance PDF Author: Zachary Lesser
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754656852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
A group of leading scholars here investigate the varied ways in which the Renaissance incorporated conversation and dialogue into its literary, political, juridical, religious, and social practices. Across a range of texts and genres, the essays focus on the importance of conversation to early modern understandings of ethics; on literary history itself as an ongoing authorial conversation; and on the material and textual technologies that enabled early modern conversations.

Theory as Practice

Theory as Practice PDF Author: Nancy S. Struever
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226777429
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
There is a tendency in modern scholarship to describe the Renaissance Humanists merely as readers—as interpreters happily absorbed within the bounds of their chosen classical texts. In Theory as Practice, Nancy Struever contests this accepted notion; by focusing on ethical inquiry, she presents the Humanists as engaged in subtle, innovative moral work. Struever argues that the accomplishment of five major Renaissance figures—Petrarch, Nicolaus Cusanus, Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Montaigne—was to consider theory as practice and thus engage the ethics of inquiry. She notes three stages of investigation, the first represented by Petrarch, who "relocated" ethical inquiry from a theoretical realm to a familiar practice responsive to daily experience. Next, Struever describes how Cusanus and Valla assume Petrarch's relocation, yet confect ethics into discursive disciplines. Finally, while both Machiavelli and Montaigne produced strong revisions of discipline, they considered the problems of addressing the non-inquirer as well. Struever urges modern readers to employ both rhetorical and philosophical analysis to reveal these Humanists' aggressive tactics of presentation as well as their novel disciplinary reorientation. By doing so, she suggests, we discover how Renaissance ethical inquiry illuminates, and is illuminated by, the modern ethical theory of such philosophers as Peirce, Wittgenstein, Bernard Williams, and Quine.

Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics

Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics PDF Author: Patrick Gray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113999347X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Written by a distinguished international team of contributors, this volume explores Shakespeare's vivid depictions of moral deliberation and individual choice in light of Renaissance debates about ethics. Examining the intellectual context of Shakespeare's plays, the essays illuminate Shakespeare's engagement with the most pressing moral questions of his time, considering the competing claims of politics, Christian ethics and classical moral philosophy, as well as new perspectives on controversial topics such as conscience, prayer, revenge and suicide. Looking at Shakespeare's responses to emerging schools of thought such as Calvinism and Epicureanism, and assessing comparisons between Shakespeare and his French contemporary Montaigne, the collection addresses questions such as: when does laughter become cruel? How does style reflect moral perspective? Does shame lead to self-awareness? This book is of great interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare studies, Renaissance studies and the history of ethics.

Ethics Through Literature

Ethics Through Literature PDF Author: Brian Stock
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584656999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Why do we read? Based on a series of lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel in 2005, Brian Stock presents a model for relating ascetic and aesthetic principles in Western reading practices. He begins by establishing the primacy of the ethical objective in the ascetic approach to literature in Western classical thought from Plato to Augustine. This is understood in contrast to the aesthetic appreciation of literature that finds pleasure in the reading of the text in and of itself. Examples of this long-standing tension as displayed in a literary topos, first outlined in these lectures, which describes “scenes of reading,” are found in the works of Peter Abelard, Dante, and Virginia Woolf, among others. But, as this original and often surprising work shows, the distinction between the ascetic and aesthetic impulse in reading, while necessary, is often misleading. As he writes, “All Western reading, it would appear, has an ethical component, and the value placed on this component does not change much over time.” Tracing the ascetic component of reading from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance and beyond, to Coleridge and Schopenhauer, Stock reveals the ascetic or ethical as a constant with the aesthetic serving as opposition, parallel force, and handmaiden, underscoring the historical consistency of the reading experience through the ages and across various media.

Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics

Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics PDF Author: Cora Diamond
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989848
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Cora Diamond follows two major philosophers as they think about thinking, and about our ability to respond to thinking that has gone astray. Acting as both witness to and participant in the encounter, she provides fresh perspective on the value of Wittgenstein’s and Anscombe’s work, and demonstrates what genuinely independent thought can achieve.

Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy

Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy PDF Author: Jill Kraye
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040245366
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The impact of classical thought on Renaissance philosophy is the subject of this volume. In the first part Dr Kraye deals with the interpretations of ancient philosophy put forward by various thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, including the humanist Angelo Poliziano and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino; in the second, she examines the central role of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics within Renaissance moral philosophy and considers the influence of other classical treatises on ethics, especially the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The final section explores controversies concerning the authenticity of works in the Aristotelian canon, together with the early printing history of Aristotle. All the articles aim to locate philosophical questions within the historical and cultural context of the Renaissance, and particular attention is paid to the importance of philological scholarship within philosophical debates. The collection includes an essay on Philipp Melanchthon's ethical commentaries and textbooks which has previously appeared only in German translation.

Philosophers of the Renaissance

Philosophers of the Renaissance PDF Author: Paul Richard Blum
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813217261
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Philosophers of the Renaissance introduces readers to philosophical thinking from the end of the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century.

Textual Conversations in the Renaissance

Textual Conversations in the Renaissance PDF Author: Benedict S. Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351895427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
'Conversation is the beginning and end of knowledge', wrote Stephano Guazzo in his Civil Conversation. Like Guazzo's, this is a book dedicated to the Renaissance concept of conversation, a concept that functioned simultaneously as a privileged literary and rhetorical form (the dialogue), an intellectual and artistic program (the humanists' interactions with ancient texts), and a political possibility (the king's council, or the republican concept of mixed government). In its varieties of knowledge production, the Renaissance was centrally concerned with debate and dialogue, not only among scholars, but also, and perhaps more importantly, among and with texts. Renaissance reading practices were active and engaged: such conversations with texts were meant to prepare the mind for political and civic life, and the political itself was conceived as fundamentally conversational. The humanist idea of conversation thus theorized the relationships among literature, politics, and history; it was one of the first modern attempts to locate cultural production within a specific historical and political context. The essays in this collection investigate the varied ways in which the Renaissance incorporated textual conversation and dialogue into its literary, political, juridical, religious, and social practices. They focus on the importance of conversation to early modern understandings of ethics; on literary history itself as an ongoing authorial conversation; and on the material and textual technologies that enabled early modern conversations.