Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: John Christian Laursen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442649216
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: John Christian Laursen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442649216
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: John Christian Laursen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442619732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
In this collection, thirteen distinguished contributors examine the influence of the ancient skeptical philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus on early modern political thought. Classical skepticism argues that in the absence of certainty one must either suspend judgment and live by habit or act on the basis of probability rather than certainty. In either case, one must reject dogmatic confidence in politics and philosophy. Surveying the use of skepticism in works by Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Smith, and Kant, among others, the essays in Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries demonstrate the pervasive impact of skepticism on the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. This volume is not just an authoritative account of skepticism’s importance from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, it is also the basis for understanding skepticism’s continuing political implications.

The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment

The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Anton M. Matytsin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142142052X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
8. A Matter of Debate: Conceptions of Material Substance in the Scientific Revolution -- 9. War of the Worlds: Cartesian Vortices and Newtonian Gravitation in Eighteenth-Century Astronomy -- 10. Historical Pyrrhonism and Its Discontents -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: Richard H. Popkin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900424686X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
This volume deals with scepticism and irreligion in the 17th and 18th century. The various contributions seek to clarify and to understand the challenges made then to both the framework of thinking about God and religion and the intellectual systems that had supported religious thinking. Ample attention is given to early modern interpretations of ancient Pyrrhonism and also to biblical criticism. Contributors include: Susanna Åkerman, Silvia Berti, Constance Blackwell, Olivier Bloch, Harry M. Bracken, James E. Force, Alan Gabbey, Sarah Hutton, David S. Katz, Alan Charles Kors, Lothar Kreimendahl, Sylvia Murr, Ezequiel de Olaso, Richard Popkin, Theo Verbeek, Ernestine van der Wall, Richard A. Watson, and Ruth Whelan.

Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution

Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution PDF Author: Niall Allsopp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192605224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English revolution. It focuses on royalist poets who left their cause behind following the abolition of the monarchy, exploring how they re-imagined the traditional language of allegiance in newly secular, artificial, and absolutist ways. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649 royalists who had sided with the King were left with a significant vacuum to fill. Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution charts the poetry of Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, John Dryden, William Davenant, Abraham Cowley, and Margaret Cavendish amongst others in this period. It examines the poets' close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes's ideas in contemporary poetry. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. Poetry and Sovereigniy in the English Revolution builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought to contextualize royalist poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anticlericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.

Clandestine Philosophy

Clandestine Philosophy PDF Author: Gianni Paganini
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487530552
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Clandestine philosophical manuscripts, made up of forbidden works including erotic texts, political pamphlets, satires of court life, forbidden religious texts, and books about the occult, had an avid readership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming objects of historical research by the twentieth century. The purveyors of the clandestine could be found in the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and not least in Paris or London. Despite the heavy risks, including prison, the circulation of these manuscripts was a prosperous venture. After Ira Wade’s pioneering contribution (1938), Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment. Topics from philosophy, political and religious thought, and moral and sexual behaviour are addressed by contemporary authors working in both America and Europe. These manuscripts shed light on the birth of pornography and provide an important avenue for investigating philosophical, religious, political, and social critique.

The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism

The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism PDF Author: Leigh T.I. Penman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350156973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism challenges our most basic assumptions about the history of an ideal at the heart of modernity. Beginning in antiquity and continuing through to today, Leigh T.I. Penman examines how European thinkers have understood words like 'kosmopolites', 'cosmopolite', 'cosmopolitan' and its cognates. The debates over their meanings show that there has never been a single, stable cosmopolitan concept, but rather a range of concepts-sacred and secular, inclusive and exclusive-all described with the cosmopolitan vocabulary. While most scholarly attention in the history of cosmopolitanism has focussed on Greek and Roman antiquity or the Enlightenments of the 18th century, this book shows that the crucial period in the evolution of modern cosmopolitanism was early modernity. Between 1500 and 1800 philosophers, theologians, cartographers, jurists, politicians, alchemists and heretics all used this vocabulary, shedding ancient associations, and adding new ones at will. The chaos of discourses prompted thinkers to reflect on the nature of the cosmopolitan ideal, and to conceive of an abstract 'cosmopolitanism' for the first time. This meticulously researched book provides the first intellectual history of an overlooked period in the evolution of a core ideal. As such, The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism is an essential work for anyone seeking a contextualised understanding of cosmopolitanism today.

Casanova in the Enlightenment

Casanova in the Enlightenment PDF Author: Malina Stefanovska
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487534582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Illuminating the legend that Giacomo Casanova singlehandedly created in his famous – and at times infamous – autobiography, The History of My Life, this book provides a timely reassessment of Casanova’s role and importance as an author of the European Enlightenment. From the margins of libertine authorship where he has been traditionally relegated, the various essays in this collection reposition Casanova at the heart of Enlightenment debates on medicine, sociability, gender, and writing. Based on new scholarship, this reappraisal of a key Enlightenment figure explores the period’s fascination with ethnography, its scientific societies, and its understanding of gender, medicine, and women. Casanova is here finally granted his rightful place in cultural and literary history, a place which explains his enduring yet controversial reputation as a figure of seduction and adventure.

Politics and Scepticism in La Mothe Le Vayer

Politics and Scepticism in La Mothe Le Vayer PDF Author: Ioana Manea
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3823392832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The book aims at bringing a significant contribution to the study of a prestigious figure of the French 17th century who, thanks to his intellectual achievements, became involved with the leading politicians of the time, including Cardinal Richelieu and the future Louis XIV. Unlike the previous critical studies about La Mothe Le Vayer, the book does not study exclusively the works in which he seemed to undermine the political order, but also takes into account the series of educational treatises that he wrote for the prince between 1640-1658. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, which involves philosophical and literary concepts, the book is likely to deal with a question that could not be more relevant nowadays: should an intellectual who perceives the failings of the political order withdraw into the solitude of his library or get involved in politics in order to try to improve it?

The Other Enlightenment

The Other Enlightenment PDF Author: Matthew Sharpe
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538160226
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others. The enlightenment’s key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the ‘proto-postmodernist’ practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through the eyes of Others: Persians, women, Tahitians, Londoners, natives and naïves, the blind, and even imaginary extra-terrestrials. This book aims to show that this self-estrangement, as a means to gain critical distance from one’s taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the enlightenment, and remains vital for critical and constructive sociopolitical thinking today.