Nature and Culture

Nature and Culture PDF Author: Lester G. Crocker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421435799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 591

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Book Description
Originally published in 1963. Perhaps the most generative ethical question of eighteenth-century France was how to live a virtuous and happy life at the same time. During the Age of Enlightenment, Christianity fell out of vogue as the dominant and authoritative moral code. In place of Christianity's emphasis on sin and redemption in light of a supposed afterlife, present happiness became recognized as an appropriate end goal among French Enlightenment thinkers. French intellectuals struggled to find equilibrium between nature (a person's individual goals and needs) and culture (the political, economic, and social organization of humans for a collective good). Enlightenment discourse generated a unique cultural moment in which thinkers addressed the problems of humans' moral coexistence through the dichotomy of nature and culture. Lester Crocker addresses these questions in an overview of ethical thought in eighteenth-century France.

Nature and Culture

Nature and Culture PDF Author: Lester G. Crocker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421435799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 591

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Book Description
Originally published in 1963. Perhaps the most generative ethical question of eighteenth-century France was how to live a virtuous and happy life at the same time. During the Age of Enlightenment, Christianity fell out of vogue as the dominant and authoritative moral code. In place of Christianity's emphasis on sin and redemption in light of a supposed afterlife, present happiness became recognized as an appropriate end goal among French Enlightenment thinkers. French intellectuals struggled to find equilibrium between nature (a person's individual goals and needs) and culture (the political, economic, and social organization of humans for a collective good). Enlightenment discourse generated a unique cultural moment in which thinkers addressed the problems of humans' moral coexistence through the dichotomy of nature and culture. Lester Crocker addresses these questions in an overview of ethical thought in eighteenth-century France.

Virtue, Happiness and Duclos’ Histoire de Madame de Luz

Virtue, Happiness and Duclos’ Histoire de Madame de Luz PDF Author: L.R. Free
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401572933
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
Charles Pinot Duclos' biography dramatizes the evolution from the rigid separation of the aristocratic and plebeian classes in the seventeenth century to the gradual social democratization in the eighteenth. This son of a Brittany merchant from the little village of Dinan rose to social prominence in the aristocratic salon circles of Paris and to literary pre eminence, as attest contemporary memoirs, the success of his novels, histories and moral writings as well as his official positions - a member of two academies, Royal Historiographer, Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy -a feat nearly impossible in the stratified society of seventeenth century France. Moreover, not only was Duclos, the exceptional con versationalist, a persona grata among the Parisian social elite, but he was also aligned with the progressive philosophical forces, a friend or ally of the foremost mid-century men of letters. Indeed, as Karl Toth has so ably demonstrated, Duclos perhaps more than any other important writer 1 of his day can be considered the true representative of his Age. 1 Karl Toth, Woman and Rococo in France (London, 1931), p. 29. For amplified documentation on the character and life of Duclos consult the following sources: Louis Simon Auger, "Notice sur Duclos," Oeuvres completes de Duclos, Paris, 1806. Emile Henriot, "Un honnete homme au XVIIIe siecle -Duclos," La Nouvelle Revue (oct.-nov. 1910), XVII, pp. 553-64; (nov.-dec. 1910) XVIII, pp. 124-33. Leo Le Bourgo, Un homme de lettres au XVIII" siecle, Duclos, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Bordeaux, 1902).

Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I

Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I PDF Author: Aaron Garrett
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191502758
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled, and in the solutions they proposed. This new history of Scottish philosophy will include two volumes that focus on the Scottish Enlightenment. In this volume a team of leading experts explore the ideas, intellectual context, and influence of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, and many other thinkers, frame old issues in fresh ways, and introduce new topics and questions into debates about the philosophy of this remarkable period. The contributors explore the distinctively Scottish context of this philosophical flourishing, and juxtapose the work of canonical philosophers with contemporaries now very seldom read. The outcome is a broadening-out, and a filling-in of the detail, of the picture of the philosophical scene of Scotland in the eighteenth century. General Editor: Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness PDF Author: Brian Michael Norton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611484308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel's participation in eighteenth-century "inquiries after happiness," an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton's innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His central argument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual's psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one's power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment's ethical legacy.

The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction

The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction PDF Author: Olivier Delers
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495822
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The rise of the novel paradigm—and the underlying homology between the rise of a bourgeois middle class and the coming of age of a new literary genre—continues to influence the way we analyze economic discourse in the eighteenth-century French novel. Characters are often seen as portraying bourgeois values, even when historiographical evidence points to the virtual absence of a self-conscious and coherent bourgeoisie in France in the early modern period. Likewise, the fact that the nobility was a dynamic and diverse group whose members had learned to think in individualistic and meritocratic terms as a result of courtly politics is often ignored. The Other Rise of the Novel calls for a radical revision of how realism, the language of self-interest and commercial exchanges, and idealized noble values interact in the early modern novel. It focuses on two novels from the seventeenth century, Furetière’s Roman bourgeois and Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves and four novels from the eighteenth century, Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Sade’s Les infortunes de la vertu. It argues that eighteenth-century French fiction does not reflect material culture mimetically and that character action is best analyzed by focusing on the social and discursive exchanges staged by the text, rather than by trying to create parallels between specific behavior and actual historical changes. The novel produces its own reality by transforming characters and their stories into alternative social models, different articulations of how individuals should define their economic relations to others. The representation of interpersonal relations often highlights personal conceptions of private interest that cannot be easily reconciled with the traditional narrative of a transition towards economic modernity. Realism, then, is not only about verisimilar storytelling and psychological depth: it is an epistemological questioning about the type of access to reality that a particular genre can give its readers.

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.

Virtue, Happiness and Duclos!.

Virtue, Happiness and Duclos!. PDF Author: Lloyd Raymond Free
Publisher: Hague : Martinus Nijhoff
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description


Dissertation Abstracts

Dissertation Abstracts PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 1018

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Book Description


Historical Dictionary of France

Historical Dictionary of France PDF Author: Gino Raymond
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810862565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
From the construction of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower to the Fall of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to NapolZon Bonaparte's defeat at Waterloo to Albert Camus' L'Etranger and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, France has been a part of some of the greatest and most memorable events in human history. Author Gino Raymond relates the history of these events in the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of France. Through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on kings, politicians, authors, architects, composers, artists, and philosophers, a thorough history of France is presented.

Reading 1759

Reading 1759 PDF Author: Shaun Regan
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611484790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Reading 1759 investigates the literary culture of a remarkable year in British and French history, writing, and ideas. Familiar to many as the British “year of victories” during the Seven Years’ War, 1759 was also an important year in the histories of fiction, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Reading 1759 is the first book to examine together the range of works written and published during this crucial year. Offering broad coverage of the year’s work in writing, these essays examine key works by Johnson, Voltaire, Sterne, Adam Smith, Edward Young, Sarah Fielding, and Christopher Smart, along with such group projects as the Encyclopédie and the literary review journals of the mid-eighteenth century. Organized around a cluster of key topics, the volume reflects the concerns most important to writers themselves in 1759. This was a year of the new and the modern, as writers addressed current issues of empire and ethical conduct, forged new forms of creative expression, and grappled with the nature of originality itself. Texts written and published in 1759 confronted the history of Western colonialism, the problem of prostitution in a civilized society, and the limitations of linguistic expression. Philosophical issues were also important in 1759, not least the thorny question of causation; while, in France, state censorship challenged the Encyclopédie, the central Enlightenment project. Taking into its purview such texts and intellectual developments, Reading 1759 puts the literary culture of this singular, and singularly important, year on the scholarly map. In the process, the volume also provides a self-reflective contribution to the growing body of “annualized” studies that focus on the literary output of specific years.