The Waning of the Renaissance 1640–1740

The Waning of the Renaissance 1640–1740 PDF Author: John Hoyles
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401030081
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is not always easy to maintain a proper balance between the delineation of cultural development within a given literary field and the claims of practical criticism. And yet if the history of ideas is to be more than a pastime for the student of literature, it must be rooted in the precise art of discrimination. The following chapters attempt to describe and evaluate a particular cultural development by relating the background of ideas to the literary achievement of three writers. It will be sufficient here to out line the nature of the problem, and the method and approach employed. The concept of cultural development implies a recognition of the con nections between ideology and aesthetics. There are at least two ways of exploring such connections. The one, pioneered by Basil Willey, seeks to situate the critical moments of our cultural development in the back ground of ideas, without which the contribution of a particular author cannot be justly evaluated. The danger of such an approach is that the task of discrimination comes to depend over-heavily on extra-literary criteria.

The Waning of the Renaissance 1640–1740

The Waning of the Renaissance 1640–1740 PDF Author: John Hoyles
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401030081
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is not always easy to maintain a proper balance between the delineation of cultural development within a given literary field and the claims of practical criticism. And yet if the history of ideas is to be more than a pastime for the student of literature, it must be rooted in the precise art of discrimination. The following chapters attempt to describe and evaluate a particular cultural development by relating the background of ideas to the literary achievement of three writers. It will be sufficient here to out line the nature of the problem, and the method and approach employed. The concept of cultural development implies a recognition of the con nections between ideology and aesthetics. There are at least two ways of exploring such connections. The one, pioneered by Basil Willey, seeks to situate the critical moments of our cultural development in the back ground of ideas, without which the contribution of a particular author cannot be justly evaluated. The danger of such an approach is that the task of discrimination comes to depend over-heavily on extra-literary criteria.

The Waning of the Renaissance 1640-1740

The Waning of the Renaissance 1640-1740 PDF Author: John Hoyles
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Waning of the Renaissance 1640-1740

The Waning of the Renaissance 1640-1740 PDF Author: John Hoyles
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640

The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 PDF Author: William James Bouwsma
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300097177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Historians have conventionally viewed intellectual and artistic achievement as a seamless progression in a single direction, with the Renaissance, as identified by Jacob Burckhardt, as the root and foundation of modern culture. But in this brilliant new analysis William Bouwsma rethinks the accepted view, arguing that while the Renaissance had a beginning and, unquestionably, a climax, it also had an ending. Examining the careers of some of the greatest figures of the age--Montaigne, Galileo, Jonson, Descartes, Hooker, Shakespeare, and Cervantes among many others--Bouwsma perceives in their work a growing sense of doubt and anxiety about the modern world. He considers first those features of modern European culture generally associated with the traditional Renaissance, features which reached their climax in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But even as the movements of the Renaissance gathered strength, simultaneous impulses operated in a contrary direction. Bouwsma identifies a growing concern with personal identity, shifts in the interests of major thinkers, a decline in confidence about the future, and a heightening of anxiety. Exploring the fluctuating and sometimes contradictory atmosphere in which Renaissance artists and thinkers operated, Bouwsma shows how the very liberation from old boundaries and modes of expression that characterized the Renaissance became itself increasingly stifling and destructive. By drawing attention to the waning of the Renaissance culture of freedom and creativity, Bouwsma offers a wholly new and intriguing interpretation of the place of the European Renaissance in modern culture.

The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment PDF Author: D.R. Kelley
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401132380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
The original idea for a conference on the "shapes of knowledge" dates back over ten years to conversations with the late Charles Schmitt of the Warburg Institute. What happened to the classifications of the sciences between the time of the medieval Studium and that of the French Encyclopedie is a complex and highly abstract question; but posing it is an effective way of mapping and evaluating long term intellectual changes, especially those arising from the impact of humanist scholarship, the new science of the seventeenth century, and attempts to evaluate, to apply, to reconcile, and to institutionalize these rival and interacting traditions. Yet such patterns and transformations cannot be well understood from the heights of the general history of ideas. Within the ~eneral framework of the organization of knowledge the map must be filled in by particular explorations and soundings, and our project called for a conference that would combine some encyclopedic (as well as interdisciplinary and inter national) breadth with scholarly and technical depth.

Elements, Principles and Corpuscles

Elements, Principles and Corpuscles PDF Author: Antonio Clericuzio
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401594643
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Elements, Principles and Particles, Antonio Clericuzio explores the relationships between chemistry and corpuscular philosophy in the age of the Scientific Revolution. Science historians have regarded chemistry and corpuscular philosophy as two distinct traditions. Clericuzio's view is that since the beginning of the 17th century atomism and chemistry were strictly connected. This is attested by Daniel Sennert and by many hitherto little-known French and English natural philosophers. They often combined a corpuscular theory of matter with Paracelsian chemical (and medical) doctrines. Boyle plays a central part in the present book: Clericuzio redefines Boyle's chemical views, by showing that Boyle did not subordinate chemistry to the principles of mechanical philosophy. When Boyle explained chemical phenomena, he had recourse to corpuscles endowed with chemical, not mechanical, properties. The combination of chemistry and corpuscular philosophy was adopted by a number of chemists active in the last decades of the 17th century, both in England and on the Continent. Using a large number of primary sources, the author challenges the standard view of the corpuscular theory of matter as identical with the mechanical philosophy. He points out that different versions of the corpuscular philosophy flourished in the 17th century. Most of them were not based on the mechanical theory, i.e. on the view that matter is inert and has only mechanical properties. Throughout the 17th century, active principles, as well as chemical properties, are attributed to corpuscles. Given its broad coverage, the book is a significant contribution to both history of science and history of philosophy.

Cartesian Theodicy

Cartesian Theodicy PDF Author: Z. Janowski
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401091447
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
Almost all interpreters of Cartesian philosophy have hitherto focused on the epistemological aspect of Descartes' thought. In his Cartesian Theodicy, Janowski demonstrates that Descartes' epistemological problems are merely rearticulations of theological questions. For example, Descartes' attempt to define the role of God in man's cognitive fallibility is a reiteration of an old argument that points out the incongruity between the existence of God and evil, and his pivotal question `whence error?' is shown here to be a rephrasing of the question `whence evil?' The answer Descartes gives in the Meditations is actually a reformulation of the answer found in St. Augustine's De Libero Arbitrio and the Confessions. The influence of St. Augustine on Descartes can also be detected in the doctrine of eternal truths which, within the context of the 17th-century debates over the question of the nature of divine freedom, caused Descartes to ally himself with the Augustinian Oratorians against the Jesuits. Both in his Cartesian Theodicy as well as his Index Augustino-Cartesian, Textes et Commentaire Janowski shows that the entire Cartesian metaphysics can - and should - be read within the context of Augustinian thought.

Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe

Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: R. Crocker
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401597774
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
From a variety of perspectives, the essays presented here explore the profound interdependence of natural philosophy and rational religion in the `long seventeenth century' that begins with the burning of Bruno in 1600 and ends with the Enlightenment in the early Eighteenth century. From the writings of Grotius on natural law and natural religion, and the speculative, libertin novels of Cyrano de Bergerac, to the better-known works of Descartes, Malebranche, Cudworth, Leibniz, Boyle, Spinoza, Newton, and Locke, an increasing emphasis was placed on the rational relationship between religious doctrine, natural law, and a personal divine providence. While evidence for this intrinsic relationship was to be located in different places - in the ideas already present in the mind, in the observations and experiments of the natural philosophers, and even in the history, present experience, and prophesied future of mankind - the result enabled and shaped the broader intellectual and scientific discourses of the Enlightenment.

The Christianization of Pyrrhonism

The Christianization of Pyrrhonism PDF Author: J.R. Maia Neto
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401102317
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
Augustine's christianization of Plato and Thomas Aquinas's of Aristotle provided the two main foundations of medieval Judeo- Christian philosophy. In The Christianization of Pyrrhonism, José R. Maia Neto shows that Greek scepticism played a similar role in the development of a major strand of modern religious thought. From the Jansenist reaction of Molinism in the early 17th century to Shestov's resistance to the arrival of Kantian enlightenment in Russia in the late 19th century, Greek scepticism was reconstructed in terms of Christian doctrines and used against major secular philosophers who posed threats to religion. At the same time, the ancient sceptics' practical stance was attacked in order that it does not constitute a viable alternative to the modern secular philosophies. The resulting Christianized Pyrrhonism would be the basis for a genuine Christian or Biblical thought, for the first time emancipated from the rationalist assumptions and methods of Greek philosophy. The Christianization of Pyrrhonism is extremely valuable for those interested in the modern developments of ancient scepticism, in the relations between religious and philosophical ideas in modernity, and for scholars and the general public interested in Pascal, Kierkegaard and Shestov.

The Abbé Grégoire and his World

The Abbé Grégoire and his World PDF Author: R.H. Popkin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401140707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
A distinguished group of international scholars from the disciplines of history, philosophy, literature and art history offer a reconsideration of the ideas and the impact of the abbé Henri Grégoire, one of the most important figures of the French Revolution and a contributor to the campaigns for Jewish emancipation, rights for blacks, the reform of the Catholic Church and many other causes