Kant and Milton

Kant and Milton PDF Author: Sanford Budick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674050051
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kant and Milton brings to bear new evidence and long-neglected materials to show the importance of Kant’s encounter with Milton’s poetry to the formation of Kant’s moral and aesthetic thought. Sanford Budick reveals the relation between a poetic vision and a philosophy that theorized what that poetry was doing. As Plato and Aristotle contemplate Homer, so Kant contemplates Milton. In all these cases philosophy and poetry allow us to better understand each other. Milton gave voice to the transformation of human understanding effected by the Protestant Revolt, making poetry of the idea that human reason is created self-sufficient. Kant turned that religiously inflected poetry into the richest modern philosophy. Milton’s bold self-reliance is Kant’s as well.Using lectures of Kant that have been published only in the past decade, Budick develops an account of Kant based on his lifelong absorption in the poetry of Milton, especially Paradise Lost. By bringing to bear the immense power of his reflections on aesthetic and moral form, Kant produced one of the most penetrating interpretations of Milton’s achievement that has ever been offered and, at the same time, reached new peaks in the development of aesthetics and moral reason.

Kant and Milton

Kant and Milton PDF Author: Sanford Budick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674050051
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kant and Milton brings to bear new evidence and long-neglected materials to show the importance of Kant’s encounter with Milton’s poetry to the formation of Kant’s moral and aesthetic thought. Sanford Budick reveals the relation between a poetic vision and a philosophy that theorized what that poetry was doing. As Plato and Aristotle contemplate Homer, so Kant contemplates Milton. In all these cases philosophy and poetry allow us to better understand each other. Milton gave voice to the transformation of human understanding effected by the Protestant Revolt, making poetry of the idea that human reason is created self-sufficient. Kant turned that religiously inflected poetry into the richest modern philosophy. Milton’s bold self-reliance is Kant’s as well.Using lectures of Kant that have been published only in the past decade, Budick develops an account of Kant based on his lifelong absorption in the poetry of Milton, especially Paradise Lost. By bringing to bear the immense power of his reflections on aesthetic and moral form, Kant produced one of the most penetrating interpretations of Milton’s achievement that has ever been offered and, at the same time, reached new peaks in the development of aesthetics and moral reason.

Milton's Modernities

Milton's Modernities PDF Author: Feisal G. Mohamed
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

Get Book Here

Book Description
The phrase “early modern” challenges readers and scholars to explore ways in which that period expands and refines contemporary views of the modern. The original essays in Milton’s Modernities undertake such exploration in the context of the work of John Milton, a poet whose prodigious energies simultaneously point to the past and future. Bristling with insights on Milton’s major works, Milton’s Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the volume's core is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton’s dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond. Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism—assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton’s Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.

Kantian Subjects

Kantian Subjects PDF Author: Karl Ameriks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192578979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this volume, Karl Ameriks explores 'Kantian subjects' in three senses. In Part I, he first clarifies the most distinctive features-such as freedom and autonomy-of Kant's notion of what it is for us to be a subject. Other chapters then consider related 'subjects' that are basic topics in other parts of Kant's philosophy, such as his notions of necessity and history. Part II examines the ways in which many of us, as 'late modern,' have been highly influenced by Kant's philosophy and its indirect effect on our self-conception through successive generations of post-Kantians, such as Hegel and Schelling, and early Romantic writers such as Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis, thus making us 'Kantian subjects' in a new historical sense. By defending the fundamentals of Kant's ethics in reaction to some of the latest scholarship in the opening chapters, Ameriks offers an extensive argument that Hölderlin expresses a valuable philosophical position that is much closer to Kant than has generally been recognized. He also argues that it was necessary for Kant's position to be supplemented by the new conception, introduced by the post-Kantians, of philosophy as fundamentally historical, and that this conception has had a growing influence on the most interesting strands of Anglophone as well as Continental philosophy.

Scholarly Milton

Scholarly Milton PDF Author: Thomas Festa
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1942954824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Scholarly Milton [...] is admirably clear and informative. It lays out the basics of Milton’s education and intellectual life and the evolution of his thinking in relation to the political concerns of his time in ways that should orient a person new to this material at the same time as it provides a focused refreshment for someone more expert. The articles themselves offer engaging and thoughtful explorations of Milton’s work by grounding their analysis in specific seventeenth-century intellectual concerns. [...] It should be clear that the essays in this volume speak to one another in fruitful ways; they foreground Milton the educator as much as Milton the scholar. Both educators and scholars will find it equally useful.' Margaret Thickstun, MLA

Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties

Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties PDF Author: Karl Ameriks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198917643
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kantian Dignity and its Difficulties defends Kant's doctrine that all human beings have a moral capacity that gives them unconditional dignity. It explains how the reception of this influential doctrine was marred by serious misunderstandings, and how Kant himself fell prey to prejudices inconsistent with the doctrine. The works of J.G. Herder and Richard Price are discussed as providing an important supplement for, and parallel to, what is best in Kant. Thomas Mann's work is then discussed as a paradigmatic example of a transition from a chauvinist reading--influenced by the terrible but highly popular interpretation of Kant by Houston Stewart Chamberlain--to an enlightened understanding of Kant's philosophy, one heavily influenced by Walt Whitman and Novalis. This book is a combination of philosophical argument and historical analysis. The first chapter critically discusses a number of contemporary interpretations. It defends Kant's concept of dignity as rooted in a basic capacity of reason for morality, and therefore as an unconditional, all-or-nothing, and inviolable feature of all human beings, one that deserves universal respect. A systematic analysis based on close textual study defends Kant's position from interpretations that misconstrue it by overemphasizing mere rationality, contingent talents, or achievements. The next four chapters build on this systematic account by explaining how Kant's notion of dignity was further clarified, or seriously misunderstood or neglected, in a variety of significant international contexts: the Baltics (Herder and Prussia's relation to the east), Berlin (the rise of Fascism), Philadelphia (the Declaration of Independence), London (Richard Price and reactions to the American and French Revolutions), and Washington (reactions to World War I and II, discussed in three chapters on Thomas Mann). The book argues that Kant showed no interest in the "expanding blaze" of the American Revolution, and that, in addition to other prejudices, he had an elitist attitude that harmed his own cause. Tragically, it was the shock of German Fascism that forced Mann to emigrate and become the most influential public advocate of what is best in Kant's philosophy. Mann's "Democracy will win" campaign connected Kant's doctrine of dignity with the enlightened principles of American democracy.

The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant

The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant PDF Author: Robert Doran
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316368858
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Robert Doran offers the first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime, from the ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime (attributed to 'Longinus') and its reception in early modern literary theory to the philosophical accounts of Burke and Kant. Doran explains how and why the sublime became a key concept of modern thought and shows how the various theories of sublimity are united by a common structure - the paradoxical experience of being at once overwhelmed and exalted - and a common concern: the preservation of a notion of transcendence in the face of the secularization of modern culture. Combining intellectual history with literary theory and philosophical analysis, his book provides a new, searching and multilayered account of a concept that continues to stimulate thought about our responses to art, nature and human events.

Kant's Elliptical Path

Kant's Elliptical Path PDF Author: Karl Ameriks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191655333
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kant's Elliptical Path explores the main stages and key concepts in the development of Kant's Critical philosophy, from the early 1760s to the 1790s. Karl Ameriks provides a detailed and concise account of the main ways in which the later Critical works provide a plausible defence of the conception of humanity's fundamental end that Kant turned to after reading Rousseau in the 1760s. Separate essays are devoted to each of the three Critiques, as well as to earlier notes and lectures and several of Kant's later writings on history and religion. A final section devotes three chapters to post-Kantian developments in German Romanticism, accounts of tragedy up through Nietzsche, and contemporary philosophy. The theme of an elliptical path is shown to be relevant to these writers as well as to many aspects of Kant's own life and work. The topics of the book include fundamental issues in epistemology and metaphysics, with a new defense of the Amerik's 'moderate' interpretation of transcendental idealism. Other essays evaluate Kant's concept of will and reliance on a 'fact of reason' in his practical philosophy, as well as his critique of traditional theodicies, and the historical character of his defense of religion and the concepts of creation and hope within 'the boundaries of mere reason'. Kant's Elliptical Path will be of value to historians of modern philosophy and Kant scholars, while its treatment of several literary figures and issues in aesthetics, politics, history, and theology make it relevant to readers outside of philosophy.

Milton and Free Will

Milton and Free Will PDF Author: William Myers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429639333
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in 1987. Milton and Free Will is an incisive, ambitious and comprehensive analysis and defence of the concept of free will, using Milton as an example and exemplar. Written with passion, and out of a lifelong engagement with the poetry of Milton and the philosophical and theological problems it encompasses, the book will illuminate both Milton studies and philosophical debate. The author engages with all the major currents of the free will debate, starting with Aristotle and Aquinas and considering arguments advanced by Hume and Kant as well as those of a number of modern philosophers including Polanyi, Kenny, Parfit, Plantinga, Swinburne, Dennett and Davidson. He pays particular attention to the Marxist formalism of Bakhtin, the Catholic phenomenology of Pope John Paul II and the evolutionism of Monod and Sober. He concludes with a rebuttal of the deconstructionism of Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. He claims that all the major difficulties faced by defenders of free will can be overcome if a notion of willing implicit in the work of Milton is properly understood. Freedom as Milton represented and understood it, he suggests, is a condition of mind arising out of inter-personal awareness and not a property or consequence of practical reasoning. He finds supporting evidence for this view in the writings of Newman and in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which he reads as a narrative structurally reversing Milton’s representation of the fall of Eve in Paradise Lost. The author systematically analyses and reanalyses key passages in his texts in the light of the many arguments for and against free will, seeking thereby to affirm the validity in principle, and the personal and political importance in practice, of the Christian humanist tradition of which he sees Milton, Newman and the Pope as important (if sometimes misleading) spokesmen.

Kant on Poetry | Kant über Poesie

Kant on Poetry | Kant über Poesie PDF Author: Fernando M. F. Silva
Publisher: Georg Olms Verlag
ISBN: 3487423960
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Obwohl es verbreitet für ein bloßes Nebenthema gehalten wird, spielt das Thema der Poesie doch eine wichtige Rolle in Kants Denken. Mit dem Ziel, geläufige Missverständnisse zu zerstreuen, versammelt der vorliegende Band Beiträge verschiedener Spezialisten zur Bestimmung des Orts und der Rolle der Poesie in Kants Denken. Es handelt sich um den Versuch einer Neubewertung der Wichtigkeit der Poesie für seine moralische, politische, anthropologische, philosophische und ästhetische Systematik.

The ‘Critique of Judgment' and the Unity of Kant's Critical System

The ‘Critique of Judgment' and the Unity of Kant's Critical System PDF Author: Lara Ostaric
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009336851
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Argues that Kant's seminal Critique of Judgment is properly understood as completing his critical system.