La Philosophie de L'Histoire (1765)

La Philosophie de L'Histoire (1765) PDF Author: Abbe Bazin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781104260477
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

La Philosophie de L'Histoire (1765)

La Philosophie de L'Histoire (1765) PDF Author: Abbe Bazin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781104260477
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment

Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment PDF Author: Inna Gorbatov
Publisher: Academica Press,LLC
ISBN: 1933146036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This research monograph is the result of many years of archival investigation in Russia, France and elsewhere into the nature of Catherine the Great's involvement with the French Enlightenment. Professor Gorbatov's conclusions go far beyond the consensus of philosophic and cultural interests masking an authoritarian and, at times, barbarous emerging European power and delves instead into Catherine's fascination with French political and social ideals. Catherine's thirty-four year reign was marked by a furious wholesale consumption of French arts and objets as well as a lavish patronage of French artists and philosophers. Even Rousseau, the self proclaimed "enemy of monarchs", was seriously studied (though detested) and debated by Catherine and her circle as the Czarina attempted to reform the educational system. It is this theme of reform and renewal, along with Europeanization, that provides the great impetus of interest and patronage towards the philosophes and their ideas. Professor Gorbatov also shows the effect of Catherine's interest on the higher aristocracy, writers, and emergent professional classes that was to reach a intellectual and political crisis upon the outbreak of the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and her grandson's battles with the Decembrists.

History of Charles XII

History of Charles XII PDF Author: Voltaire
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sweden
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description


The Birth of Orientalism

The Birth of Orientalism PDF Author: Urs App
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200055
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
Modern Orientalism is not a brainchild of nineteenth-century European imperialists and colonialists, but, as Urs App demonstrates, was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology. Based on sources from a dozen languages, many unavailable in English, The Birth of Orientalism presents a completely new picture of this protracted genesis, its underlying dynamics, and the Western discovery of Asian religions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. App documents the immense influence of Japan and China and describes how the Near Eastern cradle of civilization moved toward mother India. Moreover, he shows that some of India's purportedly oldest texts were products of eighteenth-century European authors. Though Western engagement with non-Abrahamic Asian religions reaches back to antiquity and can without exaggeration be called the largest-scale religiocultural encounter in history, it has so far received surprisingly little attention—which is why some of its major features and their role in the birth of modern Orientalism are described here for the first time. The study of Asian documents had a profound impact on Europe's intellectual makeup. Suddenly the Bible had much older competitors from China and India, Sanskrit threatened to replace Hebrew as the world's oldest language, and Judeo-Christianity appeared as a local phenomenon on a dramatically expanded, worldwide canvas of religions and mythologies. Orientalists were called upon as arbiters in a clash that involved neither gold and spices nor colonialism and imperialism but, rather, such fundamental questions as where we come from and who we are: questions of identity that demanded new answers as biblical authority dramatically waned.

A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography

A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004251847
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography provides a survey of the most important historians and historiographical debates in the long eighteenth century, examining these debates’ stylistic, philosophical and political significance. The chapters, many of which were specially commissioned for this volume, offer a mixture of accessible introduction and original interpretive argument; they will thus appeal both to the scholar of the period and the more general reader. Part I considers Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Herder and Vico. Part II explores wider themes of national and thematic context: English, Scottish, French and German Enlightenment historians are discussed, as are the concepts of historical progress, secularism, the origins of historicism and the deployments of Greek and Roman antiquity within 18th century historiography. Contributors are Robert Mankin, Simon Kow, Jeffrey Smitten, Rebecca Kingston, Síofra Pierse, Bertrand Binoche, Donald Phillip Verene, Ulrich Muhlack, David Allan, Noelle Gallagher, François-Emmanuël Boucher, Sandra Rudnick Luft, Sophie Bourgault, C. Akça Ataç, and Robert Sparling.

Narratives of Enlightenment

Narratives of Enlightenment PDF Author: Karen O'Brien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521465338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Narratives of Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary study of cosmopolitan approaches to the past. It reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the century - Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay - in the context of political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America; and it investigates the nature and degree of their intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilisation. Karen O'Brien combines the methodologies of literary criticism and intellectual history to explore debates about Enlightenments and the political uses of narrative. Where previous studies have emphasised the growth of nationalism in eighteenth-century literature, she reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national cultural issues.

The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire

The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire PDF Author: Nicholas Cronk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113982757X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
As a leading thinker of the European Enlightenment, Voltaire is a central figure in France's collective cultural memory. The popularity of Candide has made him perhaps best known as a writer of tales. Yet these represent only a fraction of his entire œuvre. Voltaire created a style of authorship which made him the most famous writer in Europe and made him a figurehead for a certain style of writing and thinking. This Companion covers his plays, fiction, pamphlets, correspondence, biblical criticism, and historical, political and philosophical thought, to give a wide-ranging view of his writings. The most comprehensive book on Voltaire available in English, it makes accessible the most recent research in France as well as the English-speaking world, in a series of original essays and a guide to sources. The essays demonstrate why Voltaire remains an essential point of reference in defining the modern intellectual today.

Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing

Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing PDF Author: Kelly Boyd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113678764X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing contains over 800 entries ranging from Lord Acton and Anna Comnena to Howard Zinn and from Herodotus to Simon Schama. Over 300 contributors from around the world have composed critical assessments of historians from the beginning of historical writing to the present day, including individuals from related disciplines like Jürgen Habermas and Clifford Geertz, whose theoretical contributions have informed historical debate. Additionally, the Encyclopedia includes some 200 essays treating the development of national, regional and topical historiographies, from the Ancient Near East to the history of sexuality. In addition to the Western tradition, it includes substantial assessments of African, Asian, and Latin American historians and debates on gender and subaltern studies.

Voltaire's History of Charles XII, King of Sweden

Voltaire's History of Charles XII, King of Sweden PDF Author: Voltaire
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1613108435
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
THE “Life of Charles XII” that Mr. John Burns once bought for a penny in the New Cut—an incident in itself historical if one looks at it in the right way—was, he writes to say, an English version of Voltaire’s book. The “Histoire de Charles XII, Roi de Suède,” was first published at Rouen in 1731, first freely translated into English by Alexander Henderson in 1734, and soon afterwards reduced into a chap-book, which made the King a proverbial hero in English fairs and market-places. There have been other translations since Henderson’s, and it is now retranslated by Miss Todhunter with a closer correspondence than his to Voltaire’s original. The book may claim a particular right to an English hearing, apart from the main interest of its subject. It was in England that the life of Charles XII was written by Voltaire, when he was on a visit of exigency there after the Rohan escapade and his second Bastille imprisonment. The effect of this stay in England was that of a determining event in his career. “Voltairism,” writes Mr. John Morley, “may be said to have begun from the flight of its founder from Paris to London. This, to borrow a name from the most memorable instance of outward change marking inward revolution, was the decisive ‘hegira,’ from which the philosophy of destruction in a formal shape may be held seriously to date.” We may supplement this passage from the criticism of a French critic of another school, who says, “England at this time was worked by a spirit of dogmatic irreligion which based itself on a false erudition, a bold criticism and an insidious metaphysic. It was the time of Woolston, of Toland, of Tindal, of Chubb, of Collins, of Bolingbroke. Until then, an insouciant disciple and imitator of the epicureans of the Temple and the roués of the Regency, Voltaire had only ventured on impiety by sallies; dogmas and mysteries had so far only inspired him with bon mots. In the school of the English philosophers he learnt to reason out his incredulity.” Voltaire had had time by this to mend his youth and find his intellectual stature. Born in 1694, he was now a man approaching thirty-three. He had written plays, for his love for the theatre, as it lasted late in him, began early; he had completed his epic, “la Henriade”; he had used his wit irresponsibly, and, thanks to it, had twice been in the Bastille. In England he learnt, if one may say so, to take his wit seriously, that is, to realize it as a decisive weapon in his inevitable revolt and warfare. Similarly he was to use some of his other faculties in their most adroit perfection. If in the “Henriade” the epic method had failed him, considered by the side of other poems as ambitious and as long, he was able to sit down on his return from his English exile and complete this rapid piece of biography, in effect a short prose epic, which shows us the narrative art used by a consummate master in that art. More than this we need not claim for him. If we admit Carlyle’s stigma of “persifleur” as applying to his first period, we need not go on to write him down now philosopher, by way of compensation, because he had studied for a brief period under certain notorious English philosophers. He was neither a persifleur nor a philosopher: he was a militant scribe and hyper-critic with a master bias, anti-religious or anti-Catholic, and an inimitable gift of expression. We see his gift in a very luminous special form in his “Charles XII,” which luckily need offend no man’s susceptibilities.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: J. C. D. Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198916302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines, notably history, philosophy, political theory, political science, literary studies, and theology; Clark calls for a fundamental reconsideration in each. The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each--and, more broadly, between the five societies--has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth. Without the concept, people at the time were unable to act in ways that would have created the Enlightenment as a coherent movement. Since the conventional account has held that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon, the idea could be used as a component of what has been called a 'civil religion': a summing up of the myths of origin, aims, and essential values of a society from which dissent is not permitted. An appreciation that it was instead a historiographical concept undermines, in turn, the idea that there was any great transition to what came to be called 'modernity'.