Political Philosophy in Gulliver’s Travels PDF Download
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Author: Lloyd W. Robertson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030988538
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
This book analyzes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels from a political philosophy perspective. When authors have focused on politics in Swift’s writings, this has usually meant a study of how Swift located himself on issues of his day such as church and state, and Ireland. Robertson claims by contrast that Gulliver’s Travels is fundamentally a book about the “ancients” (e.g. Plato, Aristotle), and the “moderns” (science and technology), and their contrasting views about the human condition. The claim that the Travels is “a kind of prolegomena” to political philosophy leaves open the possibility that it does not achieve, or seek to achieve, a fusion of various teachings but rather uses the device of alien societies to point us to uncomfortable aspects of political philosophy’s “larger questions” we are prone to ignore. Swift, Robertson argues, draws our attention to some version of the classical republic, as idealized in Aristotle’s political writings and in Plato’s Republic, as opposed to a modern regime which, at its best or most intellectual, emphasizes modern science and technology in combination as a way to improve the human condition.
Author: Lloyd W. Robertson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030988538
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
This book analyzes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels from a political philosophy perspective. When authors have focused on politics in Swift’s writings, this has usually meant a study of how Swift located himself on issues of his day such as church and state, and Ireland. Robertson claims by contrast that Gulliver’s Travels is fundamentally a book about the “ancients” (e.g. Plato, Aristotle), and the “moderns” (science and technology), and their contrasting views about the human condition. The claim that the Travels is “a kind of prolegomena” to political philosophy leaves open the possibility that it does not achieve, or seek to achieve, a fusion of various teachings but rather uses the device of alien societies to point us to uncomfortable aspects of political philosophy’s “larger questions” we are prone to ignore. Swift, Robertson argues, draws our attention to some version of the classical republic, as idealized in Aristotle’s political writings and in Plato’s Republic, as opposed to a modern regime which, at its best or most intellectual, emphasizes modern science and technology in combination as a way to improve the human condition.
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
ISBN: 1913724336
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 31
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Book Description
George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. Politics vs. Literature, the fourth in the Orwell's Essays series, is, at heart, a review of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Having been given a copy of the book on his eighth birthday, Orwell knows it inside out, and thinks highly of it; it is 'pessimistic', though, he says – 'it descends into political partisanship of a narrow kind,' designed to 'humiliate man by reminding him that he is weak and ridiculous.' Using the book as an example of enjoying a book whose author one cannot stand, Orwell goes on to say that he considers Gulliver's Travels a work of art, leaving the reader to reconsider the books on their own shelves.
Author: Jonathan Swift
Publisher: Echo Library
ISBN: 9781603037228
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Author: Arthur M. Melzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022617512X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
“Shines a floodlight on a topic that has been cloaked in obscurity . . . a landmark work in both intellectual history and political theory” (The Wall Street Journal). Philosophical esotericism—the practice of communicating one’s unorthodox thoughts “between the lines”—was a common practice until the end of the eighteenth century. Despite its long and well-documented history, however, esotericism is often dismissed today as a rare occurrence. But by ignoring esotericism, we risk cutting ourselves off from a full understanding of Western philosophical thought. Walking readers through both an ancient (Plato) and a modern (Machiavelli) esoteric work, Arthur M. Melzer explains what esotericism is—and is not. It relies not on secret codes, but simply on a more intensive use of familiar rhetorical techniques like metaphor, irony, and insinuation. Melzer explores the various motives that led thinkers in different times and places to engage in this strange practice, while also exploring the motives that lead more recent thinkers not only to dislike and avoid this practice but to deny its very existence. In the book’s final section, “A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading,” Melzer turns to how we might once again cultivate the long-forgotten art of reading esoteric works. The first comprehensive, book-length study of the history and theoretical basis of philosophical esotericism, Philosophy Between the Lines is “a treasure-house of insight and learning. It is that rare thing: an eye-opening book . . . By making the world before Enlightenment appear as strange as it truly was, [Melzer] makes our world stranger than we think it is” (George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University). “Brilliant, pellucid, and meticulously researched.” —City Journal
Author: Jonathan Swift
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781582791814
Category : Satire
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Author: Jonathan Swift
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Author: Janelle Pötzsch
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498521541
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Jonathan Swift and Philosophy is the first book to analyse and interpret Swift’s writing from a philosophical angle. By placing key texts of Swift in their philosophical and cultural contexts and providing background to their history of ideas, it demonstrates how well informed Swift’s criticism of the politics, philosophy, and science of his age actually was. Moreover, it also sets straight preconceptions about Swift as ignorant about the scientific developments of his time. The authors offer insights into, and interpretations of, Swift’s political philosophy, ethics, and his philosophy of science and demonstrate how versatile a writer and thinker Swift actually was. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, history of ideas, and 18th century literature and culture.
Author: Paul Krause
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725297396
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Tolle Lege, take up and read! These words from St. Augustine perfectly describe the human condition. Reading is the universal pilgrimage of the soul. In reading we journey to find ourselves and to save ourselves. The ultimate journey is reading the Great Books. In the Great Books we find the struggle of the human soul, its aspirations, desires, and failures. Through reading, we find faces and souls familiar to us even if they lived a thousand years ago. The unread life is not worth living, and in reading we may well discover what life is truly about and prepare ourselves for the pilgrimage of life.
Author: Warren Montag
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859840009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
No major figure of the English Augustan period has generated stronger and more contradictory views than Jonathan Swift. Scourge of the Whig ascendancy in his own day, vilified by the Victorians, celebrated by Yeats, he has in recent years become a significant bone of contention for prominent figures on the left like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. In this highly original and subtle new study, Warren Montag situates Swift in relation to the ideological and political currents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—in particular to what Montag perspicaciously identifies as the long crisis of the British state. Swift’s perspective, he argues, was determined less by his personality or psychology than by his position as an Anglican cleric. The church, an instrument of the Tudor and Stuart absolutist state, lapsed into institutional and ideological crisis after the Stuart’s fall. In Montag’s view, Swift’s writings were a defense of this increasingly indefensible institution. Swift employed satire because only in the negative representations of this literary form could the now effectively ‘unthinkable’ doctrines of the Church be made to appear. Opening with a historical survey of the crisis of English absolutism and the Anglican Church, Montag then gives a definitive account of the specific conflicts in philosophy against which Swift’s Anglican orthodoxy was aligned. Detailed examinations of Swift’s two prose masterpieces, A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, follow. Historically and philosophically informed, The Unthinkable Swift contributes not only to our understanding of a seminal figure in English literary history but also to the study of historical ideologies, in particular the once dominant religious tradition at the dawn of the first modern capitalist state.
Author: John Stubbs
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634159
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 840
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Book Description
A rich and riveting portrait of the man behind Gulliver’s Travels, by a “vivid, ardent, and engaging” (New York Times Book Review) author. One of Europe’s most important literary figures, Jonathan Swift was also an inspired humorist, a beloved companion, and a conscientious Anglican minister—as well as a hoaxer and a teller of tales. His anger against abuses of power would produce the most famous satires of the English language: Gulliver’s Travels as well as the Drapier Papers and the unparalleled Modest Proposal, in which he imagined the poor of Ireland farming their infants for the tables of wealthy colonists. John Stubbs’s biography captures the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakable attachment to an unmarried woman, his “Stella”; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all the answers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, in Jonathan Swift Stubbs has found the perfect subject for this masterfully told biography of a reluctant rebel—a voice of withering disenchantment unrivaled in English.
