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British and US scholars of German literature and culture assess the nature of public communications and the molding of public opinion in historical situations ranging from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. In particular they look at the representation of the public sphere in literary writing a half century after the German original of Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published. Their overall themes are publics before the public sphere, thinking about Enlightenment publics, and cultural politics and literary publics. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
This book examines Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism both historically and philosophically, establishing a link between his discussions of nature and normativity.
This book explores Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism in its historical context, showing that his position is best understood against the background of encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the nineteenth century. Analyzing most of Nietzsche's writings from the late 1860s onwards, Christian J. Emden reconstructs Nietzsche's naturalism and argues for a new understanding of his account of nature and normativity. Emden proposes historical reasons why Nietzsche came to adopt the position he did; his genealogy of values and his account of a will to power are as much influenced by Kantian thought as they are by nineteenth-century debates on teleology, biological functions, and theories of evolution. This rich and wide-ranging study will be of interest to scholars and students of Nietzsche, the history of modern philosophy, intellectual history, and history of science.
During the 1960s the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduced the notion of a "bourgeois public sphere" in order to describe the symbolic arena of political life and conversation that originated with the cultural institutions of the early eighteenth-century; since then the "public sphere" itself has become perhaps one of the most debated concepts at the very heart of modernity. For Habermas, the tension between the administrative power of the state, with its understanding of sovereignty, and the emerging institutions of the bourgeoisie--coffee houses, periodicals, encyclopedias, literary culture, etc.--was seen as being mediated by the public sphere, making it a symbolic site of public reasoning. This volume examines whether the "public sphere" remains a central explanatory model in the social sciences, political theory, and the humanities.
This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled.
Nietzsche and the philosopy of language have been a well trafficked crossroads for a generation, but almost always as a checkpoint for post-modernism and its critics. This work takes a historical approach to Nietzsche’s work on language, connecting it to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors. Though Nietzsche invited identification with Zarathustra, the solitary wanderer ahead of his time, for most of his career he directly engaged the intellectual currents and scientific debates of his time. Emden situates Nietzsche’s writings on language and rhetoric within their wider historical context. He demonstrates that Nietzsche is not as radical in his thinking as has been often supposed, and that a number of problems with Nietzsche disappear when Nietzsche’s works are compared to works on the same subjects by writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Further, the relevance of rhetoric and the history of rhetoric to philosophy and the history of philosophy is reasserted, in consonance with Nietzsche’s own statements and practices. Important in this regard are the role of fictions, descriptions, and metaphor.
This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is "new" about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective.
This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled.
Nietzsche’s thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in both the Anglo- American and the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind presents 16 essays from analytic and continental perspectives. Appealing to both international communities of scholars, the volume seeks to deepen the appreciation of Nietzsche’s contribution to our understanding of consciousness and the mind. Over the past decades, a variety of disciplines have engaged with Nietzsche’s thought, including anthropology, biology, history, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, to name just a few. His rich and perspicacious treatment of consciousness, mind, an...
The relationship between different media has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in contemporary cultural and literary studies. But how should we conceive of the relationship between texts and images today? Should we speak of collaboration, interaction or competition? What is the role of literary, historical and scientific texts in a culture dominated by the visual? What is the status of images as cultural artefacts? Are images forms of representation, do they simulate reality or do they intervene in the material world? And how do literature and cultural theory - themselves essentially textual discourses - react to the much-discussed visual turn within Western culture? Does the concept of 'intermediality' allow literary, historical and cultural scholars to envisage a more general theory of media? Addressing these questions from a programmatic point of view, the articles in this volume investigate the effects of different forms of representation in modern European and American literature, media and thought.