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Public opinion in Germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to the evil and dangerous consequences of a war, more particularly when the war in question has been a victorious one. Those writers, therefore, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion as final, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of the war, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear upon morality, culture, and art. Yet it must be confessed that a great victory is a great danger. Human nature bears a triumph less easily than a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler to gain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that it may not ultimately prove a serous rout.
David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (1835) brought about a new dawn in Biblical criticism by applying the 'myth theory' to the life of Jesus. Strauss treated the Gospel narrative like any other historical work, and denied all supernatural elements in the Gospels. Das Leben Jesu created an overnight sensation and Strauss became embroiled in fierce controversy. This earliest English version of 1846 was translated by the novelist George Eliot, and was her first published book.
In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that “seeing is believing” Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, David Levi Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smart phones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust. In the first ekphrasis title on photography, Strauss challenges the aura of believability and highlights the potential dangers around this status. He examines how images produced on cameras gradually gained an inordinate power to influence public opinion, prompt action, comfort and assuage, and direct or even create desire. How and why do we be...
Nietzsche harbored a fevered yearning to call false prophets to book and to reduce their fine axioms to absurdity. Accordingly, he planned a series of twenty-four pamphlets and decided to call them Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen [Untimely Meditations], which may be translated as "Inopportune Speculations," or more clearly, "Essays in Sham-Smashing." In looking about for a head to smash in essay number one, his eye, naturally enough, alighted upon that of David Strauss, the favorite philosopher and fashionable iconoclast of the day. Strauss had been a preacher but had renounced the cloth and set up shop as a critic of Christianity. He had labored with good intentions, no doubt, but the net result of all his smug agnosticism was that his disciples were as self-satisfied, bigoted and prejudiced in the garb of agnostics as they had been before as Christians. Nietzsche's clear eye saw this and in the first of his little pamphlets, "David Strauss, der Bekenner and der Schriftsteller" ("David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer"), he bore down upon Strauss' bourgeoise pseudo-skepticism most savagely."
David Friedrich Strauss is a central figure in 19th century philosophy. As the father of unbelief, he was a prominent critic of Christianity and persecuted for his views by religious and political authorities. This book studies his intellectual development and recounts his fate, which began in faith as a young man but finally ended in unbelief.
In an era of social confusion and visual pandemonium, David Levi Strauss tackles issues of photography and politics in a way that few critics today are courageous enough to attempt. The essays collected in Between the Eyesaddress topics ranging from propaganda and the imagery of dreams, to Sebastião Salgado’s epic social documents and the deeply personal photographic revelations of Francesca Woodman. Other issues broached here include the legitimacy of photographic imagery and the media frenzy surrounding the events of September 11, as well as essays on the work of Ania Bien, Miguel Rio Branco, Alfredo Jaar, Joel-Peter Witkin and others, plus an interview with painter Leon Golub (who worked from photographs). Reviewing the first edition of Between the Eyes, Publisher’s Weeklywrote: “‘Photography and Propaganda,’ a study of the work and deaths in ‘80s Central America of photojournalists Richard Cross and John Hoagland, should be required reading in the age of embeddedness, and ‘Photography and Belief’ is a terrific meditation on truth in the age of digital manipulation.”
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German philosopher and radical theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) distinguished himself as one of Europe's most controversial biblical critics and as an intellectual martyr for freethought.