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Johann Gottfried Herder initiated the modern disciplines of philosophical anthropology and cultural history, including the study of popular culture. He is also remembered as a sharp critic of colonialism and imperialism. But what types of social, economic and political arrangements did Herder envision for modern European societies? Herder and Enlightenment Politics provides a radically new interpretation of Herder's political thought, situating his ideas in Enlightenment debates on modern patriotism, commerce and peace. By reconstructing Herder's engagement with Rousseau, Montesquieu, Abbt, Ferguson, Möser, Kant and many other contemporary authors, Eva Piirimäe shows that Herder was deeply interested in the potential for cultural, moral and political reform in Russia, Germany and Europe. Herder probed the foundations of modern liberty, community and peace, developing a distinctive understanding of human self-determination, natural sociability and modern patriotism as well as advocating a vision of Europe as a commercially and culturally interconnected community of peoples.
The English-German collection Herder on Empathy and Sympathy: Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders considers the meaning and role of the concepts of empathy and sympathy in Herder’s thought. Herder invokes sympathy in a number of disciplinary domains ranging from metaphysics, biology, anthropology, epistemology, psychology, morality, politics, history, aesthetics to homiletics. While Herder is shown as belonging to a long line of thinkers who view sympathy as a metaphysical principle contributing to the interconnectedness of all parts of nature, he also offers new insights about intra-/inter-species sympathetic communication and distinctively human varieties of sympathy for which he reserves the term “sich einfühlen”. Acknowledging the limits of the natural capacity for “sich einfühlen”, Herder nonetheless calls for its reflective cultivation in various domains.
A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science The 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains. Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural...
Presents the first English translation of Herder's foundational essay along with critical responses to it by today's leading Herder scholars.
The volume features the work of leading scholars from the US, UK, Germany, China, Spain, and Russia and presents an important contribution to current debates on world literature. The contributions discuss various facets of the historically changing role and status of language in the construction of notions of universality and locality, of difference, foreignness, and openness; they explore the relationship between world literature and bilingualism, supranational languages, dialects, and linguistic inbetweenness. They also examine the larger social and political stakes behind both foundational and more recent attempts to articulate ideas of world literature. Mapping the space between philology, anthropology, and ecohumanities, the essays in this volume approach world literature with sophisticated methodological toolkits and open up new opportunities for engaging with this important discursive framework.
The Idea of Semitic Monotheism examines some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion in the long nineteenth century--from the Enlightenment to the First World War. It aims to understand the new status of Judaism and Islam in the formative period of the new discipline. Guy G. Stroumsa focuses on the concept of Semitic monotheism, a concept developed by Ernest Renan around the mid-nineteenth century on the basis of the postulated and highly problematic contradistinction between Aryan and Semitic families of peoples, cultures, and religions. This contradistinction grew from the Western discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship with European languages, at the time of the Enlightenment ...
This volume gathers a collection of fourteen original articles discussing the concept of drive in classical German philosophy. Its aim is to offer a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of drive at the turn of the 19th century and to discuss it both historically and systematically. From the 18th century onward, the concept of drive started to play an important role in emerging disciplines such as biology, anthropology, and psychology. In these fields, the concept of drive was used to describe the inner forces of organic nature, or, more particularly, human urges and desires. But it was in the period of classical German philosophy that this concept developed into an important phil...
Explores imagination and human rationality in a crucial period of philosophy, from hermeneutics and transcendental logic to ethics and aesthetics.
Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism’s degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism’s plundering of natu...
By investigating conceptions of experience from Descartes to Kant, this book shows that one of the central questions of the early-modern period was how humans can instantiate in their actions the principles of rational moral agency, while at the same time responding with their bodies to the causal play of nature. Through the analysis of this question, the book draws attention to the bodily underpinnings of the ability to experience thoughts and feelings. It thus challenges overly subjectivist interpretations that concentrate on the inner realm of the experiencing mind and because of this fail to account for the worldly dimension of being experientially responsive to the affections of the body.