Mirages of the Selfe
Mirages of the Selfe

Author: Timothy J. Reiss

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 652

ISBN-13: 9780804745659

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Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person—to experience who-ness—in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.

Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

Author: Stephanie Shirilan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1317062264

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Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a cento - an ancient form of satire that quotes and misquotes authoritative texts in often subversive ways - and that his express intent in so doing is to offer his readers literary therapy for melancholy. This book explores the ways in which the Anatomy dispenses both direct physic and more systemic medicine by encouraging readers to think of melancholy as a privileged mental and spiritual acuity that requires cultivation and management rather than cure. Refuting the prevailing historiography of anxious early modern embodiment that cites Burton as a key witness, Shirilan submits that the Anatomy rejects contemporary Neostoic and Puritan approaches to melancholy. She reads Burton’s erraticism, opacity, and theatricality as modes of resistance against demands for constancy, transparency, and plainness in the popular literature of spiritual and moral hygiene of his day. She shows how Burton draws on rhetorical, theological, and philosophical traditions that privilege the transformative powers of the imagination in order to celebrate melancholic impressionability for its capacity to inspire and engender empathy, charity, and faith.

The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne
The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne

Author: Philippe Desan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-10-14

Total Pages: 841

ISBN-13: 0190679239

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In 1580, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) published a book unique by its title and its content: Essays"R. A literary genre was born. At first sight, the Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections, but they engage with questions that animate the human mind, and tend toward a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death. For this reason, Montaigne's thought and writings have been a subject of enduring interest across disciplines. This Handbook brings together essays by prominent scholars that examine Montaigne's literary, philosophical, and political contributions, and assess his legacy and relevance today in a global perspective. The chapters of this Handbook offer a sweeping study of Montaigne across different disciplines and in a global perspective. One section covers the historical Montaigne, situating his thought in his own time and space, notably the Wars of Religion in France. The political, historical and religious context of Montaigne's Essays requires a rigorous presentation to inform the modern reader of the issues and problems that confronted Montaigne and his contemporaries in his own time. In addition to this contextual approach to Montaigne, the Handbook also establishes a connection between Montaigne's writings and issues and problems directly relevant to our modern times, that is to say, our age of global ideology. Montaigne's considerations, or essays, offer a point of departure for the modern reader's own assessments. The Essays analyze what can be broadly defined as human nature, the endless process by which the individual tries to impose opinions upon others through the production of laws, policies or philosophies. Montaigne's motto -- "What do I know?" -- is a simple question yet one of perennial significance. One could argue that reading Montaigne today teaches us that the angle defines the world we see, or, as Montaigne wrote: "What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it."

Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic
Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic

Author: Patrick Gray

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1474427472

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Explores Shakespeare's representation of the failure of democracy in ancient Rome This book introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel and Nietzsche. It considers Shakespeare's place in the history of concepts of selfhood and reflects on his sympathy for Christianity, in light of his reception of medieval Biblical drama, as well as his allusions to the New Testament. Shakespeare's critique of Romanitas anticipates concerns about secularisation, individualism and liberalism shared by philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Patrick Deneen.

The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self
The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self

Author: Raymond Martin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0231137443

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Raymond Martin and John Barresi trace the development of Western ideas about personal identity and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. They begin with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain the theoretical relevance of both feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists.

Open Subjects
Open Subjects

Author: James Kuzner

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2011-06-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0748647104

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Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.

Petrarch's Humanism and the Care of the Self
Petrarch's Humanism and the Care of the Self

Author: Gur Zak

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-05-17

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0521114675

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In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in Petrarch's works - his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self.

Early Modern Asceticism
Early Modern Asceticism

Author: Patrick J. McGrath

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1487505329

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Challenging contemporary perceptions of the ascetic in the early modern period, this book explores asceticism as a vital site of religious conflict and literary creativity, rather than merely a vestige of a medieval past.

Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727
Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727

Author: K. Gevirtz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1137386762

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This book shows how early women novelists from Aphra Behn to Mary Davys drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre. Fascinated by the problematic idea of a unified self underpinning modes of thinking, female novelists innovated narrative structures to interrogate this idea.

The Shadow of Dante in French Renaissance Lyric
The Shadow of Dante in French Renaissance Lyric

Author: Alison Baird Lovell

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-11-09

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 150151346X

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This book presents an interpretation of Maurice Scève’s lyric sequence Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (Lyon, 1544) in literary relation to the Vita nuova, Commedia, and other works of Dante Alighieri. Dante’s subtle influence on Scève is elucidated in depth for the first time, augmenting the allusions in Délie to the Canzoniere of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca). Scève’s sequence of dense, epigrammatic dizains is considered to be an early example, prior to the Pléiade poets, of French Renaissance imitation of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry, in a time when imitatio was an established literary practice, signifying the poet’s participation in a tradition. While the Canzoniere is an important source for Scève’s Délie, both works are part of a poetic lineage that includes Occitan troubadours, Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante. The book situates Dante as a relevant predecessor and source for Scève, and examines anew the Petrarchan label for Délie. Compelling poetic affinities emerge between Dante and Scève that do not correlate with Petrarch.