Download Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, by Helen Deutsch, Mary Terrall PDF
By Helen Deutsch, Mary Terrall
Eighteenth-century questions on the houses necessary to existence frequently explored the boundary among the actual international of the physique and the immaterial global of the brain and soul. finding materialism in the greater historical past of principles, Vital Matters examines how and why eighteenth-century scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists wondered nature and its animating principles.
In this quantity, interdisciplinary essays via most excellent students in literary reports, paintings historical past, and the heritage of technological know-how and drugs examine a large diversity of topics, together with ghosts and funerary practices, dissection and digestion, automata, and significant births. that includes new methods to literary texts corresponding to Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and work reminiscent of Girodet's Eternal Sleep, in addition to new study on instances from the historical past of drugs and the heritage of technology, Vital Matters reconsiders Enlightenment oppositions among physique and brain, mind and soul, lifestyles and demise, and the actual and the abstract.
Read or Download Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death PDF
Best history & surveys books
Reid on Ethics (Philosophers in Depth)
This can be the first edited assortment to compile vintage items and new paintings by way of top students of Thomas Reid. The individuals discover key parts of Reid's ethical concept in an organised and thematic manner, delivering a balanced and huge ranging quantity.
This is often the 1st e-book in English at the early works of the German thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). It examines the transcendental thought of self and global from the writings of Fichte's such a lot influential interval (1794-1800), and considers intimately lately came across lectures at the Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy.
The pursuit of laziness : an idle interpretation of the enlightenment
We predict of the Enlightenment as an period ruled by means of principles of growth, creation, and industry--not an period that preferred the lax and indolent person. yet was once the Enlightenment simply concerning the unceasing development of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines ethical, political, and monetary treatises of the interval, and divulges that the most important eighteenth-century texts did locate price in idleness and nonproductivity.
- Heidegger's children : Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse
- Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought
- Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History
- Wittgenstein and the Practice of Philosophy
- The crisis in continental philosophy : history, truth and the Hegelian legacy
Additional resources for Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death
Example text
The pattern of action Rochester tends to adopt is notably different, preferring instead a certain binding of the will within an overall sense of determinacy and fate. These commitments may be clarified some by turning to another of his translations from classical materialism. This is not from Lucretius but from the chorus of Seneca’s tragedy The Troades, that is, from the rival system of thought found in the Stoics. After Death nothing is, and nothing Death, The utmost limit of a Gasp of Breath.
The image with which we are left is of the failure of actions to provoke or to please an audience, the only predicate that belongs to mortals in the six lines – ‘we cannot add’ – suggesting a certain futility to action when it is an agent’s proprietary domain. Rochester’s translation limns a broken arc. Actions become fruitless when they are traced back to human agents and not the parts out of which such agents are composed. This perspective is in keeping with what we might describe as Rochester’s larger project.
Locke’s letter, concerning some passages relating to his Essay of humane understanding . . (London, 1697) and The Bishop of Worcester’s answer to Mr. Locke’s second letter . . (London, 1698). 28 Locke, Essay, 274. This comes near the end of the long account of agency given in book 2, chapter 21, a chapter that Locke spent the better part of his career revising. For more on this argument, see my ‘Locke’s Desire,’ Yale Journal of Criticism 12, 2 (1999) and chapter 4 of my Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).