The Romantic Conception of Life

Author: Robert J. Richards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226712184
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 609

Book Description
"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

The Mechanistic Conception of Life

Author: Jacques Loeb
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781015494527
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Meaning of Life in Romantic Poetry and Poetics

Author: Ross Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135910375
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
This volume brings together an impressive range of established and emerging scholars to investigate the meaning of ‘life’ in Romantic poetry and poetics. This investigation involves sustained attention to a set of challenging questions at the heart of British Romantic poetic practice and theory. Is poetry alive for the Romantic poets? If so, how? Does ‘life’ always mean ‘life’? In a range of essays from a variety of complementary perspectives, a number of major Romantic poets are examined in detail. The fate of Romantic conceptions of ‘life’ in later poetry also receives attention. Through, for examples, a revision of Blake’s relationship to so-called rationalism, a renewed examination of Wordsworth’s fascination with country graveyards, an exploration of Shelley’s concept of survival, and a discussion of the notions of ‘life’ in Byron, Kierkegaard, and Mozart, this volume opens up new and exciting terrain in Romantic poetry’s relation to literary theory, the history of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.

Flora Unveiled

Author: Lincoln Taiz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190490268
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
This book focuses on how the the scientific discovery of "plant sex" unfolded due to cultural biases, beliefs, and perceptions about plant reproduction. "Flora Unveiled" is a deep history of perceptions about plant gender and sexuality, from the Paleolithic to the nineteenth century. The evidence suggests that a plants-as-female gender bias both prevented the discovery of two sexes in plants until the late 17th century, and delayed its acceptance for another 150 years.

Clio the Romantic Muse

Author: Theodore Ziolkowski
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501711288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
"It is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era: philosophy, theology, law, natural science, medicine, and all other fields of intellectual endeavor.... Thoughtful students of the period well understand that 'Romanticism' is not merely a literary or aesthetic movement but, rather, a general climate of opinion."—from the IntroductionIn a book certain to be of interest to readers in many disciplines, the distinguished scholar Theodore Ziolkowski shows how a strong impulse toward historical concerns was formalized in the four German academic faculties: philosophy, theology, law, and medicine/biology. In Clio the Romantic Muse, he focuses on representative figures in whose early work the sense of history was first manifested: G. W. F. Hegel, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Through biographical treatments of these and other leading German scholars, Ziolkowski traces how the disciplines became historicized in the period 1790–1810. He goes on to suggest how powerfully the Romantic thinkers influenced their disciples in the twentieth century.

Hegel's Concept of Life

Author: Karen Ng
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190947632
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Karen Ng sheds new light on Hegel's famously impenetrable philosophy. She does so by offering a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism and by foregrounding Hegel's Science of Logic, revealing that Hegel's theory of reason revolves around the concept of organic life. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment on Hegel, Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which appealed to Hegel deeply. She charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant's third Critique, and argues that the most important innovation from that text is the claim that the purposiveness of nature opens up and enables the operation of the power of judgment. This innovation is essential for understanding Hegel's philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel, developing lines of thought from Fichte and Schelling, argues against Kant that internal purposiveness constitutes cognition's activity, shaping its essential relation to both self and world. From there, Ng defends a new and detailed interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, arguing that Hegel's Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel's version of a critique of judgment, in which life comes to be understood as opening up the possibility of intelligibility. She makes the case that Hegel's theory of judgment is modelled on reflective and teleological judgments, in which something's species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, one that is the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Through bold and ambitious new arguments, Ng demonstrates the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing ground-breaking ways of understanding Hegel's philosophical system.

Romanticism After Auschwitz

Author: Sara Emilie Guyer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804755245
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
Romanticism After Auschwitz reveals how one of the most insistently anti-romantic discourses, post-Holocaust testimony, remains romantic, and proceeds to show how this insight compels a thorough rethinking of romanticism.

Madness and the Romantic Poet

Author: James Whitehead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198733704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?

The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy

Author: Elizabeth Millán Brusslan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030535673
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 722

Book Description
This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the philosophical dimensions of German Romanticism, a movement that challenged traditional borders between philosophy, poetry, and science. With contributions from leading international scholars, the collection places the movement in its historical context by both exploring its links to German Idealism and by examining contemporary, related developments in aesthetics and scientific research. A substantial concluding section of the Handbook examines the enduring legacy of German romantic philosophy. Key Features: • Highlights the contributions of German romantic philosophy to literary criticism, irony, cinema, religion, and biology. • Emphasises the important role that women played in the movement’s formation. • Reveals the ways in which German romantic philosophy impacted developments in modernism, existentialism and critical theory in the twentieth century. • Interdisciplinary in approach with contributions from philosophers, Germanists, historians and literary scholars. Providing both broad perspectives and new insights, this Handbook is essential reading for scholars undertaking new research on German romantic philosophy as well as for advanced students requiring a thorough understanding of the subject.

Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: Keith Baker
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442630264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
For many years, scholars have been moving away from the idea of a singular, secular, rationalistic, and mechanistic “Enlightenment project.” Historian Peter Reill has been one of those at the forefront of this development, demonstrating the need for a broader and more varied understanding of eighteenth-century conceptions of nature. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century is a unique reappraisal of Enlightenment thought on nature, biology, and the organic world that responds to Reill’s work. The ten essays included in the collection analyse the place of historicism, vitalism, and esotericism in the eighteenth century – three strands of thought rarely connected, but all of which are central to Reill’s innovative work. Working across national and regional boundaries, they engage not only French and English but also Italian, Swiss, and German writers.