Abstract

The essays in this volume have been previously published separately, but are brought together in this collection to present Nisbet’s widely-acclaimed perspectives on this fascinating period of German thought.

Highlights

  • From the scientific revolution of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, the main opposition to science came from religion

  • In more recent decades, relativistic models in the history of science have encouraged more interpreters to see in Goethe’s scientific writings an idiosyncratic but defensible view of nature, even if his individual theories have long been superseded; and at the same time, studies of perception have increasingly recognised the physiological section of his Colour Theory as a pioneering achievement

  • It has been shown that Goethe’s views are by no means typical of his times. His scientific beliefs are idiosyncratic and opposed to that Newtonian tradition which underpinned Kant’s theory and practice of science; and his view of nature is based on the same Neo-Platonic premises as that of Herder, Herder’s own views on science are fundamentally different from those of Goethe, both in respect of his readiness to speculate beyond the limits of experience and in his essential agreement with the aims of Newtonian science

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Summary

Lucretius in EighteenthCentury Germany

John Ruskin, who had read Lucretius’s De rerum natura in his student days as a set book at Oxford, commented in later years: ‘I have ever since held it the most hopeless sign of a man’s mind being made of flintshingle if he liked Lucretius’.2 Such antipathy to the Roman poet was nothing new, towards his philosophy. John Ruskin, who had read Lucretius’s De rerum natura in his student days as a set book at Oxford, commented in later years: ‘I have ever since held it the most hopeless sign of a man’s mind being made of flintshingle if he liked Lucretius’.2 Such antipathy to the Roman poet was nothing new, towards his philosophy. A powerful statement on religion, culminating in a denial of human immortality and, to all intents and purposes, of the gods As poetry, it is almost as varied: it contains superb lyrical passages in a descriptive, idyllic, or hymnic vein, along with tracts of abstract—and at times arid—philosophical verse, and there are fiercely satirical and polemical passages as well. This no doubt explains why the first complete translation of De rerum natura to appear in German was not published until 1784,4 over a century after that of Thomas Creech had appeared in England and that of Michel de Marolles in France. interest in the poem in Germany did not reach its height until the last two decades of the century, when the heyday of didactic poetry was already over

Lucretius in Eighteenth-Century Germany
On the Rise of Toleration in Europe
The Rationalisation of the Holy Trinity from Lessing to Hegel1
Lessing and Misogyny
The German Reception of an Irish Eccentric
The Ethical Foundation of Goethe’s Scientific Thought1
Conclusion
A Reappraisal1
11. Laocoon in Germany
Chapter 1
Faust 115, 122
Full Text
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