Human Ideas Research Articles

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric and Law by Lyndan Warner

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric and Law by Lyndan Warner

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric and Law

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric and Law

„Ich habe […] keine Sonate schreiben wollen, sondern einen Roman“ – zu autoreferenziellen Aspekten von Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus

In the centre of the analysis stands the autoreferential dimension of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and its relation to the novel’s socio-philosophical message, which, although not free from ironical overtones, tends to be a didactic plea for humanism. However, the main emphasis of the investigation is not the humanist idea itself but, above all, the narrative methods used to infuse this idea with new means of expression. Therefore, the music-motif in the novel is interpreted as a metaphor of an intertextual literary motif. From a metaliterary perspective, the main question in Mann’s partly consistent, yet partly paradoxical art- and soul-study is the following: how can (and should) the Faust-legend be reshaped and interpreted to match the demands of the modern age? The attempt to discuss the ‚national myth‘ in such a new way is made by three authorities: two fictional and one real. The protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, the first-person narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, and, finally, the author himself, Thomas Mann, each in turn, whether wilfully or unconsciously, offers their own art-concept. To a great extent, the general semantic picture of the story told in Faustus is determined by various distinctions between the intratextual ideological confrontation ‚Leverkühn vs. Zeitblom‘ and the extratextual outside-perspective of the author, who stays paramount to the novel-figures. My article attends to the narratological as well as the philosophical decoding of this overall-picture.

Humanism and Holiness: Leon Battista Alberti between Florence and Rome

This article investigates Alberti’s relation to Italian humanist ideas around 1450, as they pertain to the dialogue between classical erudition and religious insight. The key source in this investigation is Alberti’s Latin novel Momus . While scholars have often interpreted this work as a commentary on the papal court of Nicholas V, to which Alberti belonged, the essay argues that it shows Alberti’s critique of humanist thinking on holiness. This critique emerges through the work’s variant of the Prometheus myth. Comparing the rendering of this myth in the Momus with allegorical readings of the Prometheus story by Giovanni Boccaccio and Marsilio Ficino, we may observe how Alberti took issue with other humanists’ assertion of enlightened reason, symbolized by Promethean fire. Alberti looked skeptically at the epistemological and ontological claims that supported Renaissance humanist allegorism, seeing in these imaginings more the absence or withdrawal of the divine rather than its manifestation.

From melancholia to Prozac: a history of depression

Depression is an experience known to millions. But arguments rage on aspects of its definition and its impact on societies present and past: do drugs work, or are they merely placebos? Is the depression we have today merely a construct of the pharmaceutical industry? Is depression under- or over-diagnosed? Should we be paying for expensive 'talking cure' treatments like psychoanalysis or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? Here, Clark Lawlor argues that understanding the history of depression is important to understanding its present conflicted status and definition. While it is true that our modern understanding of the word 'depression' was formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the condition was originally known as melancholia, and characterised by core symptoms of chronic causeless sadness and fear. Beginning in the Classical period, and moving on to the present, Lawlor shows both continuities and discontinuities in the understanding of what we now call depression, and in the way it has been represented in literature and art. Different cultures defined and constructed melancholy and depression in ways sometimes so different as to be almost unrecognisable. Even the present is still a dynamic history, in the sense that the 'new' form of depression, defined in the 1980s and treated by drugs like Prozac, is under attack by many theories that reject the biomedical model and demand a more humanistic idea of depression - one that perhaps returns us to a form of melancholy.

Francisco de Enzinas, a Reformationminded humanist with a vernacular dream

In sixteenth-century Western Europe there was widespread debate as to whether it was permissible, or even desirable, that the laity read the Bible in the vernacular and whether the Bible might be translated into various national languages. Under the influence of the humanistic ideas of Desiderius Erasmus, several young Spaniards came to Leuven to complete their studies, one of whom was the Spanish humanist, Francisco de Enzinas, whose chief objective was to provide a Spanish translation of Scripture. This article will show that in an eventful life, but cut short, and during which he eventually did admit allegiance to the Reformation, Enzinas was only able to partially achieve this goal. In 1543 he published a Spanish translation of the New Testament and some books of the Old Testament.

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France. Print, Rhetoric, and Law (review)

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France. Print, Rhetoric, and Law (review)

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The making of the new negro: black authorship, masculinity, and sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

Review of Anna Pochmara's The Making of the Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011)The history of African American culture-much like the history of almost any culture developed in, or under the influence of, the West-is dominated by the figures of dead men, who loom over all historical studies with a matter-of-factness that has long remained disconcertingly appropriate. Two strategies are typically employed to interrogate this masculine bias. One consists in the exploration of the under-recorded and often unwritten history of the role women played in the formation of a given culture or movement. Such archaeological works often deliberately set out to tackle the bias by highlighting the ways in which history forgot about the women- as was the case with Rosa Parks, for years remembered almost exclusively as the lady who refused to give up her seat. The other strategy turns the spotlight on the masculine heroes themselves, questioning the rules of the game instead of trying to play it.This is the course Anna Pochmara follows in her study of the origins and development of the idea of the New Negro. Her analysis focuses on how several illustrious Black men of letters involved in the Harlem Renaissance-Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright-dealt with the question of Black manhood in the racist America of the early twentieth century. With this purpose in mind, Pochmara invokes two well-established theoretical paradigms: Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's anxiety of authorship. In the context of a struggle for supremacy in Black American culture,[t]he black male writer is caught in a double bind between the need to engage in heroic warfare with his strong predecessors and the need to establish a legitimate patrilineal lineage, which will both validate black male authorship and set off the specters of social illegitimacy resulting from white men's symbolic and biological fathering of black children. (9-10)In other words, for an early-twentieth-century Black writer to achieve artistic recognition (i.e. find favour with white readers), he was obliged to produce an art that broke with established conventions while paying heed to a certain tradition of Black art.The study opens with an analysis of the relations between Booker T. Washington and W E. B. Du Bois in the context of turn-of-the-century ideas about manliness and masculinity-the transition from the idea of man as the agent of civilization to one of man as the embodiment of virility. According to Pochmara, though Washington pays heed to Victorian values throughout his output, he manages to assert his own masculine privilege in less overt ways, for instance, by citing his popularity as a public speaker among White female audiences. Du Bois, on the other hand, addresses the tension between the two concepts of masculinity more openly. He claims that the racial oppression of Blacks feminizes Black men, enfeebling the Black community. In spite of his firm opposition to Washington's ethics of accommodation, he effectively upholds them by advocating the respectable care of Black men over Black women, claiming manliness while eschewing masculinity.During the interwar years, with Victorian ideas out of favour, respectability lost some of its lustre, while Black male privilege retained virtually all of its allure. Building on the concept of respectable Black masculinity responsible for the uplift of the race, Alain Locke put forward the idea of a New Negro that celebrated the manly vigour of the urban Black. In this context, Pochmara highlights the way in which Locke is positioned not as a father of the New Negro movement-the Harlem Renaissance-but rather as a midwife: a gesture that neatly circumscribes Black womanhood. Her analysis goes even further by identifying the European roots of the movement, traced to both ancient Greece and the more modern Jugendkultur offin-de-siecle Germany. …

Sociology as the Philosophy of the Future

In the beginning of sociology it was a philosophy for promoting the Good society. Sociology was what we in Feuerbach’s terms may call a “philosophy of the future”. The German enlightenment is crucial if one wants to go beyond: create an alternative to today’s sociology. Kant’s notion of experience bridges the abyss created by the empiricists and rationalists by placing knowledge in man. Sociology is very much a heritage of the French Enlightenment, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and Emile Durkhein (1858-1917). They thought of themselves as positivists, i.e., as doing something “objective”. At the same time as heirs of the ideas of Enlightenment they wanted sociology to be used in order to improve society, to create a Good society. Comte had a view of this whole – society - in terms of Man. Lost in Durkheim is this idea of man developing in and through society, reflecting a change in the social context, in the development of the capitalist society. After the death of Durkheim in 1917 sociology holds a marginal position in the French society but then in the late 1940’s it rises again and in this new sociology American sociology was dominating, becoming an applied science. Today sociology continues this empiricist tradition. It is claimed that society has become something out-of-control. Instead we should follow its French and German roots. Understanding society as a reflection of ourselves, of man is what we need in order to create a Good society for everyone, this also should be the first principle of sociology as the philosophy of the future.

Review: Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston by Michael Rawson

Michael Rawson. Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, xii + 367 pp., 29 b/w illus. and 3 tables. $29.95, ISBN 9780674048416 The removal of cows from Boston Common was a burning political issue of 1830. The anti-cow faction saw the 631-acre pasture on the western edge of the Shawmut peninsula as a potential site of leisure, recreation, and refinement. These petitioners often resided in the wealthier adjacent areas of the city. A counter petition emerged from pro-cow advocates who more likely earned their living, in part, from the keeping of animals. Boston’s town council decided in favor of the petition to ban cows; the common people appealed that decision the following year and lost again. This seemingly benign change in agricultural and social practice is presented as a turning point in the attitude of Bostonians to nature in the most important book published in recent years on the city’s nineteenth-century environmental history. Michael Rawson’s Eden on the Charles succinctly summarizes the relevant literature, opens new research territory, and provides a larger context for understanding the human relationship to nature in American cities. The book features five fascinating and interlocking chapters: “Enclosing the Common,” “Constructing Water,” “Inventing the Suburb,” Making the Harbor,” and “Recreating the Wilderness.” An admirer of Raymond Williams’s writings on the social construction of nature, Rawson examines the ways that Bostonians redefined their …

Reflections on the Construction of Affordable Housing Communities

From foreign experience and lessons, the urban living space differentiation has brought about serious social problems. At present, during the large-scale urban residential development and construction process in China, there is a trend of differentiation, but it is not yet fully formed. In this regard, the author is trying to find out the ways to build affordable housing communities through such measures as the government policy guidance, the building of a harmonious community, the employment of mixed living pattern, and the heritage of humanistic ideas.

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law

Prostitutes and criminals: beginnings of eugenics in Croatia in the works of Fran Gundrum from Oriovac (1856-1919)

Fran Gundrum (1856-1919) was a Croatian physician, encyclopedist, and an advocate of medical enlightenment and healthy lifestyle. In order to identify and analyze Gundrum’s ideas about the problems of prostitution and criminality, we studied all of his books, booklets, and articles published between 1905 and 1914. We showed that Gundrum’s theories of heredity, morality, and sexual hygiene incorporated many of the important discussions of his time, especially those related to the Darwinian paradigm. Gundrum’s project of collecting statistics on prostitutes was the first such study published on the territory of today's Croatia. Although he rejected the notions of born prostitutes and born criminals, defended by Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, he still regarded eugenics as a convenient method of dealing with the ills of society. He believed that criminals were degenerate individuals representing a violent threat to the society and that it was legitimate to use radical means, such as sterilization and deportation, to deal with this problem. Organicistic view of the society prevented him from seeing the individual rights as important as that of the society to protect itself. Nevertheless, this view led to many humanistic ideas, such as the binomial illness/poverty in case of prostitution, which influenced many prominent works of social medicine movement.

Thomas Carlyle’s “Real-phantasmagory”: The Historical Sublime and Humanist Politics in Past and Present

... dead continue live on, survive beyond life, in afterlife we call reading. --Julian Wolfreys (185) In a 1964 article appearing in PMLA, David DeLaura mapped out intricate influence Thomas Carlyle had over Matthew Arnold, demonstrating Arnold's tenacious and ambivalent attitude towards Sage of Chelsea. The ambivalence Arnold harbored towards Carlyle, according DeLaura, led Arnold misrepresen[t] larger shape and effect of Carlyle's writings (129). In 1971, D. R. M. Wilkinson responds what he understands as DeLaura's and overall academic community's propensity just past, or in other words, being just Carlyle (225). For Wilkinson, scholars have been too forgiving of Carlyle's all-but-unforgivable style and rhetoric, mention questionable ideologies. The main problem with Carlyle, Wilkinson claims, is a certain naivete as he invites a True/False attitude in readers is difficult sustain for a lifetime (226). Wilkinson posits Carlyle's weakness is not simply divinity is vague and sometimes merely a rhetorical phantasm, but in blending unblendable--Jehovah, Odin, Destiny, and even 'Nature'--he was unwittingly damaging cause of morality and faith by blurring (227-28). Carlyle is only deluding readers with a phantasmal rhetoric bordering on irreligious and of questionable morality, but also, Wilkinson suggests, with his technique designed to win assent less by argument than by an attack on heart, adding that in most cases effect is enhanced in direct proportion solemn naivete of heart in question (226). The Sage has been handled roughly by many a literary critic, but Wilkinson's evaluation of Carlyle underscores critical atmosphere surrounds Carlyle well into twenty-first century. Perhaps my heart exhibits a solemn naivete, but like phantasms haunt pages of works, Thomas Carlyle haunts me. The Carlyle who haunts me is Carlyle who looked humankind in face in Past and Present, pleading: Human faces should grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! (153). As one of work's first reviewers, Friedrich Engels noted a strikingly chord. Staging Carlyle as a reluctant socialist, Engels nevertheless sympatheticaIly judged book as only one worth reading in English language and one strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view. Later critics have been less enthusiastic about work. Raymond Williams, for example, argued Past and Present demonstrates Carlyle's steady withdrawal from genuinely social thinking into preoccupations with personal power (83). Tom Toremans has aptly pointed out throughout body of Carlyle criticism, Past and Present and its year of publication--1843--have been persistently identified as the decisive locus of transition from promise decline (204). Past and Present, then, figures a Carlyle representing at once fading of humanist ideas and emergence of ultraconservative or allegedly proto-fascist ideology. (1) But primordially ideological criticism of Past and Present tended iron out complex wrinkles in formal and rhetorical structures of work. Ralph Waldo Emerson's review of Past and Present should invite us read Carlyle more closely: whatever thought or motto has once appeared him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen him henceforward, and is sure return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as promise, now as threat, now as confirmation (224-25). Past and Present is a promise and a threat. Carlyle perhaps best summed up estimation of work in a letter Emerson: it is a somewhat fiery and questionable 'Tract of Times' (CLO 16: 76-77). Formally, text is divided into four sections, which subtly threaten binary structure promised in title. …

The city of sarcasm and woe: Swift’s “A description of a city shower” and “A description of the morning”

In his poetry, Jonathan Swift (1667 to 1745) has shown a deep concern in understanding human nature and explaining human behavior. This paper aims at studying the technical devices Swift uses to introduce a satirical image of the city in an attempt to clarify his moral outlook. With special emphasis on Swift's two poems A Description of a City Shower and A Description of the Morning, this study emphasizes Swift's use of sustained irony, satire, dramatization of vice and realistic portrayal of human nature to clarify physical and spiritual degradation which has become a characteristic of the society in the eighteenth-century. Swift's description of man's nature and the exposure of the fallaciousness of man's illusory ideas reflect his repudiation of man's false and immoral conduct. He meant his poetry to be a genuine reforming force; to be evaluated by its real influence on moral sensibility. Key words: Moral outlook, satire, irony, gradualism, realistic depiction, mock-heroic style, moral indignation, social reformation.

Homo oeconomicus oder Homo culturalis? – Aktuelle Herausforderungen für das ordoliberale Menschenbild / Homo oeconomicus vs. Homo culturalis: Current challenges to the ordoliberal idea of man

Zusammenfassung Wie lässt sich das anthropologische Fundament des Ordoliberalismus und der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft beschreiben? Welche Prämissen liegen ihm zugrunde? Ist ein derartiges Menschenbild überhaupt noch zeitgemäß? Welchen Gefahren ist es ausgesetzt und welche institutionellen Vorkehrungen lassen sich treffen? Diese und andere Fragen stehen im Mittelpunkt des nachfolgenden Essays. Dieser ist dabei wie folgt gegliedert: Das zweite Kapitel analysiert die anthropologischen Grundlagen des Ordoliberalismus. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf dem kantischen ‘Programm der Freiheit als Autonomie’. Das darauf folgende dritte Kapitel thematisiert mögliche Gefahrenpotenziale für eben jenes ordoliberale Menschenbild. Hierbei werden insbesondere die Vermachtung der Wirtschaft und die Instrumentalisierung und Funktionalisierung der Wissenschaft eingehender untersucht. Im vorletzten Kapitel schließlich werden die häufig vorgeschlagenen institutionellen Vorkehrungen kritisch evaluiert. Wichtige Beiträge hierzu stammen aus der Feder von Röpke (Clercs und Nobilitas naturalis) und Hayek (Zwei-Kammern-Verfassungsmodell).

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law by Lyndan Warner (review)

Review(s) of: The ideas of man and woman in renaissance France: Print, rhetoric, and law, by Warner, Lyndan, (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, hardback, pp. 278, 6 b/w illustrations, R.R.P. 65.00 pounds, ISBN 9781409412465.

AN EVALUATION OF PRIMARY SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS AND TEACHERS’ OPINIONS ABOUT IN EDUCATIONAL UNIONS TO ACCORDING VARIOUS VARIABLES: CASE OF MALATYA CITY

AN EVALUATION OF PRIMARY SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS AND TEACHERS’ OPINIONS ABOUT IN EDUCATIONAL UNIONS TO ACCORDING VARIOUS VARIABLES: CASE OF MALATYA CITY

O progresso do homem brasileiro pelo mecanismo de seleção natural em Miranda Azevedo

O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar como a palestra de Miranda Azevedo, "Darwinismo: seu passado, seu presente, seu futuro", proferida nas Conferências Populares da Freguesia da Glória, em 1875, articula os conceitos de evolução, evolução humana, progresso e a ideia do homem como ápice da evolução e controlador das leis seletivas que regulam a natureza. Para tanto apresentaremos e analisaremos o texto publicado em 1876 que contém na íntegra o discurso de Azevedo. De particular importância é a filiação de Azevedo a Haeckel, já anteriormente indicada pela historiografia brasileira. Ao contrário dos estudos dedicados ao tema, pretendemos mergulhar mais detidamente no texto de Azevedo com o objetivo de mostrar como ele relaciona a hereditariedade e os processos pretensamente seletivos para a partir daí pensar em como fazer as novas gerações brasileiras progredirem.