Philosophical Writings Research Articles

Books confiscated by Inquisition in Europe(385-1834 AD) : A bibliometric historical study

A study aimed at dealing with books confiscated by the Inquisition inEurope, This is by drawing on the historical method, to determine the impact ofthe intellectual renaissance on the Church in Europe, In addition, the Inquisitionwas dealt with in terms of its concept, origin, composition, and Places of itsspread, As well as using the method of bibliographic research to determine thegeneral features of books confiscated by the Inquisition in Europe, In addition todefining the role of the Inquisition in controlling intellectual production, As well aslearn about lists of prohibited books, The fate of the Inquisition, The resultsindicated that the Inquisition paralyzed the scientific movement of the entirenation, Also, the books confiscated by the Inquisition amounted to 209 books for(137) authors during the period from the twelfth century until the twentieth centuryA.D. in various subjects, including: Religious writings and books that offend publicmodesty, and political writings focused on freedoms, Philosophical writings,literary and artistic writings in poetry, music, novels and plays, In addition to theproliferation of the Inquisition in various places in Europe, such as: Spain 1478,France 1329, Portugal 1547, and in Italy in the late sixteenth century CE inAquileia, Naples and Venice, Also in Andalusia, beginning in 1501 CE, when thedecree issued to burn all Islamic books was issued.

The correlation between politics and law: socio-philosophical analysis

This article carries out a socio-philosophical analysis of interaction between the phenomena of politics and law. The goal of this work consist in the review of the existing correlations between politics and law. The subject of research is the correlations between politics and law. For achieving the set goal, the history of the question is considered. The author presents integral and differential characteristics of the two indicated categories. The definition to the concept of “political-legal institution” is provided alongside the modern classification by various grounds. The novelty is substantiated by the fact that there are virtually no philosophical writings on the analysis of correlations between politics and law. The formulated conclusions have theoretical and practical importance: reflect the characteristics of politics and law; confirm the justification of their institutional realization; underline the duality of nature of the political-legal institutions; propose classification of political-legal institutions for clearer understanding of the vectors of institutional transformations and emergence of neoforms in the context of current global development.

The creative power of affective discourse. Recapitulating deleuze

In the following article an attempt is made to draw the reader’s attention to the problem of affective and emotional poverty which has resulted from the systematic degradation of everyday experience in contemporary times. The analysis of this problem is based on the writings of different continental philosophers, especially Gilles Deleuze, but also others, like Michel Foucault or Maurice Blanchot. It is suggested that the solution to this problem may lie in the power of creation, and I have tried to offer the reader some techniques or methods which, if undertaken, may develop creativity and release its power. However, the best repertoire of such techniques is to be found in the writings of the above mentioned researchers, so the reader is directed to the original sources.

A Forgotten Philosopher Juozapas Čepėnas: Ethic Insights

The article deals with ethic insights of the priest Juozapas Čepėnas (1880–1976), who published a study cycle on Nietzsche. This cycle is significant in the context of an early reception of Nietzsche’s ideas in Lithuania; however, the author himself appears to remain an undeservedly forgotten thinker of the national school of thought. The article attempts to bring back Čepėnas’ philosophical outlooks and analyse the factors that shaped his philosophical position such as his academic upbringing in German classical universities and Čepėnas’ subsequent activities overstepping the boundaries of a clerical work. The article offers a new interdisciplinary approach in reviewing Čepėnas’ dissertation thesis that earned him a Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Freiburg University. The thesis is analysed in comparison to other Čepėnas’ philosophical writings on Dostoevsky produced at the period of university studies and later during his clerical service in Lithuania. Ethical aspects of Čepėnas’ thesis continue to hold relevance until the recent period of philosophical development. Čepėnas’ writings are viewed in parallel analysis with a spectrum of the Lithuanian existential thought. Critical contemplations on ethical principles in the cycle of articles on Nietzsche’s philosophy are emphasised. The article attempts to clarify Čepėnas’ understanding of the egotism of the superhuman, the reasons and the content of supplements of Christian ethics, and the concept of the secular purpose of life.

Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville: Selected Philosophical, Scientific, and Autobiographical Writings. Julie Candler Hayes, ed and trans. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

<i>Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville: Selected Philosophical, Scientific, and Autobiographical Writings</i>. Julie Candler Hayes, ed and trans. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Jean Wahl’s unassailable heritage

Despite his unassailable heritage, the passionate thinker to whom Levinas dedicated Totalite et infini has today nearly been forgotten outside France. This forgetting is the shared premise of two books published in recent years. The first is William C. Hackett and Jeffrey Hanson’s edition and translation of Wahl’s Existence humaine et transcendance (1944): Human Existence and Transcendence (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016, pp. 151), and the second is a volume of selections from Wahl’s philosophical writings edited by Alan D. Schrift and Ian Alexander Moore: Jean Wahl: Transcendence and the Concrete Selected Writings (New York: Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, 2017, pp. 291).

L’écriture philosophique comme pratique de soi chez Foucault

Dans cette étude j’aborde la question du rapport du sujet à l’écriture dans l’œuvre de Foucault, des années 60 aux années 80. Le rapport de Foucault à l’écriture est un sujet qu’il a, comme tel, très peu traité. Il l’évoque discrètement dans l’entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy, « Le Beau danger ». C’est néanmoins cette perspective que je propose pour aborder l’écriture philosophique de Foucault, i. e. l’archéologie du savoir et la généalogie du sujet, pour montrer comment cette écriture s’élabore dans le parcours entier de son œuvre, et comment corrélativement la question du sujet (de l’écriture) s’y déploie. On voit que chez Foucault, la méthode de l’écriture est intrinsèquement liée à l’éthique et à la politique, au point que l’écriture philosophique peut tout à fait être considérée comme une pratique de soi.In this paper, I analyse the relation of subjectivity and writing in the work of Foucault, from the sixties to the eighties. The relation that Foucault entertains with his own practice of writing is a topic that he barely discussed. He only gave a few words about this issue in the interview with Claude Bonnefoy, « Le beau danger » (Beautiful danger), but that is all. I nonetheless chose to take on this perspective on the work of Foucault in order to describe the method of his philosophical writings, from archeology to genealogy, and I emphasize his treatment of the subject (in / of the writing). I aim to show that his method of writing – archeology and genealogy – is thoroughly related to the ethical and political aspects of his work, and that writing for the philosopher is a practice of the self.

The Genealogy of ‘Human Dignity’: A New Perspective

ABSTRACTThis article considers the history of the concept of human dignity from its origins in the Bible and in Stoic philosophy down to the twentieth century. The major thinkers who contributed to the development of the idea are examined, including Pico della Mirandola, Pufendorf, Kant, and Broch. Similarly, the views of contemporary philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Martha Nussbaum are considered. The central thesis in this argument, which diverges from the standard view, is that Goethe occupies a pivotal role in this tradition. Goethe’s creation of an organic, holistic and self-reflective view of human dignity established a new paradigm. This innovative concept of dignity as an expression of human growth and self-realization found its way into the UDHR and German Basic Law. It is a position adopted by the German Constitutional Court in several important rulings; and it continues to find an echo in the writings of contemporary philosophers.

Colour matters in Balzac, from his beginnings to Séraphîta

This article explores Balzac’s understanding and exploitation of colour from his beginnings to Séraphîta (1835), the ordinal end of La Comédie humaine. Beginning with his earliest philosophical writings, it considers the relative roles of the spiritual and the material, and of light and black–white binaries as absolutes versus a more nuanced evolution of colour. Falthurne and Wann-Chlore bookend a development in which La Dernière Fée pivotally mixes the referential and the symbolic. The 1830 Scènes de la vie privée, La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, and La Vendetta, stories told via colour and ways of painting, Neoclassicism and Dutch genre, are then considered. Sarrasine and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu’s, contrasting texts presenting a monochrome-binary patterned, white sculptural supposed ideal, and an absolute colour-based incarnation of the real, are then examined. Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu’s hands-on grappling with paint as matter takes representation beyond the colour–line dichotomy into the realm of modelling and form, and the philosophical question of the relationship between causes and effects. The article closes by comparing La Fille aux yeux d’or (1834–35) and Séraphîta, two coeval narratives at opposite ends of the moral and chromatic spectrum, but which both demonstrate contrasting ways of using colour in the quest for the Absolute.

WILDERNESS IN AMERICA: PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS BY HENRY BUGBEE EDITED BY DAVID W. RODICK

Reviewed by: Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings by Henry Bugbee Rick Anthony Furtak (bio) Henry Bugbee Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings, edited by David W. Rodick New York: Fordham University Press, 2017; xiv + 222 pages; no index. Those who are already familiar with Henry Bugbee's written work will almost invariably have encountered it first through his 1958 text The Inward Morning, subtitled A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. This book, which originally appeared with an introduction by the French existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel, was reissued in a 1999 edition thanks to Edward F. Mooney, who served as editor and added a new introduction of his own (while retaining the one by Marcel). In the volume under review, David W. Rodick brings more of Bugbee's work back into print, a development that will surely be appreciated by admirers and newcomers alike. Or, in Rodick's own words, the aim of Wilderness in America is "to remove Bugbee's thought from relative obscurity, making it more accessible to the wider public" (2). It makes readily available some hard-to-find writings along with many that had never been published before. Readers who cringe upon learning that this volume begins with Bugbee's undergraduate thesis can rest assured that it holds up remarkably well—and, indeed, offers a glimpse into some of his enduring preoccupations. Entitled "In Demonstration of the Spirit," it defends what Bugbee at this early stage of his career describes as a form of "Personal Idealism" (18), which amounts to what might be called theistic personalism. "My interest," he writes, "is manifestly in persons" and "the consciousness whereby they exist, and I have held these to constitute the primary elements of Philosophy" (29). Bugbee affirms the intrinsic worth of human life while admitting the difficulty of providing air-tight philosophical justification for this belief. Although, as [End Page 347] he argues, each of us has an inner conviction that existence is valuable in itself, nonetheless "when we try to justify these beliefs," it seems to be "inevitable that our efforts will culminate in an insecure skepticism" (23). Citing a passage from Saint Paul at the outset of nearly every section, Bugbee proceeds in the spirit of Thoreau by showing that the terms which express our faith and piety are bound to be indefinite, even as they register the reality of the values that we have experienced. Moreover, the knowledge brought to us in such experiences must be affectively felt. Quoting in a footnote his mentor Warner Fite, Bugbee agrees that "thought without emotion is mere words" (206). It is no surprise, based upon this student work, that Bugbee will later begin to write philosophy in a concrete, meditative idiom, moving beyond the limits of a standard, abstract expository method. As Wilderness in America demonstrates, in graduate school and beyond Bugbee strove to articulate the implications of an insight that is fundamentally Aristotelian: namely, that just as the purpose of one's entire life does not lie outside that life itself, to live meaningfully is to engage in activities that are worth doing for their own sake. Thus, if our mode of transportation means "far more than getting from here to there," and we enjoy the process of walking, driving, or the like, then such a practical enterprise may afford us nothing less than an "opportunity for a growing realization of the significance of existence" (46–47). Furthermore, life as a whole ought to exhibit teleological finality: it is "destinate," as Bugbee likes to say (see, e.g., 102, 112). His philosophical vision includes a sense that what transpires in temporality reverberates in the widest scheme of things. In other words, Bugbee attests that "what may come to be and pass away" has an "eternal meaning" (69), which the appreciative perceiver should recognize. Theoretically, how does he flesh out this intuition? Wild nature both within us and in our surroundings appears to carry a sort of moral authority: it makes a claim upon our lives (111). To answer this claim is to be receptive to the promptings of conscience and also toward the beauty of the natural world. What we must endeavor to cultivate, therefore, is a...

Letter-Writing as a Decolonial Feminist Praxis for Philosophical Writing

AbstractAccording to Chandra Mohanty, there is no apolitical academy; academic and scholarly practices are in themselves political, insofar as they are inscribed in power and validation relations, which answer to and have effects upon the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist structures to which they belong. In the case of philosophical writing, this means that the forms that regulate writing, that is, what determines how one must write in different contexts, are expressive of the power structures within philosophical academia. These power structures are upheld through time because of, among many other factors, the rendering invisible of the diversity of places of enunciation belonging to those who write and think in philosophy, and of the universalization of the privileges associated with said places of enunciation. In this article, I propose a way of writing letters that appeals to grammatical persons and their relation to the authors of the texts. Through this writing practice it is possible to make explicit the places of enunciation from which we write philosophy. This enables, first, making visible the privileges and oppressions of those writing philosophy; and second, generating small spaces of resistance and transformation of the oppressive power relations within the philosophical academy.

The Cambridge Companion to "Robinson Crusoe," ed. by John Richetti

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to "Robinson Crusoe," ed. by John Richetti Leah Orr The Cambridge Companion to "Robinson Crusoe," ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2018. Pp. xix + 244. $79.99; $25.99 (paper). This is the newest eighteenth-century volume in a series that already has good coverage of the most commonly taught authors of the period (including a volume on Defoe, also edited by Richetti). Robinson Crusoe is a good choice for a single-title focus: one of the most read, reprinted, abridged, and imitated works from the eighteenth century, it has enjoyed a long afterlife in various media up to the present day. The Cambridge Companion adequately reflects this reception history, while covering the major strands of criticism on the original text. Students and those new to this corner of the field will find it an excellent collection to orient themselves with the most significant arguments and topics from the last half century; scholars familiar with recent work on Crusoe and on Defoe may find it sometimes rather thin. The book consists of a preface, chronology, and fourteen chapters by different contributors, divided into three sections: "Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe: The Eighteenth Century," "Robinson Crusoe in the Wider World," and "Robinson Crusoe over Three Hundred Years." The chapters generally progress from more focused interpretations of the original book to broader examinations of its contexts, including other literary and philosophical writings in the eighteenth century and the illustrations, imitations, adaptations, and films based on the story through the late twentieth century. In his brief preface, Richetti cites some of the key questions and topics that recur throughout the essays—questions of genre, religion, colonialism, and the ways the text has changed—as well as referring briefly to the ongoing critical debate over Defoe's canon. The all-star list of contributors includes many who have published extensively on Defoe, including several who have been publishing on Defoe since the 1960s. The best essays are those that, although coming from a perspective of established authority, attempt to go beyond the arguments their authors have already put into print in more developed forms. The book opens with two chapters that meditate on genre, by J. Paul Hunter and Rivka Swenson. Hunter quite rightly points to the ways that Crusoe has enjoyed a central role in literary history in part because of its apparent relationship to later novels, which causes us to ignore certain parts of the book: "We are critically more apt to see a modern Defoe as novelist rather than the explorer of narrative forms and methods that he was." Instead, Hunter suggests, readers might be better served by remembering the variety of genres that the book draws on (ten of which he lists). Swenson also highlights Crusoe's generic variety but takes a different tack by drawing the various genres of allegory, journalism, travel writing, and so forth under the umbrella of "novel." She focuses on the way that Crusoe remains in charge of his story, retelling some details more than once with the benefit of hindsight to direct the reader to his point of view. Both essays are suggestive [End Page 197] and do well in opening new lines of inquiry, though more specific examples of the other genres to which they allude would have been helpful. No scholar of Defoe will be surprised by Maximillian E. Novak's contribution to this book: his chapter on "Robinson Crusoe and Defoe's Career as a Writer" sets Crusoe in the context of Defoe's life as Novak reconstructed it at length in his magisterial biography (2001). Following the same lines of the first two chapters, Novak emphasizes the generic experimentalism in Defoe's other published writings as a clue to the genres of Crusoe, from irony and fantasy to allegory and history, concluding that the book "might be viewed as the inevitable result of his interests as a writer." He avoids the issue of Defoe attributions, but that is taken up directly (albeit briefly) by Pat Rogers in the next essay. Unlike many of the essays in this volume, Rogers's chapter goes against a standard line of thinking and will interest scholars while remaining accessible to...

Little-known pages of the history of the development of international legal thought: Ludwig Jacob (1759–1827)

This article explores the contribution to the development of international law science by the outstanding German philosopher and economist Ludwig Kondratievich Jacob (Ludwig Heinrich von Jacob) (1759–1827), who for some time worked as a professor of diplomacy and political economy at Kharkiv University. L. Jacob's contribution to the development of the science of international law is not limited to reading lectures on positive international law, which was taught at the Department of Diplomacy and Political Economy in the first decades of Kharkiv University. L. K. Jacob prepared and published a series of textbooks on logic, grammar, psychology, aesthetics, rhetoric, political economy and law under the general title «Philosophy Course for High Schools of the Russian Empire», the seventh part of which was devoted to the problems of natural law, including international law. International Law Jacob interpreted it as part of natural law, which determines relations between independent states. Among the fundamental rights of the nation he distinguishes: 1) the right to independence, which includes the right to take possession of things that did not belong to anyone (it is clear that the author here justifies the right to take over the so-called res nullius, which was widely used in international law at the time, 2) the right to independence from any other nation; 3) the right to formal equality with any other nation. Considerable attention in his textbook L. K. Jakob attributes the right to international treaties, though he sees no distinction between treaties that nation conclude with other nations and with foreign individuals. Some emphasis is also placed on diplomatic law in the textbook. In the work of L. К. Jakob quite comprehensive doctrine of the right to war, which, again, is quite typical for proponents of natural law in the science of international law, is based on the identification of relations between independent nations (states) with relations between individuals in the natural state. His international legal doctrine is literally imbued with the ideas of the humanization of war – he strongly opposes treachery and the use of such means of war, which cause the enemy extreme pain, requires respect for the rights of prisoners of war.On the last pages of his textbook L. K. Jacob is installing an application in which he proposes the idea of uniting the independent states into a confederation, provided that each of them maintains complete independence in their internal affairs. In this project it is easy to see the impact of the ideas of the treatise «To Eternal Peace» by I. Kant, a consistent follower of the philosophical doctrine of which L. K. Jacob performed in his philosophical writings.

Ancient handbooks and Graeco-Egyptian collections of alchemical recipes

AbstractA fluid terminology was used in antiquity to refer to scientific or philosophical writings that, in some respects, may be equated with what one would call today a handbook or manual. In particular, this paper will explore a group of treatises that may be counted as examples of ancientencheiridia, a Greek term that could mean ‘hand-knife’, ‘handbook’ and even ‘napkin, towel’. All these meanings have something to tell us about the nature and the history of ancientencheiridia, some of which can be identified with well-known pieces of Graeco-Roman literature. However, the spectrum of ancientencheiridiacan be further enlarged by exploring sources that are often neglected. After giving an up-to-date overview of ancient ‘handbooks’, the article will discuss the termencheiridionin Graeco-Egyptian alchemical literature. In fact, fresh textual investigations of the Syriac tradition of Zosimus of Panopolis point to the circulation of ancient recipe books that bore this title. On the one hand, this investigation will shed new light on the tradition of other important collections of alchemical recipes, such as the medievalMappae clavicula. On the other, it will highlight some strategies that ancient alchemical authors developed in selecting, reorganizing and legitimizing earlier alchemical recipes.

Unapologetic Absurdity

Unapologetic Absurdity Keith Kopka (bio) Sun-Tzu’s Life in the Holy City of Vilnius Ričardas Gavelis Elizabeth Novickas, trans. Pica Pica Press www.picapica.press/books 271 Pages; Print, $13.99 Lithuanian born writer and theoretical physicist Ričardas Gavelis is perhaps most known to western audiences for his book Vilnius Poker (1989), a scathing indictment of post-soviet Lithuania that finds Gavelis characterizing his country as a headless and ignorant nation. First published in 1989, this politically charged mix of fantasy, eroticism, and philosophy rocked Eastern Europe in the middle of the USSR’s slow descent toward disintegration. Although Sun-Tzu’s Life in the Holy City of Vilnius was initially published more than a decade later, the themes within this work remain similar to the challenging and incendiary content of Vilnius Poker, its sister novel. Sun-Tzu’s Life in the Holy City of Vilnius, translated by Elizabeth Novickas and published in the United States by Pica Pica Press, follows the life of a narrator who calls himself the Sun-Tzu of Vilnius, a typically direct Gavelis style persona that allows the author to characterize his narrator through external means. As we all learned in history class, Sun-Tzu was the Chinese general and strategist most famous for his book The Art of War, a collection of strategic, instructional, and often even philosophical writings on the ways in which war should be waged. Gavelis’s narrator takes on this persona in the context of post-Soviet Lithuania. However, unlike the original Sun-Tzu, Gavelis’s character is far from the refined voice of reason that permeates the narrative structure in The Art of War. Instead, Gavelis frames his Sun-Tzu as an anti-hero, a criminal and sex addict who is the product of his time and of his upbringing in the Soviet era. Stylistically, Sun-Tzu’s Life in the Holy City of Vilnius is an aggressive book. The information comes at the reader at an incredible pace, and the lyricism and detail that is required in translation is a testament to Novickas’s talent, not just as a translator of Gavelis’s words but also as the steward of the fraught and extremely detailed universe that Gavelis has painstakingly crafted. Throughout the text, the descriptions of sexuality and violence are sometimes startlingly direct. However, Gavelis avoids crossing over any lines that might alienate a reader by stylizing his disturbing descriptions in a way that resembles the magical realism of authors like Gabriel García Márquez or Miguel Ángel Asturias, and because of these stylistic choices, Gavelis finds ways to make his often-overwrought descriptions feel necessary. Gavelis wields his penchant for the absurd and fantastic as a chisel to sculpt images that are reflective of the ways in which he sees that Lithuania and its people have been exploited and, in turn, forced to work within a system of corruption. This critical perspective is a lot for readers to take in, especially those readers [End Page 21] who might not be familiar with the historical and socio-political context of Gevalis’s evaluation. However, the stylistic choices that fortify his post-modern adaptation of magical realism disarms readers and allow them to receive his harsh social commentary. For example, Sun Tzu’s formative years provide Gavelis an opportunity to use the strengths of stylistic literalism to his advantage as he describes Sun-Tzu’s “first father” as an “interim coffin designer,” and a “deconstructionist” who “didn’t deconstruct someone’s despicable written texts, but rather all the Lord’s creation.” This unique metaphorical persona sucks readers into the character of the first father. However, all of this description ultimately still culminates in poignant tragedy when the KGB catches on to the first father’s work and has him arrested and killed for supposedly organizing a nationalist group. These moments of spectacular metaphor and absurdity challenge and confront the reader throughout the novel. However, some of these moments bare the historical weight and narrative direction of the novel better than others. Sometimes there is a feeling that the reader is being forced to confront absurdity simply for the...

Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy ed. by María del Rosario Acosta López and Jeffrey L. Powell

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy ed. by María del Rosario Acosta López and Jeffrey L. Powell Sabine Roehr María del Rosario Acosta López and Jeffrey L. Powell, editors. Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Pp. 217. Cloth, $90.00. In the past, Schiller has often been underestimated as a philosopher in his own right. Fortunately, this has been changing, beginning with the bicentennial commemoration of his death in 2005, which has since then produced a fair number of volumes, mostly in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Unfortunately, Frederick Beiser's 2005 Schiller the Philosopher: A Re-Examination, one of the still rare book-length treatments by a single author, has failed to lead to a similar "new wave" in the English-speaking world (3). Thus, it is heartening to have here a volume of essays focusing on his philosophical writings and bringing together titans of the fields of philosophical Schiller-studies, German early romantic aesthetics, and German idealism, such as Beiser, Daniel Dahlstrom, and Manfred Frank, together with a younger generation of Schiller scholars. What makes this compilation additionally useful is the fact that its editors have not shied away from providing several essays in translation, thereby opening access to readers for whom they might otherwise be inaccessible. As a short review such as this cannot possibly do justice to all essays in this collection, I can only try to mention in radically abbreviated form some of the contributions that offer important or novel approaches. Yvonne Nilges's reconstruction of Schiller's implicit references to Rousseau's political philosophy is most instructive for us modern readers, for whom they might be no longer obvious. The same goes for María del Rosario Acosta López's essay, which shows that Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man as a critique of the French Revolution holds its own in comparison to Hegel's in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Frank's "Schiller between Kant and Schelling," first published in German in 2007, provides the indispensable grounding of Schiller's ethical/aesthetic views in Kant's Critique of Judgment and gives us not only the most complete account of "imaginative freedom" referenced in the title of the book, but also an analysis of different concepts of freedom found in Schiller. Dahlstrom's essay, which starts the second part of the book, could as well have been closing the first, since, in addition to making a connection to twentieth-century phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, it provides a close reading of [End Page 178] Schiller's most important philosophical work after the Aesthetic Letters, his On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry—a work that Beiser's Schiller the Philosopher had left out. Dahlstrom shows it to render a view of poetry as one way to reflect on humanity's place in the world after the loss of a kind of naturalness that Schiller sees realized in ancient Greek culture—which he idealized, like many of his contemporaries. For him, it is the task of culture, of which poetry is a part, "to lead us back, 'along the path of reason and freedom,' to nature" (107). Jeffrey Powell interprets Schiller's political aesthetics as the "disruption" (170) of aestheticized politics as it was critiqued by Walter Benjamin, based as it is on Schiller's concept of perfect freedom. María Luciana Cadahia uses Schiller's concept of positivity in his Aesthetic Letters as a corrective to contemporary readings of Michel Foucault's notion of dispositif. This is maybe the most important insight brought forward by most of the contributions: the idea of aesthetic freedom as an all-encompassing force, not one limited to the traditional realm of art but meant to mediate the dualisms of the age, and foremost that of the political and the moral. In the words of Jacques Rancière, "the aesthetic is equally ethical, political, or religious . . . [carrying] the promise of a newly non-separated world, one where art will no longer exist as a separate sphere, but where the practices of artists will be identical...

Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature by Elizabeth Alice Honig

Reviewed by: Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature by Elizabeth Alice Honig Rachel Daphne Weiss Elizabeth Alice Honig, Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature (London: Reaktion Books 2019) 272 pp., 68 ills. For an artist whose mention popularly evokes scenes of peasant merrymaking and sedate, wintry landscapes, Pieter Bruegel the Elder has aroused fierce debate among twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars. Controversy has erupted over the correct orthography and pronunciation of his family name, conflicting [End Page 279] theories about his socioeconomic background have generated radically opposed interpretations of his art, and speculation over his religious and political persuasions continue to overburden pictures that may have been fairly benign in his day. It is hard to fault these zealous historians; Bruegel's artistic legacy is a seductive cocktail of scant archival evidence and complex, enigmatic imagery. The opacity of Dulle Griet (1563), for instance, could lead even the most pedantic of scholars to flights of interpretive fancy, and it is often the boldest assertions that best contend with the vibrancy of Bruegel's art. But rather than court controversy, Elizabeth Alice Honig's new book elaborates Bruegel's body of work with plausibility, offering elegant, convincing solutions to the artist's pictorial puzzles. Honig's diplomatic insights are rooted in the premise that Bruegel's pictures were fundamentally discursive objects. Not content with conceiving of these works as ornaments or as handmaidens to propagandistic aims, Honig posits that Bruegel's compositions functioned actively, sparking lively conversation, selfexamination, and forms of philosophical meditation among beholders. These claims ring of credibility, as the titular "idea of human nature" was inarguably a preoccupation for Bruegel and his audience, as it has been throughout recorded history. But Honig's study never descends into platitudes; the book's investigation of art and human nature is historiographically rigorous and thoroughly nuanced. Honig is undaunted by the capacious, universal implications of her title, assembling a formidable amount of evidence to support her thesis. Instead of excavating obscure sources with tenuous links to Bruegel's imagery, as some students of Bruegel have been inclined to do, Honig fleshes out the most probable climate of thought. She defers often and effectively to Erasmus, not to suggest a direct correspondence between the philosopher's writings and Bruegel's visualizations, but to demonstrate how Erasmus's ideas on human nature were ubiquitous in Bruegel's world. She also references other worldview-shaping philosophies, such as Neo-Stoicism, Christianity, and Humanism, which were so prevalent as to be inescapable. As a consequence of building out this rich context, Honig is able to theorize the reception of Bruegel's work instead of laboring to reconstruct artistic intent. The emphases on human nature and reception have two advantages: first, they allow Honig to explore the myriad meanings available to contemporary viewers instead of hewing to narrower iconographic possibilities; second, they permit a truly comprehensive odyssey into the artist's oeuvre, as ideas of human nature and their provocations suffuse the full scope of Bruegel's artistic chronology and the multiple mediums in which he worked. Accordingly, the book's chapters cohere around subthemes instead of more familiar organizing principles, such as mediums or stylistic progress. Each chapter theme addresses a feature of human nature—from connection with the natural world to the traumas of war—that manifests in Bruegel's art. The first chapter, "Humanity and Self-Knowledge," is the most broadly philosophical, engaging classical, medieval, and early modern writings on selfhood and the soul to elucidate prints such as Bruegel's Everyman (ca. 1558) and his Seven Virtues series (1560). Attention to elite philosophy is balanced by a complementary focus on folk knowledge, which Bruegel vividly pictorialized in his Netherlandish Proverbs (1559). Honig's explication of these various knowledge [End Page 280] sources emphasizes the diverse milieus in which these objects could have stimulated discourse. She also stresses the artist's innovations, by pointing out discontinuities between written articulations of human nature and Bruegel's visual interpretations. Discrepancies between text and image are revisited in the sixth chapter, "Laughing Man," in which Honig considers Bruegel's spin on kermis imagery. Prints of this type conventionally ridiculed peasants in...

ПРИНЦИП ВЕРХОВЕНСТВА ПРАВА: ІСТОРІЯ СТАНОВЛЕННЯ

У статті аналізується історичний розвиток принципу верховенства права як сполучення справедливості, свободи, рівності, гуманності. Аналіз процесу становлення принципу на різних етапах суспільного розвитку демонструє, що визначені ще в епоху Античності основоположні ідеї панування права є актуальними і нині, а єдність вияву норм права та моралі є визначальною у визначенні змісту принципу.

Uneasy Landscapes

This article offers an unprecedented close reading of the poetic texts created by the Martinican author René Ménil, whose poetry has been almost entirely neglected by scholars to date and who is better known for his philosophical and political writings than for his verse. I pay particular attention to Ménil’s treatment of geographical and cultural spaces in his published poetry from 1932 to 1950, and place that verse in dialogue with a text by another Martinican author at work around this period: Edouard Glissant, and his first poetry collection, Un champ d’îles (1952). Despite their otherwise dissimilar literary approaches, I show how both Ménil and Glissant created verse in these years where landscapes shift unpredictably, where human subjects are often overwhelmed, and where bewildering, vertiginous contact between Europe and the Caribbean is emphasized. This stands in contrast to more descriptive or directly political depictions of local nature created by other Afro-Caribbean poets during the period, and, I argue, underscores the complexities of the unsettling encounters between places and peoples occurring with increasing frequency in these years of rapid change around the Second World War.

A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch ed. by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch ed. by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov Richard Lambert III Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov, eds., A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 278 pp. In their edited volume A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch, editors Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov deliver a comprehensive scholarly introduction that valiantly strives to render the works of a great Austrian modernist—finally—more accessible to a broad audience. Impressive in both scope and depth, the Companion leaves no stone unturned in its attempt to chronicle both the longevity and scope of Broch's diverse writings and offers both tried-and-true assessments of Broch's major novels alongside new perspectives and disciplinary approaches toward some of the author's less prominent works. The resulting collection is thus a fitting testimony to the breadth of Broch's intellectual engagements, ranging from art and literature to ethics, politics, and social theory. This commitment to comprehensiveness is without question the major success of the volume. The Companion wrangles Broch's complicated, complex aesthetic and oftentimes explicitly philosophical writings into a concise, comprehensible, and exhaustive introductory work. The Companion is effectively structured chronologically. After Bartram and McGaughey's introduction, which offers a full biographical overview of Broch's life and career, each contribution profiles a subsequent work or critical evolution in Broch's thought according to its date of publication or its emergence as a salient theme in his writings. The scope and focus of these contributions vary from chapter to chapter, and the interpretive impetus accordingly fluctuates between exploring new perspectives, methods, and themes, on the one hand, and relating canonical interpretations on the other. Kathleen L. Komar's examination of Broch's Die Schlafwandler, "Perspectives on Broch's Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self," embraces both of these tendencies by offering accepted readings of the trilogy alongside novel, if brief, examinations of the motifs of degrading images and female writers. Two subsequent contributions devoted to Broch's earliest writings aim to define Broch's intellectual affinities discursively. Gunther Martens ("Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age") returns to a familiar mode of inquiry in Broch scholarship by linking the author's voluminous secondary writings on literature to both Die Schlafwandler and Der Tod des Vergil, while Galin Tihanov attempts to [End Page 106] contextualize Broch's relationship to literary modernism vis-à-vis Romantic refrains ("Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch's Postromanticism"). Beyond these earlier and better-known works, the Companion also contains a number of contributions that provide thorough yet economical (re-)introductions to some of Broch's underappreciated, overlooked, or overly complex work. Brechtje Beuker's "Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luftgegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine" furnishes a glimpse into Broch's brief theatrical forays and contextualizes his works for the stage within historical trends in economic and social criticism. In "Limits of the Scientific: Broch's Die unbekannte Größe," Gwyneth Cliver explores Broch's short novel Die unbekannte Größe as a referendum on the author's past flirtations with logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Meanwhile, Judith Ryan ("Hermann Broch's Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times"), Sebastian Wogenstein ("Human Rights and the Intellectual's Ethical Duty: Broch's Political Writings"), and Jennifer Jenkins ("Broch's Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable") deliver glossaries of keywords, passages, and definitions to orient new readers in the nuances of Broch's social theory, political theory, and his novel Der Tod des Vergil. Finally, a cluster of contributions investigate Broch's devotion to a series of intellectual interlocutors. Appearing in the first half of the Companion, Gisela Brude-Firnau's "Broch's Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer" traces the narrator's ambivalence in the face of ideology to the anti-urbanism and anti-intellectualism associated with Ludwig Klages and, in turn, Klages's following in National Socialism. Similarly, Judith Sidler's contribution "From the 'Tierkreis-Erzählung' to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch's Last...