In Freedom and the End of Reason, Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant's philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy's larger ...history. He persuasively argues that the whole of Kantianism—not merely the Second Critique—focuses on a "critique of practical reason" and is a response to a problem that Kant saw as intrinsic to reason itself: the teleological problem of its goodness. Reconstructing the influence of Rousseau on Kant's thought, Velkley demonstrates that the relationship between speculative philosophy and practical philosophy in Kant is far more intimate than generally has been perceived. By stressing a Rousseau-inspired notion of reason as a provider of practical ends, he is able to offer an unusually complete account of Kant's idea of moral culture.
Shelley and Rousseau Lee, Monika
The Wordsworth circle,
01/2017, Letnik:
48, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Shelley's writing during the actual sailing voyage included parts of a long letter to Thomas Love Peacock, a will in which he divided his estate evenly between Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont, a ...sketchbook full of rough drawings of the lake, and the autobiographical opening of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," which he may have completed after returning to Montalègre, but which Michael Erkehlenz, editor of The Geneva Notebook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, supposes was drafted during the actual boat voyage - a credible explanation of the chronology of composition, since many pages of the notebook have been lost and no first draft of the poem survives. Shelley's lines, "Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hands in extacy!" (59-60), are un-ironic, and the poem may not be overdy polidcal, though political thought is manifest, whether coverdy or direcdy, in all Shelley's writing; nonetheless, Forest Pyle has made a creditable foray into the poem's polidcal substrata. In a note to the poems of 1816, Mary Shelley writes that Shelley was reading Julie when he conceived "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" {CompletePoetry 3.1069), and Shelley's letter to Peacock referring to his reading of the novel lends support to the assertion (Letters 1.485). To redress an imbalance and to fill a gap, this reading of the intertextual dialogue between Shelley's lyric and the novel which inspired it proposes historical influence as a basis for a dialogic intertext; the "fast influencing" ("Mont Blanc," 38) and "an unremitting interchange" (39) between...
This essay takes stock of the pivotal role played by the Enlightenment in efforts to theorize a new cosmopolitanism. Recent attempts to reframe the concept for the global age have purveyed facile ...associations of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism with imperialism and racism, while also strategically averting a substantive redefinition of cosmopolitanism. An analysis of the eighteenth-century figure of the cosmopolitan, which is marked by its situation in rhetorically charged but often hypothetical or fictive discourses, reveals an unrecognized tradition of elusiveness in the cosmopolitan which both informs and stalls its current revival.
...readers leave few traces of their habits and experiences: "Who better than the reader can speak of reading, of his or her reading," writes Labrosse, "and who more than the reader refuses or ...neglects to do so" (11). ...with so much at stake, these readers never scanned the texts just once but perused them over and over: "I read with keen pleasure your Novel, I reread it with intense emotion avec transport, and I will reread it again many times, even though I feel I know it by heart, such was the deep impression it made on me," writes Jacob Vernes, in an illustrative 1761 letter to Rousseau.8 For Robert Darnton, Vernes's statement indicates that post-1750 novel-reading habits exemplified a readaptation of traditional "intensive" practices rather than a sharp break with them (249-51). ...crying tends to nudge investigations toward questions that, as far as I know, do not normally get asked of other reading practices in other places and times, no matter how strange they appear. ...Labrosse went on to ascribe the dearth of first-person historical accounts of reading on which we started this essay to the tendency of readers to "forget" that they are reading, which leads to "the difficulty or even impossibility of talking about it" (11).
Despite a recent resurgence of interest in friendship and a seemingly inexhaustible fascination with Rousseau, scholars have neglected Rousseau's conception of friendship. The work that does exist ...emphasizes friendship's ability to inculcate virtue, and moors Rousseau to the classical notion that friendship catalyzes ethical improvement. However, Rousseau lowers the aim of friendship by decoupling it from the process of moral learning and putting limits on the degree of intimacy between friends. The argument is made in four steps. First, Rousseau's theory of friendship differs from its relevant predecessors in both origin and end. Second, the effort to ground friendship in pity bounds emotional intimacy, since pity introduces elements of character difference as well as sameness. Third, Rousseauan friendship fails to catalyze virtue and is successful instead in providing consolation. Finally, the essay considers the function of friendship in a Rousseauan polity.
The standard "realist" reading of The Prince assumes that the book is a straightforward treatise whose various maxims and examples Machiavelli recommends in earnest. But there are good reasons to ...doubt whether The Prince always speaks in Machiavelli's own voice. The book is full of artfully crafted ambiguities that challenge its own most loudly asserted views. One of its neglected features is Machiavelli's patterned use of words that seem to praise individuals or actions, yet subtly question their prudence. If we decode The Prince's ironic language, we discover a brilliant critique of charismatic one-man rule and imperial politics.
Modern reflection on the ideal of personal autonomy has its Western origin in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where autonomy, or self-legislation, involves citizens joining together to make ...laws for themselves that reflect their collective understanding of the common good. Four features of this conception of autonomy continue to be relevant today. First, autonomy, a type of freedom, is introduced into modern philosophy in order to make up for a perceived deficiency, or incompleteness, in merely "negative" freedom (the right to do as one pleases, unimpeded by others). Second, autonomy is taken to be not merely a complement of negative freedom but a higher, more valuable species of freedom. Third, at its origin personal autonomy is not conceived individualistically; rather, on Rousseau's account, autonomy is achievable only if citizens surrender part of their status as individuals and think of their social membership as essential, not merely accidental, to who they are. Finally, Rousseau's conception of autonomy is distinct from the contemporary ideal of autonomy defined as judging or deciding for oneself (according to one's own reason). Nevertheless, there is an important sense in which autonomy as Rousseau conceives it also requires the developed capacity for independent, self-determined judgment.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus blesses those who "find no scandal" in him (Luke 7:23 NRSV, modified translation). Whatever the word "scandal" might mean in this beatitude, it cannot simply denote our ...usual sense of shock at flagrantly bad behavior. The scandal that one takes in Christ is the scandal of the Cross and, as such, it has to do with the crucial issues of evil, violence, and suffering, as well as redemption and salvation. The kind of scandal experienced in different ways by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by Jacques Derrida reading Rousseau. It might come as a surprise to learn that these two thinkers had some important things to say about scandal, but it should come as no surprise that they were drawn to the scandalous. One only has to think of Rousseau's Confessions with their intimate revelations, the shock caused by some of the statements by Derrida to the effect that there is "nothing outside the text." Although they each pursued what is properly referred to as "the scandal of reason," they were aware of this notion's biblical origin. It is this aspect I wish to highlight.
Voix et mémoire Mercier-Faivre, Anne-Marie; O'Dea, Michael
2012
Book
Sélection d'articles sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrits sur une période de 20 ans par des membres de l'UMR 5611 (LIRE). Retours sur l'histoire de la critique rousseauiste.
This article compares a tax method featuring flat rates and fixed allowances equal for all taxpayers (Surplus Income Tax Method (SITM) procedure) with a tax method featuring also flat rates and ...increasing personal allowances (IPAs) to meet the amounts of necessary consumption required by the different living standards (Discretionary Income Tax Method (DITM) procedure). Our results show that the DITM procedure generates an after-tax income distribution less unequal and superior in terms of social welfare. Moreover, the assumption (for comparison purposes) of identical total tax revenues leads to the corollary that the flat tax rate under the DITM is necessarily larger than the one under the SITM; being thus, the former taxmethod is more progressive than the latter. These results imply an obvious paradox considering the commonly accepted principle that basic necessities are the same for everyone (Rousseau,
1755
). Based on the results obtained in this article, we have labelled this paradox as the Rousseau's paradox of fiscal egalitarianism.
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