Unnatural Affections

Unnatural Affections
Author: George E. Haggerty
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

George Haggerty examines the 'unnatural' affections that defy cultural taboos and challenge what are seen as natural boundaries to desire. Such affections abound in 18th century novels offering understanding into gender and female desire.

Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis

Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis
Author: Maurer Christian Maurer
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1474413382

The dawn of the Enlightenment saw heated debates on self-love. Do people only act out of self-interest? Or is there a less pessimistic explanation for human behaviour? Maurer delves into the contributions to these debates from both famous and lesser known authors, including Lord Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, Archibald Campbell, David Hume and Adam Smith, and puts them in their philosophical, theological and economic context. Maurer identifies five distinct conceptions of self-love and looks at their role within theories of human psychology and morality while drawing attention to the heuristic limits of our contemporary notion of egoism. He compares the central arguments and the different strategies intended to morally rehabilitate human nature and self-love before and during the Enlightenment.

The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy

The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy
Author: Ádám Smrcz
Publisher: Gyöngyösi Megyer
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9632848209

There is no need to argue for the relevance of affectivity in early modern philosophy. When doing research and conceptualizing affectivity in this period, we hope to attain a basicinterpretive framework for philosophy in general, one that is independent of and cutting across such unfruitful divisions as the time-honored interpretive distinction between “rationalists” and “empiricists”, which we consider untenable when applied to 17th-century thinkers. Our volume consists of papers based on the contributions to the First Budapest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, held on 14–15 October 2016 at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. When composing this volume, our aim was not to present a systematic survey of affectivity in early modern philosophy. Rather, our more modest goal was to foster collaboration among researchers working in different countries and different traditions. Many of the papers published here are already in implicit or explicit dialogue with others. We hope that they will generate more of an exchange of ideas in the broader field of early modern scholarship.

British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment

British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment
Author: Stuart Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135865116

This fifth volume covers many of the most important philosophers and movements of the nineteenth century, including utilitarianism, positivism and pragmatism.

Toward a Humean True Religion

Toward a Humean True Religion
Author: Andre C. Willis
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015-06-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271065788

David Hume is traditionally seen as a devastating critic of religion. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles sits at the heart of the narrative overview of his work that perennially indoctrinates thousands of first-year philosophy students. In Toward a Humean True Religion, Andre Willis succeeds in complicating Hume’s split approach to religion, showing that Hume was not, in fact, dogmatically against religion in all times and places. Hume occupied a “watershed moment,” Willis contends, when old ideas of religion were being replaced by the modern idea of religion as a set of epistemically true but speculative claims. Thus, Willis repositions the relative weight of Hume’s antireligious sentiment, giving significance to the role of both historical and discursive forces instead of simply relying on Hume’s personal animus as its driving force. Willis muses about what a Humean “true religion” might look like and suggests that we think of this as a third way between the classical and modern notions of religion. He argues that the cumulative achievements of Hume’s mild philosophic theism, the aim of his moral rationalism, and the conclusion of his project on the passions provide the best content for this “true religion.”