Naturalization Of The Soul

Download or read book Naturalization of the Soul written by John Barresi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious 'soul' was replaced first by a philosophical 'self' and then by a scientific 'mind'. The authors show that many supposedly contemporary theories of the self were actually discussed in the eighteenth century, and recognize the status of William Hazlitt as one of the most important Personal Identity theorists of the British Enlightenment, for his direct relevance to contemporary thinking. Now available in paperback, Naturaliazation of the Soul is essential reading for anyone interested in the issues at the core of the Western philosophical tradition.

Download or read book The Making of the Modern Self written by Dror Wahrman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wahrman argues that toward the end of the 18th century there was a radical change in notions of self & personal identity - a sudden transformation that was a revolution in the understanding of selfhood & of identity categories including race, gender, & class.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self written by Raymond Martin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west.

Download or read book The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 written by James H. Kettner and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: he concept of citizenship that achieved full legal form and force in mid-nineteenth-century America had English roots in the sense that it was the product of a theoretical and legal development that extended over three hundred years. This prize-winning volume describes and explains the process by which the cirumstances of life in the New World transformed the quasi-medieval ideas of seventeenth-century English jurists about subjectship, community, sovereignty, and allegiance into a wholly new doctrine of "volitional allegiance." The central British idea was that subjectship involved a personal relationship with the king, a relationship based upon the laws of nature and hence perpetual and immutable. The conceptual analogue of the subject-king relationship was the natural bond between parent and child. Across the Atlantic divergent ideas were taking hold. Colonial societies adopted naturalization policies that were suited to practical needs, regardless of doctrinal consistency. Americans continued to value their status as subjects and to affirm their allegiance to the king, but they also moved toward a new understanding of the ties that bind individuals to the community. English judges of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assumed that the essential purpose of naturalization was to make the alien legally the same as a native, that is, to make his allegiance natural, personal, and perpetual. In the colonies this reasoning was being reversed. Americans took the model of naturalization as their starting point for defining all political allegiance as the result of a legal contract resting on consent. This as yet barely articulated difference between the American and English definition of citizenship was formulated with precision in the course of the American Revolution. Amidst the conflict and confusion of that time Americans sought to define principles of membership that adequately encompassed their ideals of individual liberty and community security. The idea that all obligation rested on individual volition and consent shaped their response to the claims of Parliament and king, legitimized their withdrawal from the British empire, controlled their reaction to the loyalists, and underwrote their creation of independent governments. This new concept of citizenship left many questions unanswered, however. The newly emergent principles clashed with deep-seated prejudices, including the traditional exclusion of Indians and Negroes from membership in the sovereign community. It was only the triumph of the Union in the Civil War that allowed Congress to affirm the quality of native and naturalized citizens, to state unequivocally the primacy of the national over state citizenship, to write black citizenship into the Constitution, and to recognize the volitional character of, the status of citizen by formally adopting the principle of expatriation.-->

Download or read book American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship written by Joni Adamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to the collection examine literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19th century to the 21st. They explore notions of the common--namely, common humanity, common wealth, and common ground--and the relation of these notions to often conflicting definitions of who (or what) can have access to "citizenship" and "rights." The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups--ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional--that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision.

Download or read book The United States in Crisis written by Edward J. Erler and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State argues that to preserve our freedom Americans must mount a defense of the nation state against the progressive forces who advocate for global government. The Founders of America were convinced that freedom would flourish only in a nation state. A nation state is a collection of citizens who share a commitment to the same principles. Today, the nation state is under attack by the progressive Left, who allege that it is the source of almost every evil in the world.

Download or read book The Idea of the Self written by Jerrold Seigel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the self? The question has preoccupied people in many times and places, but nowhere more than in the modern West, where it has spawned debates that still resound today. In this 2005 book, Jerrold Seigel provides an original and penetrating narrative of how major Western European thinkers and writers have confronted the self since the time of Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. From an approach that is at once theoretical and contextual, he examines the way figures in Britain, France, and Germany have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of the inner tensions and external pressures that threaten to divide or overwhelm them. He makes clear that recent 'postmodernist' accounts of the self belong firmly to the tradition of Western thinking they have sought to supersede, and provides an open-ended and persuasive alternative to claims that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged.