Voltaire foundation gb (778 Ergebnisse)

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Hardback. Zustand: New. This study illustrates the significance of Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan's networking in the spread of Enlightenment thought. It focuses primarily on the unpublished correspondence between Mairan and the Geneva scientists, Firmin Abauzit, Gabriel Cramer, Jean Jallabert and Charles Bonnet. Mairan was an assiduous correspondent whose letters reveal the progress of scientific thought in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century. Despite the high regard in which of his contemporaries, he has been, until recently, relatively neglected by Enlightenment scholars. This is the first full-length study devoted to Mairan's relations with scientists in other countries, to the process of cross-fertilisation in the production of scientific knowledge, and to his considerable influence on the development of scientific thought on key issues. The topics covered in the letters range from the Shape of the Earth and vis vivacontroversies and the medical powers of electricity, to the nature of the Seichesin the Lac du Léman and the origin of monsters. One of the major interests of the correspondence is Mairan's obvious fascination with Newton. Neglect of his contribution to the history of ideas can be partly explained by the fact that he was unfairly considered a 'last-ditch' Cartesian in a triumphantly Newtonian world. The detailed analysis of the letters in this study amply shows a constant preoccupation with both the Opticks and the Principiaand a fairly sophisticated understanding of scientific method. The letters abound in references to other scientists, such as the Bernoullis, Nollet, Dufay and Maupertuis. They provide an exciting, unguarded and 'behind-the-scenes' view of scientific developments before they were finalised and appeared in published works. It is particularly revealing, therefore, to compare the letters to Mairan's contributions to the Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences, his early dissertations, and his mature works. Mairan's unpublished correspondence with Geneva scientists is a treasure-house of information on personalities, ideas and controversies of crucial importance to the international scientific community from 1717 to 1769.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. During the early modern period the public postal systems became central pillars of the emerging public sphere. Despite the importance of the post in the transformation of communication, commerce and culture, little has been known about the functioning of the post or how it affected the lives of its users and their societies. In Postal culture in Europe, 1500-1800, Jay Caplan provides the first historical and cultural analysis of the practical conditions of letter-exchange at the dawn of the modern age.Caplan opens his analysis by exploring the economic, political, social and existential interests that were invested in the postal service, and traces the history of the three main European postal systems of the era, the Thurn and Taxis, the French Royal Post and the British Post Office. He then explores how the post worked, from the folding and sealing of letters to their collection, sorting, and transportation. Beyond providing service to the general public, these systems also furnished early modern states with substantial revenue and effective surveillance tools in the form of the Black Cabinets or Black Chambers. Caplan explains how postal services highlighted the tension between state power and the emerging concept of the free individual, with rights to private communication outside the public sphere. Postal systems therefore affected how letter writers and readers conceived and expressed themselves as individuals, which the author demonstrates through an examination of the correspondence of Voltaire and Rousseau, not merely as texts but as communicative acts.Ultimately, Jay Caplan provides readers with both a comprehensive overview of the changes wrought by the newly-public postal system - from the sounds that one heard to the perception of time and distance - and a thought provoking account of the expectations and desires that have led to our culture of instant communication.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. The canonical image of John Locke as one of the first philosophes is so deeply engrained that we could forget that he belonged to a very different historico-political context. His influence on Enlightenment thought, not least that of his theories of political liberty, has been the subject of widespread debate. In Locke's political liberty: readings and misreadings a team of renowned international scholars re-evaluates Locke's heritage in the eighteenth century and the ways it was used.Moving beyond reductive conceptions of Locke as either central or peripheral to the development of Enlightenment thought, historians and philosophers explore how his writings are invoked, exploited or distorted in eighteenth-century reflections on liberty. Analyses of his reception in England and France bring out underlying conceptual differences between the two nations, and extend an ongoing debate about the difficulty of characterising national political epistemologies. The traditional Anglocentric view of Locke and his influence is demystified, and what emerges is a new, more diverse vision of the reception of his political thinking throughout Europe.Of interest to political philosophers and historians, Locke's political liberty: readings and misreadings reveals how the issues identified by Locke recur in our own debates about difference, identity and property - his work is as resonant today as it has ever been.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. In an era when both Church and State assigned gender roles and defined sexual practices in terms of male/female, lawful/illicit, Sade's extensive accounts of sexual activity were categorized as deviant, prurient or provocative. William F. Edmiston explores how Sade's unique challenge to sexual, moral and social taboos anticipates the discourses of queer theory.Following an overview of queer theory, Edmiston examines the categories of sex, gender and sexuality as treated in some of Sade's best- and lesser-known works. He demonstrates the extent to which Sade erodes the boundaries of sexual opposition through discourses justifying rather than illegitimizing 'unlawful' sex. The author reveals the coexistence of two competing discourses on sexuality: a proclivity that cannot be eradicated, and a habit that one can choose to adopt. This pioneering re-reading culminates with an examination of how recent biographies attempt to force Sade into a normal/abnormal dichotomy, manipulating police reports, personal correspondence or narratorial interventions to establish (or not) the author's homosexuality.Through revealing Sade's attempts to undermine prevailing gender roles and sexual identities, Edmiston uncovers a 'queer' discourse that challenges the still common assumption that heterosexuality is exclusively natural and normative, and that nature has always prompted humans to reproduce, rather than to seek pleasure.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. The purpose of this study is to assess the importance of Switzerland in the life and writings of Edward Gibbon. Whereas the choice of Lausanne as a place of exile for Gibbon to undo his youthful conversion to Roman Catholicism was largely accidental, the society and intellectual resources of that city, perched on its hills overlooking the shores of Lake Geneva, proved to be of lasting influence for the rest of his life. During his period of exile, he began to write in French his first work to be published, the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature, and the subject of Switzerland was his preferred choice of research until his Grand Tour, in which he renewed his residence in Lausanne for a further eleven months, stimulated the idea of writing a history of Rome. Eventually he decided to retire to Lausanne at the end of his parliamentary career to finish the last three volumes of The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire.Brian Norman shows that the liberalism of Gibbon's political philosophy in his criticism of Lausanne's subjection to the aristocratic rule of Berne surprised the patriots of the new canton of Vaud when his Letter on the Government of Berne, which is here established as a youthful work of the late 1750s, was posthumously published at the end of the eighteenth century.The author then proceeds to examine Gibbon's other early writings relating to Switzerland, his letters and journals, The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire and his Memoirs in order to show the abiding effect of the society, language, history, constitution and military organisation of Switzerland on his beliefs and assumptions.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. New ed. Source d'étude mais également d'inspiration, l'Orient a influencé de nombreux penseurs, historiens et écrivains anglais du XVIIIe siècle, dont les textes ont contribué au développement d'une véritable mode orientale en Angleterre. Mais parmi ces représentations de l'Orient se confondent ouvrages érudits et fictifs, connaissance et imagination.Relisant un corpus de romans dits pseudo-orientaux à partir de leur intertexte savant, Claire Gallien met en évidence la déconstruction des frontières entre textes fictifs et non-fictifs. Si le roman s'inspire de l'érudition orientaliste, celle-ci emploie des techniques de vulgarisation propres à l'écriture romanesque.Dans L'Orient anglais C. Gallien examine le lien qui unissait une mode à un système de connaissance, et permet de voir le rôle d'une culture étrangère dans la constitution d'une littérature nationale.…

Hardback. Zustand: New.

Paperback. Zustand: New. The development of political economy as a philosophical preoccupation constitutes a defining feature of the Enlightenment, but no consensual agreement on this issue was formed in the period. In this book contributors reassess the conflicting views on money, trade, banking, and the role of the State in the work of leading figures such as Locke, Davenant, Toland, Berkeley and Smith, and Smith's critics in revolutionary France.Key events, from the Recoinage crisis in the 1690s to the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s and the consequences of the French Revolution, sharpened the need for a more dynamic conception of economic forces in the midst of the Financial Revolution. Political economy emerged as a disruptive force, challenging philosophers to debate and define unstable phenomena in a new climate of expanding credit, innovation in money form, political change and international competition. In Money and political economy in the Enlightenment contributors investigate received critical assumptions about what was progressive and what was backward-looking, and reconsider traditional attempts to periodise the Enlightenment. Major questions explored include:the impact of economic and political crises on philosophy;transitions from mercantilist to 'classical' analyses of the market;the challenge of reviving ancient republicanism on the foundations of a modern commercial system, with its inherent social inequalities. …

Paperback. Zustand: New. Ever since Ian Watt's The Rise of the novel (1957), many critics have argued that a constitutive element of the early 'novel' is its embrace of realism. Anne F. Widmayer contends, however, that Restoration and early eighteenth-century prose narratives employ techniques that distance the reading audience from an illusion of reality; irony, hypocrisy, and characters who are knowingly acting for an audience are privileged, highlighting the artificial and false in fictional works.Focusing on the works of four celebrated playwright-novelists, Widmayer explores how the increased interiority of their prose characters is ridiculed by the use of techniques drawn from the theatre to throw into doubt the novel's ability to portray an unmediated 'reality'. Aphra Behn's dramatic techniques question the reliability of female narrators, while Delarivier Manley undermines the impact of women's passionate anger by suggesting the self-consciousness of their performances. In his later drama, William Congreve subverts the character of the apparently objective critic that is recurrent in his prose work, whilst Henry Fielding uses the figure of the satirical writer in his rehearsal plays to mock the novelist's aspiration to control the way a reader reads the text. Through analysing how these writers satirize the reading public's desire for clear distinctions between truth and illusion, Anne F. Widmayer also highlights the equally fluid boundaries between prose fiction and drama.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. Sade's rehabilitation as a major Enlightenment writer has hitherto not extended to a re-evaluation of his dramatic works. With a theoretical framework inspired by psychoanalysis and dramatic theory, and attentive to eighteenth-century theoretical debates, Thomas Wynn demonstrates the value of these neglected works. This is the first study to consider the nature and implications of Sade's dramatic aesthetic, and to define the erotic quality of spectatorship in his experimental plays.Challenging the assumption that the gaze is sadistic, the author uses insights from film theory to argue that Sade adapts contemporary theatrical texts and practice to create an aesthetic distinct from that of his novels. Rather than replicate the style of such works as Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome, Sade's drama anticipates a masochistic model, as theorised by Theodor Reik and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis of Sadean spectatorship takes a thematic rather than chronological or text-by-text approach. The author argues that Sade, as an atheist materialist, focuses on the structural elements of theatre to produce visual pleasure rather than moral improvement, and that he elaborates an insistently visual dramatic aesthetic, a mode analogous to the linguistic saturation of the novels' tout dire.With reference to eighteenth-century obscene drama, theatre architecture and the history of visuality, the author explores the paradox that Sade's theatre is meant not for the stage, but for the private imagination. His visionary theatre is an example of the late eighteenth-century sublime, an aesthetic of the ineffable and the unrepresentable which, in its emphasis on the survival of the demeaned individual, structurally resembles masochism.Without deforming his technique or strategy, the author shows that Sade's voluptuous theatre - like his fiction - addresses an individual whose sovereignty in a godless world is intimately linked to the independent imagination. This book will be of interest to all those working in eighteenth-century drama and theory of spectatorship.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. Co-Winner of theModern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for ItalianStudies, 2018.The rediscovery of the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1774) - especially his New science - is a post-Revolutionary phenomenon. Stressing the elements that keep society together by promoting a sense of belonging, Vico's philosophy helped shape a new Italian identity and intellectual class. Poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) responded perceptively to the spreading and manipulation of Vico's ideas, but to what extent can he be considered Vico's heir?Through examining the reasons behind the success of the New science in early nineteenth-century Italy, Martina Piperno uncovers the cultural trends, debates, and obsessions fostered by Vico's work. She reconstructs the penetration of Vico-related discourses in circles and environments frequented by Leopardi, and establishes and analyses a latent Vico-Leopardi relationship. Her highly original reading sees Leopardi reacting to the tensions of his time, receiving Vico's message indirectly without a need to draw directly from the source. By exploring the oblique influence of Vico's thought on Leopardi, Martina Piperno highlights the unique character of Italian modernity and its tendency to renegotiate tradition and innovation, past and future.…

Hardback. Zustand: New.

Hardback. Zustand: New. Qui dit Diderot dit philosophe par excellence, encyclopédiste en chef, prôneur d'un matérialisme absolu, prosateur ludique et parfois cocasse. Pourtant, au cours des cinquante dernières années, la critique nous a dévoilé l'autre visage de Diderot - celui d'un théoricien de la politique qui s'oppose à ses contemporains en évitant les traités et en favorisant les vifs échanges et contre-attaques intellectuelles. Dans Sens et fonction de l'utopie tahitienne dans l'oeuvre politique de Diderot, Bernard Papin replace le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville dans son contexte historique et nous propose de le découvrir en tant que tournant décisif dans la pensée politique de celui qui a démenti vouloir écrire 'un de ces traités du bonheur, qui ne sont jamais que l'histoire du bonheur de chacun de ceux qui les ont faits'. S'inscrivant dans une longue tradition de textes utopiques, Le Supplément déjoue les attentes et semble aller à l'encontre des méthodes habituelles de Diderot. A mi-chemin entre réalisme et onirisme, ce traité aux allures de rêverie et teinté de provocation représente pour Papin le moment où Diderot devient père de la Révolution, préférant 'les vociférations des peuples en colère aux conversations feutrées des alcôves princières'.…

Paperback. Zustand: New. By convention, the likely end of the career of an eighteenth-century actress was marriage, the convent or the gutter. Jeanne Quinault used her talents to shape a most unconventional life. Despite her provincial origins, she was a favourite for over twenty years at the Comédie-Française and also carved an identity for herself in literary and salon life.Jeanne Quinault's role as organizer of the société badine, called the Bout-du-Banc, is what has attracted the most interest, but historians have not generally recognized in her a salonnière as devoted to benevolence and mentorship as her wealthier and better-born contemporaries. From the time of her depiction in the pseudo-memoirs of Mme d'Épinay, the story has been distorted and errors have been handed down. This study offers a fresh assessment of her friendships with Caylus, Piron, Duclos, Maurepas and many other prominent individuals.In the theatrical sphere, Mlle Quinault promoted the development of sentimental comedy, sponsored both authors and actors, and participated in the creation of a number of works, including those of Françoise de Graffigny. Another client was Voltaire, whose letters shed light on the interplay between writers and performers. On a broader scale, the story of Jeanne Quinault is also that of the large acting family to which she belonged and of their aspiration to acceptance in polite society.Drawing on archival resources and unpublished collections of letters, this work offers readers the first detailed study of the actress and her circle.…

Hardback. Zustand: New.

Paperback. Zustand: New. During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar's writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world.John Millar's organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. Over five chapters that address the historical and comparative models developed by the thinker, Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Nicholas B. Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics.…