Skepticism and Belief in Early-Modern France: The Fideism of Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet

Despite the seeming oppositions between skepticism and religious belief, Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721) was both a devout Catholic and a philosophical skeptic. While this opposition may seem paradoxical to both modern readers and Huet’s contemporaries, this thesis explains how Huet’s scandalous posthumous Treatise Concerning the Weakness of Human Understanding (1723) fits into the intellectual curriculum of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By situating Huet in the intellectual context of Early-Modern France, this thesis demonstrates how philosophical skepticism became appealing to Catholic thinkers both as a polemic and as an epistemological stance in opposition to the rationalist transformation of pre-Enlightenment thought

Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine

This paper will examine the importance of Marcel Duchamp’s La Machine Célibataire (The Bachelor) on Art and Technology in the 20th and 21st centurie

"Utopia" by Thomas More : the political and legal system of Utopia as an answer to the "theologico-political problem"

Artykuł stanowi próbę interpretacji skonstruowanego przez Tomasza Morusa systemu politycznoprawnego fikcyjnej wyspy Utopii w kontekście wyzwania jakie dla myśli politycznej nowożytnej Europy stanowił tzw. "problem teologiczno-polityczny". Praca ma na celu wskazanie podstaw na jakich oparł się Morus przy próbie rozwiązania owego problemu (zarówno w jego wymiarze "publicznym", jak i "prywatnym"), sposób konstrukcji stworzonego ustroju państwowego, jak i jego ostateczny cel. Artykuł wskazuje także prawno-polityczne implikacje zastosowanych rozwiązań dla funkcjonowania człowieka w ustroju rządzonym przez niezmienne zasady moralności i cnoty. Kładzie także nacisk na przekształcenie życia politycznego jakie za sprawą swoich założeń dotyczących natury człowieka, jego dążeń, jak i wzajemnych relacji z państwem i społeczeństwem dokonuje w swojej koncepcji ustroju idealnego Morus.This article presents an interpretation of the political and legal system of the fictional island of Utopia as constructed by Thomas More in the context of a challenge posed to the political thought of early-modern Europe by "the theologico-political problem". The aim of the article is to show the foundations on which More based his attempt to solve the aforementioned problem (both in its "public" and "private" dimension) as well as the means of constructing the political and legal system of Utopia and its ultimate purpose. The article also indicates the implications of human existence in a polity ruled by immutable principles of morality and virtue. It also puts an emphasis on the transformation of the political life that, due to axioms concerning the nature of humans, their desires as well as relations to the state and society, is proposed by More in his concept of an ideal polity

The Spiritual Nature of the Italian Renaissance

This study seeks to investigate the influence of faith in the emergence and development of the Italian Renaissance, in both the artwork and writing of the major artists and thinkers of the day, and the impact that new expressions of faith had on the viewing public. While the Renaissance is often labeled as a secular movement by modern scholars, this interpretation is largely due to the political motives of the Medici family who dominated Florence as the center of this artistic rebirth, on and off again throughout the period. On close examination, the philosophical and creative undercurrents of the movement were much more complex. The thinkers of the era would often place Greco-Roman philosophers in the context of their Christian era and use their wisdom in addition to, rather than superseding, church and biblical authority, embracing figures like Virgil and Augustine in concert rather than opposition. These Christian humanists saw their work as a way to engage humanity in a quest for knowledge in ever expanding ways, but still with an undercurrent of reflection on the role of the divine. Spiritual inquiries of Dante, Lorenzo Valla, and Petrarch in written works are similarly manifested in the visual arts by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarotti, and Raphael Sanzio. These ‘big three’ painters of the Renaissance portrayed their individual Christian ideas through their own writings, sketchbooks, and all forms of artistic expressions, many of which are evaluated in this paper. Finally, the transition of art to a scale inviting the viewer to experience it personally marked a vital change. The shift from divine proportions to more naturalistic and relatable art also logically harmonizes with the mindset of the broader Renaissance movement. This paper seeks to examine the depth and complexity of key Renaissance figures and how concepts of Christian faith and spirituality translated into their works

A Deconstruction of The Discourses on Livy : a biography of Niccolo Machiavelli and his Political Legacy

This paper examines the historical context of Machiavelli and his life experience that prompted his infamous writing in The Prince & Discourses on Livy. By examining Machiavelli\u27s life, the author hopes to provide a clearer understanding of the Florentine and his controversial political ideology

Tracing Sehnsucht to Place: Mythopoeia, Visions, Transcendence, and the Journey of the Rhetorical Refugee

This dissertation seeks to explicate a rhetorical conceptualization from C. S. Lewis’s notion of longing, or sehnsucht, in hopes of extending its employment to two other contemporary contexts—Christian Hedonism and American Humanism. To do so, I utilize the method of rhetorical criticism to analyze Lewis’s most famous sermon entitled The Weight of Glory. Following this paradigm chapter, I then compare uses of longing within the contemporary evangelical philosophy called Christian Hedonism initiated during the eighties through the seminal text entitled Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. In doing so, I uncover distinct aspects of longing within a metaphysical framework of rhetorical transcendence. Through the lens of Betz’s (1985) Theology of Hope, the sacred substance of joy emerged as a form of immanence offering sustenance to participants for their continued progression to the Christian Other. Finally, I rhetorically analyzed the three manifestoes of the American Humanist Association (AHA) as a means to discover uses of longing within a philosophical framework totally absent of supernaturalism. Distinctively, humanists, like Christian hedonists, utilize longing in relation to imagining a futuristic world community. Through this rhetorical vision, the humanistic discourse of the manifestoes is shown to be a form of religious rhetoric in that it reveals the world as already in transition through constitutive rhetoric. The ultimate finding of this dissertation demonstrates that the employment of longing as a rhetorical motive in these three scenarios all inherently aim for a place, or topos, thus innovating past perceptions of rhetorical transcendence

Timothy Leary and the trace of the posthuman

Author's post-print version.If we trace the line of Timothy Leary’s thought from The Politics of Ecstasy to Your Brain is God, he is outlining his programme for social and personal change based on the consumption of psychedelics and the 3-stage process of ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’. And yet, at the same time, he is mapping out a process which has a profound relationship to the shifting concept of the human. Leary’s programme was one which paradoxically urged the reader to re-humanize him or herself by stepping out of preprogrammed social games even to the extent of temporarily destroying the ego under heavy doses of psychedelics, and yet at the same time sketched out an emerging posthuman future, in which the subject in and of ideology (Althusser) was to be replaced by a post-subjective, post-ideological being whose processes Leary believed would operate on a different ontological level. Leary argued that this level was that of the cellular process of the body, the automatic somatic workings over which the ego has no control and yet which inform and create the majority of sensory impressions and subjective consciousness. His means of reaching this level was, at first, drugs; then from the 1980s his focus shifted to computer technology: ‘Electronics and psychedelics have shattered the sequence of orderly linear identification, the automatic imitation that provides racial and social continuity’. In his introduction to the 1995 reissue of High Priest (1968), Leary pointed out that ‘You will note (and, perhaps, be amused by) our Breathless Spirituality, our lavish use religious metaphors. Today, of course, we are beginning to use neurological and digital terms to suggest how we can operate our brains’; he warns the reader that the Priest in the title is ironic. My focus here is not on the means but the end: not on drugs or computers as such but on Leary’s revisions of the human; on his problematic quest to refashion the human being and move beyond it towards posthuman states which were largely uncharted but towards which his chosen tools, fashionable for each era in which he was writing, could point the way