The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. Edited by Catherine L. Albanese. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1988. ix + 360 pp. $59.95 cloth; $34.95 paper.

1990 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 416-417
Author(s):  
Peter W. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Bronson Alcott ◽  
Amos Bronson Alcott

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

Romantic Influence and Nature Reconsidered: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
British Romanticism

This chapter reads the thought and writing of Emerson and Thoreau as exhibiting a knowing self-consciousness about their treatment of self and nature and its use of allusion to the literary and cultural tradition of British Romanticism. What is offered is a fresh awareness of the intellectual and imaginative engagement of the thought of Emerson and Thoreau with the works of Byron, Shelley and Keats. The chapter also points up the affinities rather than the divisions between these two important American writers and their ideas about self and nature.

Laws That Refuse To Be Stated: The Post-Sectarian Spiritualities of Emerson, Thoreau, and D. T. Suzuki

2011 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-654
Author(s):  
Palmer Rampell
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Henry David Thoreau

Drawing on previously untranslated Japanese articles, this essay reveals the powerful and sustained influence New England transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau exerted on the highly renowned and yet highly unorthodox arbiter of Japanese Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki.

Pierre Hadot as a Reader of Wittgenstein

Paragraph ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Laugier
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Ethical Reflection ◽  
Spiritual Exercise ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Pierre Hadot ◽  
Point Of Departure

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation.

The Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
David L. Norton
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Informal Group ◽  
Moral Individualism ◽  
Four Books ◽  
American Thought

Henry Thoreau boasted that he was widely travelled in Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there on 12 July 1817, and he died there on 6 May 1862, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four years. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College, and in 1838 he joined Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the informal group that became known as the New England Transcendentalists. The author of four books, many essays and poems, and a voluminous journal, he is best known for the book Walden and the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, and for the circumstances attending these two milestones in American thought and literature.

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