An Inquiry into Thomas Jefferson's Ideas of Beauty

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Hafertepe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Standard Of Taste ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Good Proportion

A careful reading of eighteenth-century aesthetics provides a view of Thomas Jefferson's thinking about art and architecture quite different from the existing scholarly paradigm. Jefferson owned, read, and quoted Enlightenment philosophy and criticism, most notably that of Henry Home, known as Lord Kames. Far from privileging reason over emotion, these philosophers held that all people are created with innate senses of beauty and morality, as well as a rational faculty. Because of the sense of beauty, certain qualities in objects can inspire the idea of beauty in the mind; other ideas of beauty are comparative, requiring use of the rational faculty. Jefferson's aesthetic theory was informed by his understanding of the human mind, which led to an architecture rooted in good proportion and to didactic paintings rooted in history ancient and modern. As with other Enlightenment thinkers, Jefferson endorsed the entire classical tradition, admiring not only the architecture of ancient Rome and modern Paris but also of Palladio and the French Baroque. Similarly, he admired the work of minor Baroque painters as well as the neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David. Nor was Jeffersonian classicism nationalistic; rather, he endorsed the Enlightenment concept of a universal and uniform standard of taste.

Tetens, Johann Nicolaus (1736–1807)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunter Zoller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Second Career ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Descriptive Account ◽  
German School ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
School Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

Tetens was a German philosopher, mathematician and physicist, with a second career as a Danish government official, who was active in Northern Germany and Denmark during the second half of the eighteenth century. Together with Johann Heinrich Lambert and Moses Mendelssohn, Tetens forms the transition from the German school philosophy of Leibniz, Wolff and Crusius to the new, critical philosophy of Kant. Tetens’ philosophical work reflects the combined influence of contemporary German, British and French philosophical currents. His main contribution to philosophy is a detailed descriptive account of the principal operations of the human mind that combines psychological, epistemological and metaphysical considerations. While showing a strong empiricist leaning, Tetens rejected the associationist and materialist accounts of the mind, favoured in Britain and France, and insisted on the active, spontaneous role of the mind in the formation and processing of mental contents.

scholarly journals From the Closet of the Mind to Mindedness: Rethinking 'Animism' at the Crossover of Science Studies, Postcolonial Ethnography and Environmental Humanities

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fani Cettl
Keyword(s):  
Animal Ethics ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
World Picture ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Discourses ◽  
The Mind

Recently the concept of animism has been radically rethought at the crossover of postcolonial ethnography, environmental humanities and science studies. This reconceptualization aims at decolonising western sciences, destabilising an anthropocentric world picture, and articulating an environmental and animal ethics in the age of the Anthropocene. It decidedly abandons the controversial colonial epistemology in which animism was first introduced as a primitive and regressive belief in the supernatural spirits. In this essay I would like to situate this current rethinking of animism into a genealogy of historical discourses, following scholarship that has theorized one aspect of the Enlightenment secularisation processes as the internalisation of spirits and ghosts from nonhuman materiality on the outside into the space of the human mind. Building on this approach, I propose that the current, post-Enlightenment, posthumanist, cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism can be said to mark a certain historical reversal: an externalization of what has been seen as within and of the human mind, which I will in this essay term mindedness, to the outside nonhuman materiality (again).

scholarly journals Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment in Russia? Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment in Russia? Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1089-1120
Author(s):  
Natalie Bayer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Mind

The article explores the themes of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment through the lens of Freemasonry, and, more specifically, Freemasons in Russia who wrote history. It tests the approaches of Masonic history writers against Berlin’s definitions of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Whilst a definitive break between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment seems attractive, the article advances a more nuanced picture of the plurality of religious and secular discourse in Russia. Instead of opposing the Enlightenment, many late eighteenth-century Masonic writers of history provided their own, alternative interpretative models of history as a way out of the perceived crisis between the mind and the soul.

Distributed Cognition and Women Writers’ Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind’

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-186
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Experience ◽  
The Mind

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Colley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
British History ◽  
Western World ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State ◽  
Art And Architecture

Britain's “long” eighteenth century, which began with one aristocratic revolution in 1688 and ended with another in 1832, was a pageant of success. The nation's art and architecture reached their elegant and original best. Its capital became the center of print culture, finance, fashion, and commercial creativity, the largest and most vibrant city in the Western world. The British constitution became a topic for eulogy, as much by the unenlightened and illiterate at home as by the Enlightenment literati abroad. The armed forces, fiscal system, and bureaucracy of the British state grew in efficacy and range, bringing victory in all but one of a succession of major wars. Legitimized by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power, Britain's landed elite kept at bay every domestic revolution except the industrial one, which only enriched it more. The American Revolution, of course, was not averted; but while this crisis embarrassed the British Empire, it did not destroy it. Even before 1776, the conquest of Canada had reduced the thirteen colonies' strategic significance, just as their profitability to the mother country had been outstripped by its Indian possessions; their final loss was made up, and more than made up, with relentless and almost contemptuous speed. Between 1780 and 1820 some 150 million men and women in India, Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives.

scholarly journals Medicine, connoisseurship, and the animal body

2020 ◽  
pp. 007327532094900
Author(s):  
Alexander Wragge-Morley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Lower Body ◽  
Animal Body ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Disembodied Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Medical Therapeutics ◽  
Bernard Mandeville

This essay reconsiders the links between medicine, connoisseurship, and aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. Taking a satire on the body of the physician and collector John Woodward as its starting point, I show that medicine and connoisseurship shared a deep preoccupation with the possibility that the animal body could excessively influence the workings of the mind. Pursuing this line of argument, moreover, I will reconsider the place of mind–body dualism in eighteenth-century British medicine and aesthetics. With the exception of materialists such as the philosopher-physician Bernard Mandeville, medics and aesthetic theorists tended to identify the exercise of judgment with the operations of a disembodied mind, unsullied by the embodied mechanisms of the lower body. In practice, however, the insistence that the most refined forms of judgment depended on the presence and activity of a disembodied, immaterial soul was less meaningful than it seems. When confronted by failures of judgment, medics and connoisseurs alike sought explanations in the mechanisms of the animal body. Whether or not they believed in the immateriality of the soul, they pictured the mind as a malfunctioning animal machine, to be cured through the material agency of medical therapeutics.

Aristotle's Formal Identity of Intellect and Object: A Solution to the Problem of Modal Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Robert C. Koons
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Modal Epistemology ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Object A ◽  
Formal Identity ◽  
Identity Thesis ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Objects ◽  
Aristotelian Metaphysics

In De Anima Book III, Aristotle subscribed to a theory of formal identity between the human mind and the extra-mental objects of our understanding. This has been one of the most controversial features of Aristotelian metaphysics of the mind. I offer here a defense of the Formal Identity Thesis, based on specifically epistemological arguments about our knowledge of necessary or essential truths.

The “New Empire of Common Sense”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul B. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

Although the rise of Scottish common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments of the Enlightenment, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the reception of Scottish common sense philosophy in the Atlantic world during the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter focuses on the British context in the period 1764–93, and examines published responses to James Oswald, James Beattie, and, especially, Thomas Reid. The chapter contextualizes the polemics of Joseph Priestley against the three Scots and argues that it was Joseph Berington rather than Priestley who was the first critic to claim that the appeal to common sense was the defining feature of “the Scotch school” of philosophy. It also shows that Reid was widely acknowledged to be the founder and most accomplished exponent of the “school”, whereas Beattie and Oswald were typically dismissed as being derivative thinkers.

Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-1750

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
General Point ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Enlightenment

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.

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