Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century

The long nineteenth century spans a host of important philosophical movements: romanticism, idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, to mention a few. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx are well-known names from this period. This, however, was also a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. Their works are less well known yet offer stimulating and pathbreaking contributions to nineteenth-century thought. In this period, women philosophers explored a wide range of philosophical topics and styles. Throughout the movements of romanticism, idealism, socialism, and phenomenology, women philosophers helped shape philosophy’s agenda and provided unique approaches to existential, political, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. While during the nineteenth century women continued to be (largely) excluded from formal education and positions, they developed ways of philosophizing that were accessible, intuitive, and activist in spirit. The present volume makes available to English-language readers––often for the first time––the works of nine significant women philosophers, with the hope of stimulating further interest in and scholarship on their works. The editors’ introductions offer a comprehensive overview of the contributions of women philosophers in the period as well as to individual figures and movements. The translations are furnished with explanatory footnotes and are designed to be accessible to students as well as scholars.

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Valérie Loichot

Martinican creolist Raphaël Confiant claims in an unabashed praise of Lafcadio Hearn that the nineteenth century writer “invented what today we might call ‘multiple identity’ or ‘creoleness’ [créolité].” Critic Chris Bongie notes that the word “creolization” appeared for the first time in the English language in Hearn’s 1890 novel Youma. In a letter written to his friend Henry Krehbel in 1883, Hearn himself announces this allegiance to all things creole as he signs “your creolized friend.” These comments identify the nineteenth century thinker not only as a precursor of creoleness, but more importantly, and also surprisingly, as a forerunner of both creoleness and creolization, two related terms that are philosophically unlike in Martinican thought.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Alonso

Seamlessly entwining archival research and sociological debates, The Last Abolition is a lively and engaging historical narrative that uncovers the broad history of Brazilian anti-slavery activists and the trajectory of their work, from earnest beginnings to eventual abolition. In detailing their principles, alliances and conflicts, Angela Alonso offers a new interpretation of the Brazilian anti-slavery network which, combined, forged a national movement to challenge the entrenched pro-slavery status quo. While placing Brazil within the abolitionist political mobilization of the nineteenth century, the book explores the relationships between Brazilian and foreign abolitionists, demonstrating how ideas and strategies transcended borders. Available for the first time in an English language edition, with a new introduction, this award-winning volume is a major contribution to the scholarship on abolition and abolitionists.


Author(s):  
Carl Phelpstead

The British reading public discovered the rich corpus of medieval Icelandic literature for the first time during the ‘long nineteenth century’. This chapter describes the ways in which British readers became aware of Old Norse-Icelandic literature through translations into English and through English-language editions of texts in the original language. Beginning with pioneering work of the pre-Victorian period, the chapter focuses on Victorian translators of medieval Icelandic literature (especially G. W. Dasent, William Morris, Sabine Baring-Gould, and W. G. Collingwood), as well as the collaborative editions and translations of Guðbrandur Vigfússon with Dasent or F. York Powell. The chapter shows that the dissemination of Icelandic sources was often linked with the discovery of Iceland as a travel destination or involved collaborating with Icelandic scholars resident in Britain. The conclusion briefly considers the legacy and influence of Victorian translators.


Author(s):  
Chris Jones

Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and ‘invention’ of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on ‘early’ language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton’s apprehension of ‘deep time’ in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of ‘constant roots’ whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so aetiologically to legitimize, a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the ‘extinct’ philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. A wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works of antiquarianism, philology, and Anglo-Saxon scholarship forms the evidential base that underpins the advancement of these two models for understanding the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry. New archival research and readings of unpublished papers by Tennyson, Whitman, and Morris is also presented here for the first time.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22

The introduction offers an overview of women philosophers in nineteenth-century German philosophy. In particular, it emphasizes the growing self-awareness of women philosophers and their exploration of a practice-oriented and socially aware philosophy. It situates the work of women philosophers within the larger tradition and calls for a new narrative of nineteenth-century thought that acknowledges the contributions of women philosophers and their lasting significance.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Tony Burke

Scholars interested in the Christian Apocrypha (CA) typically appeal to CA collections when in need of primary sources. But many of these collections limit themselves to material believed to have been written within the first to fourth centuries CE. As a result a large amount of non-canonical Christian texts important for the study of ancient and medieval Christianity have been neglected. The More Christian Apocrypha Project will address this neglect by providing a collection of new editions (some for the first time) of these texts for English readers. The project is inspired by the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project headed by Richard Bauckham and Jim Davila from the University of Edinburgh. Like the MOTP, the MCAP is envisioned as a supplement to an earlier collection of texts—in this case J. K. Elliott’s The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford 1991), the most recent English-language CA collection (but now almost two decades old). The texts to be included are either absent in Elliott or require significant revision. Many of the texts have scarcely been examined in over a century and are in dire need of new examination. One of the goals of the project is to spotlight the abilities and achievements of English (i.e., British and North American) scholars of the CA, so that English readers have access to material that has achieved some exposure in French, German, and Italian collections.


Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.


Author(s):  
Michael D. Gordin

Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1907) is a name we recognize, but perhaps only as the creator of the periodic table of elements. Generally, little else has been known about him. This book is an authoritative biography of Mendeleev that draws a multifaceted portrait of his life for the first time. As the book reveals, Mendeleev was not only a luminary in the history of science, he was also an astonishingly wide-ranging political and cultural figure. From his attack on Spiritualism to his failed voyage to the Arctic and his near-mythical hot-air balloon trip, this is the story of an extraordinary maverick. The ideals that shaped his work outside science also led Mendeleev to order the elements and, eventually, to engineer one of the most fascinating scientific developments of the nineteenth century. This book is a classic work that tells the story of one of the world's most important minds.


Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.


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