Morality, Justice, and Peace: Insights from Henry David Thoreau

In this book, Wolfram Hogrebe deals with the realm of the intermediate – an ancient philosophical tradition according to which philosophical thinking is concerned with a kind of intermediate space that holds the orders of concepts and ideas in a remarkable limbo. The in-between is, as it were, a medium sustaining both thoughts and languages and is thus likely to disclose uncharted areas where thinking itself changes. Hogrebe shows how frequently this in-between, which has also been known to surface in experiences of nature, is the subject theme of a host of different philosophers and poets such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Martin Heidegger, Henry David Thoreau and Peter Handke.

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The American Art of Memory

Religion and the Arts ◽

10.1163/15685292-02501003 ◽

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.

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Lewis Mumford

Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies ◽

10.5840/jis199681/24 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 49-68

Author(s):

Leonidas Donskis ◽

Keyword(s):

Regional Planning ◽

City Planning ◽

Henry David Thoreau ◽

Social Philosophy ◽

Garden City ◽

Social Theories ◽

American Romanticism ◽

Great Tradition ◽

Lewis Mumford ◽

The City

Lewis Mumford's discursive map, uncovering the trajectories of modem consciousness and Western social philosophy, dates back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the great tradition of American Romanticism However, Mumford's discursive map of the idea of the city cannot be reduced to architecture and city planning alone. His world of ideas draws on such thinkers and concepts as Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, Benton MacKaye's Eutopian ideas, Patrick Geddes' regional planning, and Frank Lloyd Wright's organic architecture (Broadacre City), anticipated by Louis Henri Sullivan. Mumford's theoretical constructions also reflect the worldviews of Simmel, Tönnies, Spengler, and Toynbee, as well as other influential social theories of the last two centuries, Mumford was apparently the first among twentieth-century intellectuals to grasp that human creation, interaction, self-fulfillment, and the search for perfectibility all take place in the city.

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