Description Shaffer’s play, originally published in 1981, presents a conflict between composers Mozart and Salieri that centers on questions of genius and religious faith. Set in Vienna during the 1780s, the play explores connections between […]
Category Archives: Curated Research
The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France
Description Norman argues that the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns ended in victory for the Ancients, a significant reassessment. This book helps us to understand disciplines of knowledge, categorized as arts and sciences. Norman covers […]
An Experiment with an Air Pump
Description Inspired by Joseph Wright’s 1768 painting, Stephenson’s play juxtaposes scientific exploration in 1799 with scientific exploration in 1999. The play raises questions about scientific ethics with regard to dissection of human bodies and to […]
The Passions of the Soul
Description Although this work has been overshadowed in the history of philosophy by Descartes’s more famous Meditations, it contains his most mature and influential discussion of mental states (specifically emotions) as the object of scientific […]
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Description The Essay marks an important moment in the prehistory of empirical psychology. Locke seeks to explain how we come to have certain mental states (“ideas”) while doggedly avoiding metaphysical speculation of the sort found […]
Christian Wolff’s Prolegomena to Empirical and Rational Psychology: Translation and Commentary
Description In this translation of a short selection of Wolff’s extremely influential Psychologia empirica (published in 1732, with a second edition released in 1738), he sets out some of his key assumptions regarding how to […]
Critique of the Faculty of Judgment [Urteilskraft]
Description Received most often as Kant’s aesthetic treatise, but also understood as his mature political treatise (cf., Hannah Arendt’s “ectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy). Unlike most aesthetic treatises before and since, this one privileges natural […]
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Description Deserves as much credit as any source for bringing the political implications of Kant’s Critique of Judgment into contemporary discourse. Despondent over the perceived failure of the French Revolution, Schiller asks, “Why are we […]
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
Description Argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgment represents his mature political philosophy. Judgment is important for Arendt as the faculty which mediates between particularity and universality, thereby providing the conditions for a uniquely human interpolation […]
“Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society, 1640–1790”
Description Shows how Kant wrote his Critique of Judgment as a synthesis of English theories of “taste” and civil society and German theories of “aesthetic.” Writers since Hobbes have used theories of art to advance […]