DIVBased on a series of lectures delivered in 1840, Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History considers the creation of heroes and the ways they exert heroic leadership. From the divine and prophetic to the poetic to the religious to the political, Carlyle investigates the mysterious qualities that elevate humans to cultural significance. By situating the text in the context of six essays by distinguished scholars that reevaluate both Carlyle’s work and his ideas, David (...) Sorensen and Brent Kinser argue that Carlyle's concept of heroism stresses the hero’s spiritual dimension. In Carlyle’s engagement with various heroic personalities, he dislodges religiosity from religion, myth from history, and truth from “quackery” as he describes the wondrous ways in which these “flowing light-fountains” unlock the heroic potential of ordinary human beings. /div. (shrink)

The function of REM, or any other stage of sleep, can currently only be conjectured. A rational evaluation of the role of REM in memory processing requires systematic testing of hypotheses that are optimally derived from a complete synthesis of existing knowledge. Our view is that the large number of studies supporting a relationship between REM-related brain activity and memory is not easily explained away. [Vertes & Eastman].

The Walker model raises a number of questions, particularly about the nature of the sleep states involved in consolidation enhancement. While REM sleep, Stage 2 sleep, and Stage 3/4 sleep have been implicated in procedural learning, we still do not understand which types of learning are involved with specific sleep states. Several possible ideas for future research are suggested.

In this article, I foreground the role of relationality in Husserl’s later reflections on ethics and self-constitution, with a particular interest in Husserl’s account of sacrifice. I exposit how Husserl’s account of self-constitution and the conflict of absolute values between competing vocations offers a solution to Brentano’s rendering of the obligation to “choose the best among the ends attainable.” I explore the numerous instances in which Husserl uses the parent-child relation to illustrate the absolute value of our relation to an (...) individual and how this absolute value triumphs over other seemingly rational maxims. Although problematic in several ways, Husserl’s account of motherhood grounds his notion of self-constitution in particular relations with others, rather than in a general category of nation or humanity. I conclude by considering how his emphasis on phenomenological constitution and his approach to value and sacrifice may inform future projects in phenomenological relational ethics. (shrink)

In this article, I foreground the role of relationality in Husserl’s later reflections on ethics and self-constitution, with a particular interest in Husserl’s account of sacrifice. I exposit how Husserl’s account of self-constitution and the conflict of absolute values between competing vocations offers a solution to Brentano’s rendering of the obligation to “choose the best among the ends attainable.” I explore the numerous instances in which Husserl uses the parent-child relation to illustrate the absolute value of our relation to an (...) individual and how this absolute value triumphs over other seemingly rational maxims. Although problematic in several ways, Husserl’s account of motherhood grounds his notion of self-constitution in particular relations with others, rather than in a general category of nation or humanity. I conclude by considering how his emphasis on phenomenological constitution and his approach to value and sacrifice may inform future projects in phenomenological relational ethics. (shrink)

In a promising working note to the Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty proposes that we understand Being according to topological space – relations of proximity, distance, and envelopment – and move away from an image of Being based on homogeneous, inert Euclidean space. With reference to treatments of cross-sensory perception, color-blindness, and the concept of quale or qualia, I seek to rehearse this shift from Euclidean to topological Being by illustrating how modern science confines color itself to a Euclidean model of (...) color space. I discuss “being as Object” in Merleau-Ponty’s later work before showing how color, and indeed all perception, is reduced to being as Object in the form of “quale”. Next, I address discussions in Merleau-Ponty’s work and contemporary research to illustrate how synesthesia and so-called color-blindness are rendered abnormal by this objectified being of color. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of synesthesia follows directly from his rejection of quale, and his use of color perception serves as a rejection of solipsism. With appeal to his proposed topological model of Being, I conclude by recognizing the problematic nature of synesthesia and color-blindness as being ontological, not psychological.Dans une note de travail, à mon sens décisive, du Visible et l’Invisible, Merleau-Ponty propose que l’on comprenne l’Être à partir de l’espace topologique – relations de proximité, distance et enveloppement – allant à l’encontre d’une l’image de l’Être fondée sur un espace euclidien homogène et inerte. En faisant référence aux traitements de la perception synesthésique, au daltonisme et au concept de quale ou qualia, j’essayerai de décrire ce passage de l’Être euclidien à l’Être topologique en montrant que la science moderne finit par confiner la couleur dans un modèle euclidien d’espace-couleur. J’examinerai « l’Être-objet » dans les derniers écrits de Merleau-Ponty avant de montrer comment la couleur, et plus en général la perception, est réduite à être comme un Objet dans la forme d’un « quale ». Ensuite, en examinant les analyses merleau-pontiennes et les recherches contemporaines, je montrerai comment la synesthésie et le daltonisme sont donc considérés comme anormaux à partir de cette objectivation de la couleur. La lecture que Merleau-Ponty donne de la synesthésie est la conséquence directe de son refus du quale, et l’utilisation qu’il fait de la perception des couleurs sert comme un refus du solipsisme. En faisant appel au modèle topologique de l’Être qu’il propose, je conclurai en constatant que la nature problématique de la synesthésie et du daltonisme est ontologique et non pas psychologique.In una nota di lavoro al Visibile e l’invisibile, Merleau-Ponty propone di comprendere l’Essere a partire da uno spazio topologico – secondo le relazioni di prossimità, distanza e avvolgimento – e abbandona l’immagine di un Essere fondato su uno spazio omogeneo, inerte, euclideo. Facendo riferimento ai trattamenti per le percezioni sinestetiche, al daltonismo e al concetto di quale o qualia, si cercherà di provare questo passaggio da un Essere euclideo a uno topologico, illustrando quanto la scienza moderna tenda a ridurre il concetto stesso di colore a un modello euclideo di spazio-colore. Si esaminerà l’“Essere-oggetto” degli ultimi lavori di Merleau-Ponty, mostrando come il colore, e in realtà la percezione tout court, vengano ridotti a oggetto nella forma di “quale”. Infine, si esaminerà l’opera merleau-pontiana e la ricerca contemporanea al fine di illustrare quanto la sinestesia e il daltonismo siano resi anormali da questa oggettivazione dell’essere del colore. L’interpretazione merleau-pontiana della sinestesia deriva proprio dal suo rifiuto del quale, e il suo uso della percezione del colore funge da rifiuto del solipsismo. Ricorrendo al modello topologico di Essere elaborato da Merleau-Ponty, si conclude riconoscendo che il problema della sinestesia e del daltonismo è, a tutti gli effetti, ontologico e non psicologico. (shrink)

As one of America’s "public intellectuals," John Dewey was engaged in a lifelong struggle to understand the human mind and the nature of human inquiry. According to Thomas C. Dalton, the successful pursuit of this mission demanded that Dewey become more than just a philosopher; it compelled him to become thoroughly familiar with the theories and methods of physics, psychology, and neurosciences, as well as become engaged in educational and social reform. Tapping archival sources and Dewey’s extensive correspondence, Dalton reveals (...) that Dewey had close personal and intellectual ties to scientists and scholars who helped form the mature expression of his thought. Dewey’s relationships with F. M. Alexander, Henri Matisse, Niels Bohr, Myrtle McGraw, and Lawrence K. Frank, among others, show how Dewey dispersed pragmatism throughout American thought and culture. (shrink)

Originally published in 1921 as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume contains the first of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, a sequence of essays by radical thinker Thomas Carlyle which appeared in 1850. A short editorial introduction is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Carlyle and his works.

Sleep has long been a topic of fascination for artists and scientists. Why do we sleep? What function does sleep serve? Why do we dream? What significance can we attach to our dreams? We spend so much of our lives sleeping, yet its precise function is unclear, in spite of our increasing understanding of the processes generating and maintaining sleep. We now know that sleep can be accompanied by periods of intense cerebral activity, yet only recently has experimental data started (...) to provide us with some insights into the type of processing taking place in the brain as we sleep. There is now strong evidence that sleep plays a crucial role in learning and in the consolidation of memories. Once the preserve of psychoanalysts, 'dreaming' is now a topic of increasing interest amongst scientists. With research into sleep growing, this volume is both timely and valuable in presenting a unique study of the relationship between sleep, learning, and memory. It brings together a team of international scientists researching sleep in both human and animal subjects. Aimed at researchers within the fields of neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology, this book will be an important first step in developing a full scientific understanding of the most intriguing state of consciousness. (shrink)

Pierre Maquet1,2,6, Steven Laureys1,2, Philippe Peigneux1,2,3, Sonia Fuchs1, Christophe Petiau1, Christophe Phillips1,6, Joel Aerts1, Guy Del Fiore1, Christian Degueldre1, Thierry Meulemans3, André Luxen1, Georges Franck1,2, Martial Van Der Linden3, Carlyle Smith4 and Axel Cleeremans5.

Senshu University has hosted many international conferences on medieval English literature - primarily on Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland - as well as in the related fields of Old Germanic, medieval French and Renaissance Italian literature. These international collaborations inform and contribute to the present volume, which addresses the heritage bequeathed to medieval English language and literature by the classical world.<BR> This volume explores the development of medieval English literature in light of contact with Germanic and Old Norse cultures, on (...) the one hand, and Romance languages, on the other. The book includes a comparative study of <I>Beowulf in the Germanic context, discusses aspects of <I>Piers Plowman and its tradition, and offers philological approaches to Chaucer (especially his <I>Troilus and Criseyde). The articles assembled here collectively suggest how the torches of classical learning were carried from continental Europe to illuminate the pages of medieval English literature. (shrink)

Despite an efflorescence of historical scholarship on the theme of monarchy in nineteenth-century Britain, the views of the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in this regard have been explored only in fragmentary and incomplete fashion. The present article aims to offer a comprehensive survey of Carlyle's thought regarding monarchy, arguing that on the whole, Carlyle was strongly and consistently opposed to monarchy on the hereditary principle, claiming that this had become an absurd anachronism in (...) the modern (democratic) world. Instead, Carlyle strongly and consistently promoted a merit-based aristocracy of talent, in which the ‘best’ man would rule, regardless of heredity or social origin. Indeed, in his historical writings, he was quite prepared to endorse regicide as a means to replacing inept hereditary monarchs with low-born men of destiny such as Oliver Cromwell. Although Carlyle refrained from publicly demanding the abolition of the monarchy in contemporary Britain, his private correspondence and conversation were replete with sneers and snide asides regarding Queen Victoria and her predecessors. (shrink)

The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations and superiority of the white race in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his anti-emancipationist perspective in “The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” followed by John Stuart Mill’s divergent response to him in 1850 titled, “The Negro Question.” In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman’s (...) perspective, “The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question” by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. Although Mill’s essay was a direct attack on Carlyle’s explosive article and is overtly against Carlyle and Bodington’s ideas, this paper argues that an imperialist agenda underlies Mill’s views and in fact poses the same theories of Carlyle and Bodington. The paper first proceeds to interrogate Mill’s hegemonic subtext through a comparison of these three essays by situating them within the scientific discourse of the era, arguing that science, especially phrenology and evolution theories, didn’t exist in a vacuum, but was used to perpetrate the normative racial ideologies of the period. The paper also uses Edward Said’s theory of ‘Othering the Orient’ in Culture and Imperialism to show that while Mill seemingly diverges from Carlyle’s stance, this ‘othering’ is in fact present in all three writers’ works. (shrink)

That the great Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) exercised a formative influence over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ‘British Idealism’ has long been recognized by historians. Through works such as Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), Past and Present (1843), and Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Carlyle transmitted his ideas regarding the immanence of the divine in nature and man, the infinite character of duty, and the ethical role of the state to a generation of subsequent philosophers. The following (...) article will extend this insight, arguing that through the agency of an array of migrant Scottish intellectuals, Carlyle's writings made an equally significant contribution to the development of Idealism in English-speaking Canada. (shrink)

This book initiates a new interdisciplinary approach in the literary and philosophical treatment of Carlyle, challenging the long-held notion that his work was solely influenced by German idealism. Tracing Carlyle's intellectual inheritance through Hume, Reid, and Hamilton, Jessop argues that Carlyle was crucially influenced by Scottish philosophy and that this philosophical discourse can in turn be used to inform critical readings of his texts. The book will be of interest to readers of Carlyle, philosophers, and specialists (...) in the literature and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (shrink)

Acknowledgments T HOMAS CARLYLE MIGHT HAVE HAD MANY CURMUDGEONLY QUALITIES, but this certainly does not extend to the scholars who research him. ...

Originally published in 1933, this volume contains the emended text of the Adamson Lecture for 1930, delivered by H. J. C. Grierson under the title 'Carlyle and the Hero'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the modern and possibly controversial applications of Carlyle's philosophy.

This article signals at a dearth of critical engagement with Thomas Carlyle's Presbyterian heritage resulting from the received whiggish narrative of his Calvinism as unenlightened, anachronistic, and backward-looking. It proceeds to challenge this view by examining closely Carlyle's creative use of key Calvinist concepts in his cosmopolitan and enlightened dialogue with the contemporary periodical press over British and European cultures. Carlyle is shown to be an adept purveyor both of the Edinburgh Magazine's enlightened idiom and of Blackwood's (...) morally conservative and artistically cosmopolitan agendas, while also making creative capital of the Anti-Jacobin's powerful Gothic imagery and of the critical verve of the Westminster Review. The main addressees of Carlyle's reading of the signs of the times, I argue, are contemporary Whigs. Carlyle's depiction of Macaulay as a ‘spiritual hippopotamus’ spells Carlyle's broader critique of the modern lack of imagination of the spiritual which sponsors deterministic religious and secular readings of reality. Carlyle displays his enlightened Calvinist perspective in discussing the French Revolution through such key Scottish Enlightenment concepts as free will, conscience, civilisational and moral progress, and divine providence. Insightful and creative use of his inherited Scottish Calvinist heritage characterises Carlyle's open, cosmopolitan reading of the signs of the times. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Perfectionist readings of Nietzsche have paid much attention to the positive influence of Emerson. I suggest that exploring Nietzsche's reception of Thomas Carlyle, a leading contemporary and friend of Emerson's, provides us with additional interesting insights into Nietzsche's thought. What is distinctive here is that Nietzsche strongly objects to the ethical picture that Carlyle propounds in the lecture series On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. By looking at the grounds of this opposition I argue that (...) Nietzsche holds a skeptical, antiromantic perfectionism that is sensitive to the very dangers to which it gives rise. (shrink)

This title, first published in 1943, aims to discover and discuss the convictions which the philosopher Thomas Carlyle believed to be of importance for his time, and the ways in which he personally entertained these ideas. In doing this F. A. Lea has concentrated attention on the works which Carlyle himself regarded as containing all that was essential to his message. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy and history.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Carlyle and Scottish Thought. By Ralph Jessop xvii + 266 pp. £40.00 cloth.