Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 1989"

Arnauld and the Cartesian philosophy of ideas

Abstract: This is the first full-length study of Antoine Arnauld, one of the most important thinkers of the seventeenth century. It examines both Arnauld's commitment to the methodological and metaphysical principles of Descartes and his own contributions to the metaphysics and epistemology of perception and knowledge. In particular, it scrutinizes the celebrated debate between Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche, in which Arnauld argued for a view of ideas as mental acts, against Malebranche's view of them as objects in the divine intellect. Questioning a popular view of Descartes and the Cartesians posited in the mid-eighteenth century by Thomas Reid and most recently developed by Richard Rorty, Steven Nadler argues that Arnauld's "act theory" faithfully interprets Descartes and provides a foundation for a direct realist theory of perception. Moreover, Nadler argues, Arnauld's understanding of the representative character/objective reality of ideas provides for a sophisticated explanation of the intentionality of mental acts.Descartes and his followers have been criticized for a belief that the mind can have only its own ideas as immediate objects of perceptions, rather than being able directly to perceive objects in the external world. Nadler, on the other hand, contends that such criticisms are misreadings of both Descartes and the development of early modern epistemology. Throughout the book, Nadler pays careful attention to the historical and religious context of Arnauld's work, particularly to his Jansenist commitments and the more important theological motivations for his debate with Malebranche.

The French Oratorians and absolutism, 1611-1641

Abstract: Contents: Topics include the spiritual development of Berulle and Condren, Carmelite opposition to the vows of servitude, the Oratorians in French society, and conflicts between the Oratorians and Cardinal de Richelieu. This study focuses on the controversies over spirituality that are important in understanding oppositions to absolutism and the rise of the Jansenist movement in France.

Voice of the Public: The Carnivalization of Salon Art in Prerevolutionary Pamphlets

Abstract: ONE OF THE PRODUCTIVE APPROACHES explored recently by historians to account for the momentous upheaval of 1789 has been the analysis of the creation and expansion of public opinion as a rival concept and a competing force to royal authority in pre-revolutionary decades. While the emergence of le public and public opinion as ideological constructs, and their theoretical discussion, have been traced back to Rousseau's 1750 Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts and through the writings of Malesherbes, Condorcet, Turgot, Mercier, and a number of other writers and politicians, other studies have followed the instanciation of public opinion in various oppositional writings, from the pamphlets supporting the Jansenist party and the parlementaires in the 1750s to the outpouring of violent libels surrounding all the great crises of the declining monarchy in the 1780s.1 That art criticism was an important channel of public opinion,

The People's Work: Anti-Jansenist Prejudice in the Benedictine Movement for Popular Participation in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: The history of the masses has enjoyed a generation of expansion, and fashion, in which scholars have grown increasingly severe with chroniclers of the high policy of rulers who show no interest in the deeper and more permanent needs of the ruled or with historians of ideas who handle abstract concepts in a vacuum without reference to the popular climate in which they have originated. 'The people' has become a primary association of historical inquiry. In being concerned with 'the people', historians today are more and more interested in the processes of social change, with the experiences, states of mind, and attitudes of whole groups, their institutions and social arrangements, in short all that we have to know in order to understand what the evolution of society has been like with all its marvellous complications and rich variety. As the prism of the past has shifted dramatically to the 'history of the people', new kinds of sources have become important.' In our time historians are increasingly aware of the bias that comes from a close study of written texts alone, documents that may not reflect the interplay in society of all groups and classes.? The temptation to generalize 'the mind' of an age from the written works of a handful of great men is being resisted. Today historians are discovering that written texts are but one deposit of the ultimate object of historical study, knowledge about how the large majority of people in the past thought, felt, and lived. Textual evidence has restricted findings about the past primarily to one group alone, to educated men. Now historians are looking for information about other people, even the inarticulate, and the sources are proving abundant, even overwhelming. One such new resource for the history of 'the people' is the study of liturgy.:' Liturgy is a word of great interest, one which has acquired a deeper resonance through each successive stage of its use for 2,700 years in Western Civilization. Moeris long ago dated the first reference to liturgy in Attic tablets of the seventh century B.C.E.4 By the fifth century

Veiling the Stage: The Politics of Innocence in Renaissance Drama

Abstract: At the heart of anti-theatrical sentiment in seventeenth-century Europe was a concern with a theatre that masked its duplicitous and invasive nature beneath a cloak of innocence and thereby attracted-and inevitably corrupted-its innocent audience. Protesting the renewal of Aquinas's claim that theatre should be considered a thing indifferent, the Jansenist Pierre Nicole asserted that the more careful a dramatist is to cover illicit passions with the veil of honesty, the more dangerous he makes them, capable of ensnaring even the holiest and most virtuous spectator.' In a similar vein, Pascal wrote in his Pensdes, "the more innocent [the love depicted in theatre] seems to innocent souls, the more liable they are to be touched by it."2 In an interesting reversal of earlier Renaissance debates over the open licentiousness of the stage,

Les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques au seuil de la Révolution (1788-1790)

Abstract: Robert Favre : The Nouvelles ecclesiastiques at the beginning of the ; revolution (1788-1790). ; In 1788-9, the Jansenist paper the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques seemed uninterested in events, being only concerned with their opposition to Molinist thought. The only indication of their favourable attitude towards the new ideas is their denunciation of the «despotism » of the bishops and the Pope (called an «abso lute monarch »). After Christmas 1789, they began to mention the Revolution, but mainly in order to express their approval of the National Assembly's religious policy, which they saw as a way to force churchmen to return to evangelical poverty. However, they kept to traditional positions, condemning usury, the marriage of priests or the Deputies' toleration of actors, Jews and Protestants. Thus the N.E. only showed partial and selective support for the Revolution.