Tag Archives: sentimentalism

Our Great Passion for War

By chris | Published: 12 November 2009
The confluence of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the taking down of the Berlin Wall, Obama’s ongoing deliberations on whether or not to escalate in Afghanistan and Remembrance Day, with the passing of the last of the Great War veterans, has made for an unusually rich reflection on the value and/or futility or [...]
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Calvin and Servetus

By chris | Published: 9 November 2009
Paul helm has been running a old and erudite series on Calvin at The Guardian. This week he looks at Calvin’s part in the Geneva authorities’ execution of Michael Servetus, concluding with an ambivalent defence that doesn’t seem quite right to me. The plain fact is that the civil authorities in Geneva, with the support of [...]
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Diminutive Greatness and Fanny Price

By chris | Published: 7 November 2009
This post is the final part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price We have re-read them all four times; or rather, to speak more [...]
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Scott on Emma

By chris | Published: 4 November 2009
This post is part of my series of posts looking at the impact of the novel on Enlightenment ethics. It follows the previous post giving Johnson’s view of the realistic novel set out in The Rambler No 4. The publisher of Emma, John Murray, asked Walter Scott to review the novel, which appeared anonymously in the [...]
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King Lear

By chris | Published: 30 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4.2. King Lear Seneca also wrote nine tragedies on Greek mythological subjects, more designed to be recited or read than [...]
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Blog News

By chris | Published: 30 October 2009
A New Tag Line I have cleaned up the tag line of the blog. I am pretty sure that it is an accident that it comes out at exactly the same length as the main title. Mansfield Park Essay The Mansfield Park essay is proceeding much more slowly that I anticipated. I am not sure that this is [...]
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Kantian Deontology

By chris | Published: 29 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4.1. Kantian Deontology deontology. The ethical theory taking duty as the basis of morality; the view that some acts are [...]
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President Blair?

By chris | Published: 29 October 2009
The principles of international community apply also to international security. We now have a decade of experience since the end of the Cold War. It has certainly been a less easy time than many hoped in the euphoria that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Our armed forces have been busier than ever – delivering [...]
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Preface to Mansfield Park

By chris | Published: 28 October 2009
This post is the first part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price Preface Philosophy is hard. In the Buddhist tradition meditation practitioners are warned that they must engage in study [...]
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The Silence of the Lambs

By chris | Published: 23 October 2009
l read with fascinated horror the write-up in TPM of Hannibal Rising, the latest in the Silence of the Lambs/Hanibal Lecter franchise. I am not going to name the author because I can’t emphasise enough that what I am saying is not at all personal but simply reflects in the starkest terms a general contemporary [...]
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Lost in Zombies and Sea Monsters?

By chris | Published: 23 October 2009
Dazzle camoflage is the only way I can explain my reaction to the Jane-sploitation zombie and sea monster mash-ups, the grotesquery not so much concealing as confusing. The perplexity was only compounded when it became clear that publishers were investing heavily in the genre with supporting short films. Fortunately this was a prelude to enlightenment: I [...]
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Enlightenment

By chris | Published: 21 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4. Enlightenment In Sense and Sensibility Austen showed that the Hume’s declaration in the Treatise that ‘reason is, and ought [...]
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The Quiet Thing

By chris | Published: 18 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.6 The Quiet Thing I bring depression into the picture partly because Jane Austen does, in one of her novels, [...]
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Mrs Norris

By chris | Published: 17 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.5 Mrs Norris “If I had known you were going out, I should have got you just to go as [...]
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Brooks and Lazy Debt Moralism

By chris | Published: 16 October 2009
I do enjoy reading David Brooks, perhaps because there are few I disagree with so agreeably. David has written a column today praising the responsibility of the Tories for their fiscal responsibility.  I suppose responsibility is a relative thing and relative to the Republicans the Tories are indeed responsible.  The problem is that nobody has [...]
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Fanny and Edmund

By chris | Published: 15 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.2 Fanny and Edmund prig noun a self-righteously moralistic person Compact Oxford English Dictionary In any assessment of Mansfield Park it is important [...]
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Mansfield Park: Critiques

By chris | Published: 13 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3. Critiques This section analyses a selection of critiques of Mansfield Park under six headings. Next: The Moral Law Within
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The Moral Law Within

By chris | Published: 13 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 3.1 The Moral Law Within Everyone agrees that Mansfield Park is an infamously moral book.  ‘One can almost hear the [...]
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The Post-rational Discourse

By chris | Published: 9 October 2009
Henry over at Crooked Timber has posted Centrism as Tribalism on how centrists can be just as strident and aggressive as the partisans.  This is indeed an excellent point! I am especially fond of it because it highlights something I have been saying, that the breakdown in rationality is systemic to our ethics. Henry [...]
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Iran

By chris | Published: 4 October 2009
I didn’t expect to be blogging on this.  I watched in disbelief as the public was manipulated into the Iraq war in 2002 and blogged intensively on the standoff with Iran over its nuclear programme in 2006/7 until the 16 US intelligence agencies unanimously signed off on the remarkable 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s [...]
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Roman Polanski

By chris | Published: 3 October 2009
It saddened me when I saw the news of Roman Polanki’s arrest for skipping bail 30 years ago. It didn’t know a great deal about the case but there seemed to be something a little arbitrary about waiting so long and then choosing this moment to bring him to justice. I don’t wish Polanski any ill [...]
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Sapere aude!

By chris | Published: 10 September 2009
Over at TPM, Craig Nelson, has written a paen to the enlightenment, To cry “Sapere aude!” once again, finishing with a lament on how scientifically illiterate our culture is. There is, however, a dark side to this history, and it has nothing to do with Foucault. The entire Enlightenment revolution in thinking centred around one key [...]
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Mansfield Park: Method

By chris | Published: 8 September 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 2. Method As for Mansfield Park, the first work of the mature period, it quite matches Emma in point of [...]
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The Invention of Autonomy

By chris | Published: 2 September 2009
In my quest to define what I mean by moral philosophy I will, again, contrast it with something that it is not: The Invention of Autonomy, J.B. Schneewind’s great historical account of modern moral philosophy culminating in the moral philosophy of Kant.  I will do this by way of commenting on some key passages from [...]
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Sentimental Compassion

By chris | Published: 27 August 2009
Mark Vernon has a post, The hard edge of compassion, where he comments on the retuning of the terminally ill Megrahi to Libya by the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, on compassionate grounds, wondering whether compassion should be shown to a man who killed so many and turning to the great historical champions of compassion. Jesus [...]
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