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Current Issue Article Abstracts January 2010 Vol. 71.1 • • • • • • • • Beethoven the Romantic: How E.T.A. Hoffmann Got It Right Steven Cassedy In July 1809, E. T. A. Hoffmann received a copy of the score to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and in July 1810, he published a review of the Fifth Symphony in the German journal for music criticism Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. Hoffmann need not have actually heard a performance; in his review, the purely musical analysis could easily have been based entirely on his reading of the score. In its basic structure, the review follows the pattern of reviews published in the AMZ. What is groundbreaking, however, is what Hoffmann has done with the introductory portion: Hoffmann serves up a full-blown theory of musical romanticism. His idea is to put Beethoven forward as the ultimate musical romantic. Pufendorf on Natural Equality, Human Dignity, and Self-Esteem Kari Saastamoinen It is often maintained that Samuel Pufendorf founded natural equality on human dignity. This article partly questions this interpretation, maintaining that the dignity Pufendorf attributed to human nature did not indicate the Kantian idea of absolute and incomparable worth but only superiority in relation to other animals. This comparative dignity of humanity implied that all humans are equally obliged to obey natural law, but it did not offer a foundation for the similarity of their innate duties. The latter followed from the fundamental principle of natural law, the duty to maintain sociality, and from observations concerning human self-esteem. "Refer to folio and number": Encyclopedias, the Exchange of Curiosities, and Practices of Identification before Linnaeus Dániel Margócsy The Swiss natural historian Johann Amman came to Russia in 1733 to take a position as professor of botany and natural history at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. As part of the job, he corresponded, and exchanged plant specimens, with the English merchant collector Peter Collinson in London, and the Swedish scholar Carolus Linnaeus, among others. After briefly reviewing Amman's correspondence with these scholars and the growing commerce in exotic specimens of natural history, I explore how encyclopedias came to facilitate the exchange of zoological specimens in particular. I argue that, during the seventeenth century, a new genre of zoological encyclopedias appeared on the scene whose design was particularly well-suited for the purposes of identification, a key practice in long-distance exchanges. Lovejoy's Readings of Bruno: Or How Nineteenth-century History of Philosophy was "Transformed" into the History of Ideas Leo Catana Arthur O. Lovejoy made rather grand methodological statements about the nature of history of ideas in his Great Chain of Being (1936). These statements were, it is argued, rhetorical declarations, intended to produce the conviction in the minds of his readers that history of ideas was distinct from history of philosophy and thus deserved institutional independence; they were not adequate descriptions of the method actually practiced. Instead, Lovejoy's historiographical practice can be contextualized within nineteenth-century general histories of philosophy. His studies on Giordano Bruno, dating from 1904 and 1936 respectively, illustrate this historiographical continuity. The Lovejovian Roots of Adler's Philosophy of History: Authority, Democracy, Irony, and Paradox in Britannica's Great Books of the Western World Tim Lacy This article explores how Mortimer J. Adler's philosophy of history, as it developed from the 1930s through the 1950s, affected the construction of Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World and the same set's Syntopicon. A thorough examination of Adler's influences (e.g. Arthur O. Lovejoy, Jacques Maritain, and Columbia University faculty) demonstrates that his philosophy of history derived from a coincidental confluence of developments in the fields of literature, history, and philosophy. Adler's processing of these trends reveals both irony and paradox, and also explains some philosophical objections articulated by later foes of the great books idea. "Another" Patriotism in Early Showa Japan (1930-1945) Takashi Shogimen In current debates on "constitutional" and "republican" patriotisms, the relationship between religion and patriotism is underappreciated while alternative forms of patriotism in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have escaped scholarly attention. The present essay explores "another" patriotism in wartime Japan by comparing and contrasting the patriotism of two Protestant thinkers: Tsukamoto Toraji and Yanaihara Tadao. A close analysis of Yanaihara's patriotism in particular shows that there was an alternative form of patriotism which, from a Christian perspective, combated militaristic nationalism which was anchored in State Shinto, thereby suggesting a significant link between religion and patriotism. |
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