| | 141 | Author: | Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778 | Add | | | Title: | A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind  | | | | Published: | 2002 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | However important it may be, in order to form a proper judgment of the natural state of
man, to consider him from his origin, and to examine him, as it were, in the first embryo
of the species; I shall not attempt to trace his organization through its successive
approaches to perfection: I shall not stop to examine in the animal system what he might
have been in the beginning, to become at last what he actually is; I shall not inquire
whether, as Aristotle thinks, his neglected nails were no better at first than crooked
talons; whether his whole body was not, bear-like, thick covered with rough hair; and
whether, walking upon all-fours, his eyes, directed to the earth, and confined to a
horizon of a few paces extent, did not at once point out the nature and limits of his
ideas. I could only form vague, and almost imaginary, conjectures on this subject.
Comparative anatomy has not as yet been sufficiently improved; neither have the
observations of natural philosophy been sufficiently ascertained, to establish upon such
foundations the basis of a solid system. For this reason, without having recourse to the
supernatural informations with which we have been favoured on this head, or paying any
attention to the changes, that must have happened in the conformation of the interior and
exterior parts of man's body, in proportion as he applied his members to new purposes, and
took to new aliments, I shall suppose his conformation to have always been, what we now
behold it; that he always walked on two feet, made the same use of his hands that we do of
ours, extended his looks over the whole face of nature, and measured with his eyes the
vast extent of the heavens. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 142 | Author: | Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778 | Add | | | Title: | A Discourse on Political Economy | | | | Published: | 2002 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE word Economy, or Œconomy, is derived from oikos, a house, and vomos, law, and meant originally only the wise
and legitimate government of the house for the common good of the whole
family. The meaning of the term was then extended to the government of
that great family, the State. To distinguish these two senses of the
word, the latter is called general or political
economy, and the former domestic or particular economy. The first only
is discussed in the present discourse. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 144 | Author: | Simmel, Georg, 1858-1918 | Add | | | Title: | How is Society Possible? | | | | Published: | 2002 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Kant could propose and answer the fundamental question of his
philosophy, How is nature possible?, only because for him nature
was nothing but the representation (Vorstellung) of nature. This
does not mean merely that "the world is my representation," that
we thus can speak of nature only so far as it is a content of our
consciousness, but that what we call nature is a special way in
which our intellect assembles, orders, and forms the
sense-perceptions. These "given" perceptions, of color, taste,
tone, temperature, resistance, smell, which in the accidental
sequence of subjective experience course through our
consciousness, are in and of themselves not yet "nature;" but
they become "nature" through the activity of the mind, which
combines them into objects and series of objects, into substances
and attributes and into causal coherences. As the elements of the
world are given to us immediately, there does not exist among
them, according to Kant, that coherence (Verbindung) which alone
can make out of them the intelligible regular (gesetzmassig)
unity of nature; or rather, which signifies precisely the
being-nature (Natur-Sein) of those in themselves incoherently and
irregularly emerging world-fragments. Thus the Kantian
world-picture grows in the most peculiar rejection (Wiederspiel),
Our sense-impressions are for this process purely subjective,
since they depend upon the physico-psychical organization, which
in other beings might be different, but they become "objects"
since they are taken up by the forms of our intellect, and by
these are fashioned into fixed regularities and into a coherent
picture of "nature." On the other hand, however, those
perceptions are the real "given," the unalterably accumulating
content of the world and the assurance of an existence
independent of ourselves, so that now those very intellectual
formings of the same into objects, coherences, regularities,
appear as subjective, as that which is brought to the situation
by ourselves, in contrast with that which we have received from
the externally existent - i.e., these formings appear as the
functions of the intellect itself, which in themselves
unchangeable, had constructed from another sense-material a
nature with another content. Nature is for Kant a definite sort
of cognition, a picture growing through and in our cognitive
categories. The question then, How is nature possible?, i.e.,
what are the conditions which must be present in order that a
"nature" may be given, is resolved by him through discovery of
the forms which constitute the essence of our intellect and
therewith bring into being "nature" as such. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 145 | Author: | Hobbes, Thomas, 1588-1679 | Add | | | Title: | Philosophicall rudiments concerning government and society. Or, a dissertation concerning man in his severall habitudes and respects, as the member of a
society, first secular, and then sacred. Containing the elements of civill politie in the agreement which it hath both with naturall and divine lawes. In which is
demonstrated, both what the origine of justice is, and wherein the essence of Christian religion doth consist. Together with the nature, limits, and qualifications both
of regiment and subjection. | | | | Published: | 2002 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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