Travel Fact and Travel Fiction contains 18 articles by different authors on important examples of travel writing from Classical Antiquity (Herodotus) until the first half of the nineteenth century. Discussed are among others Herodotus, Egeria, Rubruck, Marco Polo, Columbus, Joachim Du Bellay, Busbequius, Gryphius, Goethe and Dickens. Central themes are fiction, literary tradition, scholarly discovery and observation.

Be Sober and Reasonable deals with the theological and medical critique of "enthusiasm" in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and with the relationship between enthusiasm and the new natural philosophy in that period. "Enthusiasm" at that time was a label ascribed to various individuals and groups who claimed to have direct divine inspiration -- prophets, millenarists, alchemists, but also experimental philosophers, and even philosophers like Descartes. The book attempts to combine the perspectives of Intellectual history, Church history, history of medicine, and history...

While educational travel was extremely popular among early modern Englishmen, the practice attracted extensive public criticism. Rather than examining travel itself, this book explores the vivid public images of educational travellers, their development and popularity, and the fears and prejudices in English society that engendered them. The first part of the book examines the medieval background of English travel abroad, the enthusiasm for educational travel among early modern Englishmen, and the progress of the public debate over the practice which essentially started with the publication...

Centres of Learning deals with the relation between learning and the locations in which that learning is carried out. It is the editors' belief that the character (and, in part, the content) of a particular aspect of learning is determined -- or at least influenced -- by the circumstances in which the learning process takes place. The contributions in this book deal with various aspects of learning, in a broad historical and geographical perspective, which ranges from Ancient Babylon, via classical Greece and Rome, and the Middle East (both Christian and Islamic), through to the Latin...

In answering questions such as what is 'modern' in literary criticism since the beginnings of the Early Modern age, this book does not follow the lines of Rene Wellek's famous History of Modern Criticism. It does not re-examine the history of literary theories and poetics. It rather focuses on the concepts and uses of what can be called 'practical criticism' (Buchkritik) and the historicity of its institutional and categorical frames of references. Viewing them as fundamental structures of literary production, reception and communication, this study traces the emergence of a...

The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century traces the Latin scholastics' attempt to deal with two essentially incompatible notions of the human soul: the scientific view of Aristotle which considers it to be a form, and the Augustinian view of the soul as a substance in its own right, from Gundissalinus to the Parisian condemnation of 1277. It traces the growing disarray of Latin notions of the soul, the growth of the monopsychism controversy, the solutions of Bonaventure and Aquinas, through the variety of responses to Aquinas's De unitate intellectus. Among its...

This volume consists of 21 papers delivered at an international Spinoza conference on Disguised and Overt Spinozism around 1700, held at the Erasmus University (Rotterdam) in October 1994. In these papers, scholars from Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States examine the impact of Spinoza's philosophy on the European Republic of Letters, one generation after the death, in 1677, of the greatest philosopher in the history of the Netherlands.

The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanismus in Early Modern Russia argues that, between 1650 and 1789, Russia flirted with Western Europe's Latin Humanism. However, all levels of society, especially the nobility, consistently rejected the pagan authors of Latinate culture, propagated by Ukrainian clergy. An examination of the printing industry, Latin teaching, and private libraries in Russia, and excursions into the thought of Russia's "enlighteners" demonstrate that Latin authors had little impact on Russia, especially the nobility, traditionally regarded as the advocate of Western...

Medieval discussions of mental representation were constrained in essential ways by Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of intelligible species. Aquinas' view of a formal mediation of sensible reality in intellectual knowledge was not universally accepted. In particular, after his death, a long series of controversies developed about the necessity of intelligible species. (These were analyzed in the first volume of this study.) The first part of this book deals with Renaissance controversies, discussing Peripatetics, Neoplatonics, and a group of relatively independent authors. In the second part,...

Can knowledge provide its own justification? This sceptical challenge - known as the problem of the criterion - is one of the major issues in the history of epistemology, and this volume provides its first comprehensive study, in a span of time that goes from Sextus Empiricus to Quine. After an essential introduction to the notions of knowledge and of philosophy of knowledge, the book provides a detailed reconstruction of the history of the problem. There follows a conceptual analysis of its logical features, and a comparative examination of a phenomenology of solutions that have been...