Sentimentalism

The tragic tale of Prince Andrei and Natasha Rostov that is the centerpiece of Tolstoy’s masterpiece is a brilliant depiction of the fallibility of life, sublimity of love and serenity in death. Andrei was a middle-aged widower and Natasha was still in her teens when love happened to them. While Natasha’s parents welcomed their romance, Andrei’s father was scornful about the match of that ‘chit of a girl’ from the family of no fortune or rank of consequence. However, he gives in subject to the condition that Andrei should put it off for a year and stay abroad during that period. “And then if your love or passion or obduracy – whatever you choose – is still as great, marry!” says the old man.

The article points to voluntarism as a tendency in the history of philosophy, which consists in the theoretical justification for the phenomenon of the absolutization of freedom. This phenomenon also occurs in practical life, where freedom is no longer understood as freedom to truth and goodness enjoyed within the limits of natural law, but as negative freedom, i.e., as a space of free choices made without any determination, limitation and coercion (sometimes understood as any external influence on the individual, even cultural or educational), as privacy, or ultimately as complete independence from one’s own nature, from the world and other persons. The absence of natural limitations to human freedom leads to its absolutization and permissiveness, and consequently results in attempts by the state and the law to limit it which, in turn, leads to its negation. However, the conflict between freedom and nature, nature and culture, freedom and law is illusive. The article points out: 1) the essence of human freedom, 2) a synthesis of freedom and religion in the form of the right to religious freedom, and 3) threats to freedom and religion from atheism, fideism, sentimentalism and individualism. What defends against the reductionist account of freedom and religion is a realistic philosophy that indicates the rational and objective character of freedom and religion.

In a series of important papers, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson argue that all extant neo-sentimentalists are guilty of a conflation error that they call the moralistic fallacy. One commits the moralistic fallacy when one infers from the fact that it would be morally wrong to experience an affective attitude—e.g., it would be wrong to be amused—that the attitude does not fit its object—e.g., that it is not funny. Such inferences, they argue, conflate the appropriateness conditions of attitudinal responses with the fittingness conditions of the associated evaluative properties. Further, they argue that moral considerations are irrelevant for determining if amusement fits its object. We agree that a strong moralizing of humor is wrongheaded and that jokes can be quite funny even in cases where we have a compelling moral reason to not be amused. However, we argue that pace D’Arms and Jacobson moral considerations can be relevant for property ascription. On our view, in order for a joke to be funny, a properly sensitive agent must take herself to have a contributory reason to be amused, and in some cases that she lacks such a reason is best explained by appeal to moral considerations. We use this constraint as the basis of what we call our modest proposal for a modest sentimentalism

This article discusses the genre of 'benevolence literature' (liefdadigheidsliteratuur), which was highly popular in the Netherlands during the first part of the nineteenth century. In these texts, the early nineteenth century dogma of national 'brotherhood' was confirmed by way of the 'reading agreement' between the bourgeois writer and his readers. However, a flood in 1861 caused some critical responses to benevolence literature and this reading agreement, some of which are investigated here.

Dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, quel fut le rôle joué par les romans sentimentaux suisses, en particulier La Nouvelle Héloïse de Rousseau, dans la réflexion idéale d’une civilisation qui ne serait plus soumise à l’égoïsme ? Comment les textes littéraires ont-ils pensé la neutralisation de l’amour-propre – jugé néfaste dans les rapports humains –, suivant quels critères et quelles traditions de pensée ?
La question à l’origine de cet essai a inspiré une recherche qui, en analysant les positions intellectuelles de Jean-Jacques Rousseau autour de la notion d’amour-propre, cherche à démontrer la défiance du citoyen de Genève à l’égard des morales jusnaturalistes et théologiques, au profit de représentations politiques et sociales structurées autour de la notion de « sens moral ».

(Dissertação de Mestrado defendida em 2012, Universidade de São Paulo)
  A análise desenvolvida no presente trabalho lida com o peculiar acesso do jovem Goethe à questão da subjetividade enquanto uma problemática que, em tempos modernos, traz todo um conjunto de dilemas e contradições em si. O tratamento da participação do autor no discurso moderno da subjetividade se dá, primeiramente, por meio da identificação de sua apropriação crítica de códigos culturais que lhe foram contemporâneos (como o pietismo e o Sentimentalismo), e, em um segundo momento, pela análise detida de seus dois romances do Sturm und Drang.
A presente análise confronta, sobretudo, certas categorias tradicionalmente empregadas pela historiografia literária com o fim de generalizar um único modelo antropológico que autores do Sturm und Drang supostamente compartilharam — isto é, o modelo do “gênio” e do indivíduo autônomo. Não apenas Goethe não compartilharia o mesmo entusiasmo de seus contemporâneos pelo individualismo enquanto valor em si, como também seus dois retratos romanescos da questão sugerem a crença moderna no sujeito como uma entidade potencialmente autodefinidora é insuficiente, permeada por pressuposições metafísicas enganadoras que poderia e deveriam ser reconsideradas. O famoso caso trágico de Werther, o indivíduo titânico para o qual não há lugar possível no mundo, é exemplar de tal insuficiência, e o fato de que Goethe continua a lidar com a imagem do ser à procura de valores intrínsecos no romance seguinte, Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, é tomado como prolongamento de sua participação no corrente discurso filosófico da subjetividade do final do século XVIII. Estes romances são aqui tomados, assim, como dois momentos distintos — ainda que de certa forma complementares, ou ao menos coerentes em relação um ao outro — do acesso do autor à problemática.

In my paper, I reread Emerson’s “Gifts” (1844), an essay usually placed in the background of the twentieth-century gift theory canon (Schrift 1997, Ostin 2002).The essay contains a dazzling yet controversial vision of the gift. Emerson presents us with a list of appropriate gifts for different occasions and yet questions the very legitimacy of gift-giving. He sees the donation of gifts as an individual act of self-sacrifice (“thou must bleed for me”) and, at the same time, transcends it by
attributing true gifts to the impersonal power of love giving “kingdoms and flower leaves indifferently”. Seeing Emerson as an “edifying” rather than “systematic” philosopher in the terms of Richard Rorty, I attempt to understand his controversial thinking by closely reading the essay and analyzing its rhetorical strategies, largely relying on Emerson’s own statement that “[t]he very language we speak, thinks for us, by the subtle distinctions which are already marked for us by its
words”. As the analysis reveals, Emerson draws on the rhetoric of contemporary sentimental discourse about gifts reflected in behavior manuals and sentimental fiction and, thereby, develops his own original theory of gift exchange, anticipating
the asymmetrical ethics of gift-giving in modern philosophy.

Masonic rituals drew upon subject matter and narratives similar to those found in neoclassical tragedy, and managed bodies and spaces in discernibly theatrical ways. But it is the fusion of pathetic, tearful sentiment to bonds that modeled archetypal masculine relationships that most palpably links Masonic ritual to the theater culture of eighteenth-century France. Freemasonry also likely informed French dramaturgy. The valorization of artificial paternal, filial, and fraternal bonds central to Freemasonry became a prevalent theme in French drama in the third quarter of the century. French versions of The London Merchant, which had an outsized impact on the development of French drama, suggest that, regardless of playwrights’ affiliations with Freemasonry, the passionate male bonds promoted by the brotherhood informed late-Enlightenment French dramatic literature.

Статья посвящена подробному исследованию художественных принципов, свойственных портретной живописи сентиментализма. Внимательное рассмотрение женских портретов, созданных И.-Б.Лампи-Старшим, В.Л.Боровиковским и М.-Э.Виже-Лебрен, позволяет выявить не только совокупность приемов, но и особую их трактовку в творческой концепции каждого мастера. В результате исследования портретная живопись сентиментализма впервые определяется как художественная система, которая обладает конкретными характеристиками и заметно отличается от классицизма и романтизма в художественной ситуации на рубеже XVIII–XIX веков.

The article is dedicated to the thorough research of artistic principles, inherent to the portrait painting of Russian sentimentalism. The detailed analyze of female portraits, created by I.B.Lampi the Elder, V.L.Borovikovsky and E.Vigee Le Brun, gives an opportunity to reveal not only the set of methods, but also their singular interpretation in conception of each artist. In result, the portrait painting of Russian sentimentalism is first determined as the artistic system, which has specific features and considerably differs from classicism and romanticism at the turn of the 18-19th centuries.

Целью статьи является изучение нескольких женских портретов В.Л. Боровиковского первой половины 1800-х годов, рассмотрение которых позволяет выявить важную методологическую проблему – роль стилистических определений для описания конкретных произведений в ситуации параллельного существования разных художественных тенденций (классицизм, романтизм, сентиментализм).

The objective of the article is the research of several Borovikovsky female portraits created in the first half of the 1800-ies. Their consideration allows revealing important methodological problem. It is the use of different style definitions in the description of the works in a situation of coexistence of classicism, romanticism and sentimentalism.

This chapter offers a wide-ranging assessment of cosmopolitan interpretations of war in the European sentimental tradition. Taking impetus from Tolstoy’s reporting on the Crimean war, Gusejnova draws on the Russian formalists’ interpretation of his technique to reconstruct Tolstoy’s use of literary montage, which was later adapted in film by Sergei Eisenstein. The chapter then contextualises the history of this technique within genealogies of cosmopolitan thought on the one hand, and literary sentimentalism on the other. Drawing on works by Adam Smith and Stendhal, Gusejnova surveys some of the intellectual and literary techniques thanks to which cosmopolitan sentiments became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European societies. The capacity to generate multi-sensory experiences of compassion through montage presents the case for a fundamental connection between mediated experiences of war and nineteenth-century ideas of cosmopolitanism. The chapter proposes that greater understanding between people was driven by the literary, visual, and sonic mediation of violent wartime encounters.

Recent empirical research seems to show that emotions play a substantial role in moral judgment. Perhaps the most important line of support for this claim focuses on disgust. A number of philosophers and scientists argue that there is adequate evidence showing that disgust significantly influences various moral judgments. And this has been used to support or undermine a range of philosophical theories, such as sentimentalism and deontology. I argue that the existing evidence does not support such arguments. At best it suggests something rather different: that moral judgment can have a minor emotive function, in addition to a substantially descriptive one.

Данная статья посвящена рассмотрению биографии Э. Виже-Лебрен в контексте европейской и русской культур на рубеже XVIII–XIX вв. Целью статьи является выявление характерных
особенностей биографии художника в этот период времени, которые сближают жизненный путь Э. Виже-Лебрен с судьбами художников русского романтизма (О. Кипренского, В. Орловского, В. Тропинина, А. Варнека, С. Щедрина).
Научная новизна состоит в том, что на сегодняшний день биография художника, принадлежащего к направлению сентиментализма, редко рассматривается в связи с биографиями художников-романтиков и потому представляет собой малоизученное явление в искусстве рубежа XVIII–XIX вв. Существует значительная литература, посвященная теме романтического художника (культу творца и гения), но мастера направления сентиментализма обычно не включаются в этот контекст. Более того, публикации, касающиеся искусства Э. Виже-Лебрен, крайне малочисленны на русском языке.
Историографический обзор творчества Э. Виже-Лебрен позволил выявить, во-первых, неоднозначность позиций историков искусства по отношению к женщине-художнице, не самому частому явлению в культуре XVIII–XIX вв., и, во-вторых, большую роль «Воспоминаний» в оценке ее биографии и творчества. Рассмотрение главных периодов творческого пути Э. Виже-Лебрен приводит к мысли о том, что столь непростая и насыщенная событиями биография художницы, относящейся к направлению сентиментализма, вполне сопоставима с биографиями романтических художников. Иными словами, представление об исключительности творческой личности романтика может быть поставлено под сомнение: объяснение данного явления кроется не в специфике романтизма, а в характере самой эпохи.
Итак, жизненный путь Э. Виже-Лебрен демонстрирует определенную общность с судьбами романтиков, поэтому сопоставление биографий художников разных направлений на основе их мемуаров представляет собой важную научную задачу, которая позволит дополнить и переосмыслить стилистические определения на рубеже XVIII–XIX вв. (романтизм, сентиментализм).

The analysis of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun’s biography in the context of European and Russian culture at the turn of the 18 th –19 th centuries is presented in the article. As it supposed to be, the thesis should be reviewed. So, the main aim of the article is to compare Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun’s biography and life of romantic artists in Russia (Orest Kiprenskii, Vladimir Orlovskii, Vasilii Tropinin, Aleksandr Varnek and Silvestr Shchedrin).
Despite the fact that numerous studies discuss different romantic artists’ biographies, none of them is devoted to comparison between life of sentimental and romantic artists. Besides, there are a few studies on
Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun’s art in Russian.
So, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun’s life seems similar to the romantic artists’ ones. Therefore, it is important to compare the biographies of different artists in order to supplement and rethink stylistic definitions at the turn of the 18 th –19 th centuries (romanticism, sentimentalism).

В диссертации анализируются динамические процессы, происходившие в повествовательной структуре жанра путешествия конца ХVIII – первой трети ХIХ веков, выявляются основные нарративные модели жанра в русской и западноевропейской беллетристике данного историко-литературного периода, определяются эволюционные изменения повествовательной структуры жанра путешествия в смене литературных эпох; выявляется взаимосвязь между жанровой моделью мира и спецификой ее нарративного структурирования

Growth in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis has been rapid and aims to explore the opinions or text present on different platforms of social media through machine-learning techniques with sentiment, subjectivity analysis or polarity calculations. Despite the use of various machine-learning techniques and tools for sentiment analysis during elections, there is a dire need for a state-of-the-art approach. To deal with these challenges, the contribution of this paper includes the adoption of a hybrid approach that involves a sentiment analyzer that includes machine learning. Moreover, this paper also provides a comparison of techniques of sentiment analysis in the analysis of political views by applying supervised machine-learning algorithms such as Naïve Bayes and support vector machines (SVM).

The histories of moral concern for animals and literary sentimentalism are intertwined, yet the reasons for this connection have been little understood. This study examines the reasons for the growth of compassion for animals in late eighteenth-century British literature and culture and the influence of sentimental poetics on the way human and animal relationships came to be understood. Additionally, I suggest that some of the questions asked about animals in the eighteenth century are now being reconsidered in the field of Animal Studies and that modern thinking about human and animal relationships bears the influence of eighteenth-century sentimentalism in both the importance placed on sympathetic imagination and, surprisingly, our disapproval of sentimentality. The Introduction considers the rise and fall of sentimental compassion for animals in eighteenth-century Britain and examines the iconic importance of the animal encounters in Laurence Sterne's novels for eighteenth-century readers and how they epitomized the notion of sensibility for admirers and detractors. I then propose an approach to understanding the role of animals in sentimentalism that draws on Derrida's work on the gift and the response of the animal and appraise current attitudes toward sentimentality in the field of Animal Studies. Chapter 1 shows how Sterne used animal encounters to explore the dynamics of sympathetic imagination and examines how the conceptual malleability of animals and their resistance to interpretation bear on the novel's analysis of personal identity and narrative authority. Chapter 2 analyzes the major tropes of sentimental animal representation in a wide array of eighteenth-century texts, with a focus on understanding how personification and apostrophe shape the dynamics of the poetic encounter with the animal. Chapter 3 considers how William Blake's writings on animals may be understood in the context of sentimentalism and the ways in which Blake addressed questions about our ethical relations with other species. Chapter 4 outlines the intellectual context of eighteenth-century concern for animals with a focus on how moral philosophy and medical discourse established models of the mind-body relationship conducive to questioning the boundary between human and animal.

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1999. Considers the concept of sympathy from ancient Greece to the early 19th century, with special attention to its employment as an explanatory principle in physics and medicine and its shift into the world of psychology and morality in the early modern period. Considers figures such as Aristotle, Plotinus, Porta, Paracelsus, Porta, Boerhaave, Willis, Whytt, Lévesque de Pouilly, Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, (Samuel Jackson) Pratt, and many others.

A könyv az érzékenység és a romantika magyar irodalmáról, a boldog
együgyűség elvesztéséről és a művészetek élvezetének „veszedelmes”
következményeiről szól. Kazinczy rögeszmés szépségkultuszáról, Ányos
„identikus” boldogtalanságáról, Csokonai saját ellentétébe forduló boldogságfilozófiájáról, Pálóczi Horváth „hátrahőköléséről”, Ungvárnémeti bűntudattal teli „nárcizmusáról”, az esztétikum és a boldogtalanság közé egyenlőségjelet állító Kisfaludy testvérekről, a katasztrófák művészet- és gazdaságfilozófiai értelmét kereső Lisztről és Jókairól. Ha tetszik, arról a bátorságról, amely a 18. század közepétől kezdve nemcsak esztétikai természetű, de egyfajta morális bátorság is volt: olvasásra csábítani a korábban nem olvasó rétegeket, programokat írni a társadalmi elitek kulturális elitté alakításáról, könyvet adni a nők kezébe, a szépirodalom retorikai-poétikai mutatványain keresztül mintát adni a személyiség autonóm létformáihoz. A felvilágosodás szenvedélytanai (Le Brun, Hume); dialógusai a csiszoltság (politeness) fogalmai körül (Shaftesbury, Burke), ízlés-meghatározásai (Hume, Voltaire); az összefoglaló esztétikai rendszerek (Batteux, Baumgarten, Hegel); a szép esztétikai – esztétikai ideológiai! – és morális megragadhatóságának filozófiai-hermeneutikai tételei (Rousseau-tól, Gottschedtől Kantig és Schleiermacherig), vagyis az egykorú európai esztétikai gondolkodás teljessége első látásra talán nem áll ott a szentimentalizmus és a romantika magyar irodalma mögött,
mégis alig van olyan műve a korszak magyar szépirodalmi kánonjának,
amelyen ne lehetne ennek a (pre)modern esztétikai rendszernek valamiféle – nálunk főleg német közvetítéssel megjelenő – lenyomatát felismerni.
A 18–19. századi magyar szépirodalom – a boldogtalanság iskolája.

TARTALOM

Előszó 7
I.
Mikes Mulatságos napokjáról 13
Violák - Ráday Gedeon Mezei dala, Szentjóbi Szabó László Poëtája
és német előzményeik 20
Ányosról és a Gráciákról 34
„Itt állani, lépni veszedelmes…” - Kazinczy jegyzései Horváth Ádám
A lélek halhatatlansága felől való gondolatairól 52

II.
Ipiapacs - Pszeudonímia, anonímia, anímia és onímia
a szentimentális irodalomban 67
Kétnyelvű irodalom? 77

III.
„Béjárom a sok kertet…” - Tájképek és képtájak a Bácsmegyeyben 87
„…az élet nem Román és a’ Román nem élet…”, avagy Vitéz Mihály
gyötrelmei 107
„A’ kietlen magánosság Elyziom lelkemnek…” - Kisfaludy Sándor és a Himfy’ szerelmei 125
A Himfy-strófa műfaji határai 138
„Magyarentod” - Adalékok a Dobozy-témához 154
A drámaíró Kisfaludy Sándor 167
„Abstract vulgárizmus?” - Kisfaludy Károly népdalairól 179
Horváth János: Petőfi Sándor 189

IV.
Meta-pásztor - Weöres Endymionjáról 199
A romantikus Nárcisz 210

V.
Nyolc és fél - Liszt Ferenc árvízi hangversenyei Bécsben (1838) 233
Az 1838-as pesti árvíz és a Kárpáthy Zoltán tizedik fejezete 252
Szatíra az 1840-es évek irodalmi életéről - Politikai divatok (1863) 268
A kálvinista Jókai - Az elátkozott család és A barátfalvi lévita 286

We define aesthetic emotions as emotions that underlie the evaluative assessment of artworks. They are separated from the wider class of art-elicited emotions. Aesthetic emotions historically have been characterized as calm, as lacking specific patterns of embodiment, and as being a sui generis kind of pleasure. We reject those views and ar- gue that there is a plurality of aesthetic emotions contributing to praise. After present- ing a general account of the nature of emotions, we analyze twelve positive aesthetic emotions in four different categories: emotions of pleasure, contemplation, amaze- ment, and respect. The emotions that we identify in each category, including feelings of fluency, intrigue, wonder, and adoration, have been widely neglected both within aesthetics and in emotion research more broadly.

Abstract (by the author): The slave market lay at the crossroads of antebellum southern thought and practice, exposing the contradictory impulses arising from slavery’s modernization: patriarchal labor relations, the legal designation of enslaved African-Americans as chattel property, sentimental notions of family, and the massive expansion of market-crop production across the south. Forcibly moving more than one million people between 1790 and 1860, the domestic U.S. slave trade reenacted the "social death" of the Atlantic trade. Sentimentality constituted a language of grief, of embarkation, of distance, and thus found selective use by people working to understand, avoid, denounce, deny, or reconnect across it. Slaveholders applied sentiment in coming to grips with their inability to master the market world they had embraced. They aimed their sentiment at specific people they enslaved, but always turned it back on themselves, validating their own self-image. Abolitionists' sentimental critique fixated on the auction block, which embodied the commodification they feared in American society. The few enslaved people possessing access to literacy deployed sentiment selectively to implicate slaveholders in the grapevine by which they hoped to get word back to family. Paternalistic rhetoric, far from representing the antithesis of the slave market, may have found its fullest expression there, as enslaved people tried to negotiate, mitigate, or grieve for its impact. African American autobiographers struggled to make sentiment relevant, incapable as it was of fully suturing the emotional ruptures suffered in the slave market. Twentieth century African Americans rejected sentimentalism outright, invoking in more brutal terms the inhumanities done in the days of the domestic slave market.

This thesis focuses on the relationship between the literary and theoretical employment of nostalgic sentiments and the representation of the subject in contemporary coming-of-age fiction. It sheds light on the significance of a differentiation between reflective and restorative nostalgia (Boym) and the workings of nostalgia in narrative (Stewart) for the research of children's literature.

For moral sentimentalists, our emotions and desires play a leading role in the anatomy of morality. Some believe moral thoughts are fundamentally sentimental, others that moral facts make essential reference to our sentimental responses, or that emotions are the primary source of moral knowledge. Some believe all these things. The two main attractions of sentimentalism are making sense of the practical aspects of morality, on the one hand, and finding a place for morality within a naturalistic worldview, on the other. The corresponding challenges are accounting for the apparent objectivity and normativity of morality. Recent psychological theories emphasizing the centrality of emotion in moral thinking have prompted renewed interest in sentimentalist ethics.

Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century asks
what makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of sensibility – a cultural trend of compassion, benevolence and humanitarianism in the eighteenth century. Csengei undertakes to investigate the darker side of sensibility by exploring forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swooning and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century contexts. The book offers fresh interpretations of core literary texts of sensibility (by Sarah Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Mackenzie), works by its most central philosophers (Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith), medical writings about sympathy, sensibility and irritability (Albrecht von Haller, Robert Whytt and La Mettrie), late eighteenth-century critiques of sensibility by Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald, along with William Godwin’s papers, letters and diary. It also explores connections between eighteenth-century forms of feeling and more recent sciences of the psyche from psychoanalysis to the neurosciences.

Chapters, previews and purchase information:
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781349339044

I argue that our best science supports the rationalist idea that, independent of reasoning, emotions aren't integral to moral judgment. There's ample evidence that ordinary moral cognition often involves conscious and unconscious reasoning about an action's outcomes and the agent's role in bringing them about. Emotions can aid in moral reasoning by, for example, drawing one's attention to such information. However, there is no compelling evidence for the decidedly sentimentalist claim that mere feelings are causally necessary or sufficient for making a moral judgment or for treating norms as distinctively moral. I conclude that, even if moral cognition is largely driven by automatic intuitions, these shouldn't be mistaken for emotions or their non-cognitive components. Non-cognitive elements in our psychology may be required for normal moral development and motivation but not necessarily for mature moral judgment.

This chapter discusses contemporary scientific research on the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment. The literature suggests that moral judgment is influenced by both reasoning and emotion separately, but there is also emerging evidence of the interaction between the two. While there are clear implications for the rationalism-sentimentalism debate, we conclude that important questions remain open about how central emotion is to moral judgment. We also suggest ways in which moral philosophy is not only guided by empirical research but continues to guide it. Word count: 9,310 (all inclusive)

Slote Encountering Chinese Philosophy is the first volume in our series of Fudan Studies in Encountering Chinese Philosophy. The series aims to promote the living dialogue between contemporary Western philosophy and traditional Chinese philosophy. Each volume, as well as each conference in preparation for the volume, will feature one prominent contemporary Western philosopher, who may or may not previously know anything about Chinese. A dozen or scholars in Chinese philosophy are invited to critically and constructively engage aspects of the work of the featured Western philosopher from Chinese philosophical perspectives. Then the featured Western philosopher makes responses to the critical essays by these scholars of Chinese philosophy. While clearly of a comparative nature, the primarily purpose of each volume is not to identify similarities and differences between a contemporary Western philosopher and a traditional Chinese philosopher or philosophical text. Rather it attempts to see how insights from Chinese philosophical traditions may shed new lights of philosophical issues this Western philosopher engages. In short, the project is primarily not historical but philosophical.

Do the facts of evolution generate an epistemic challenge to moral realism? Some think so, and many “evolutionary debunking arguments” have been discussed in the recent literature. But they are all murky right where it counts most: exactly which epistemic principle is meant to take us from evolutionary considerations to the skeptical conclusion? Here, I will identify several distinct species of evolutionary debunking argument in the literature, each one of which relies on a distinct epistemic principle. Drawing on recent work in epistemology, I will show that most of these initially plausible principles are false, collapsing the arguments that rely on them. And we will see that each argument threatens only one popular view of moral psychology: a “Representationalist” view on which our moral judgments rely crucially on a mental intermediary—e.g. a sentiment, gut feeling, or affect-laden intuition—delivered by our evolved moral faculty. In the end, only one evolutionary debunking argument remains potent: an “Argument from Symmetry” that I will introduce to the literature. But we will see that it should worry only all naturalists, pressuring them into a trilemma: give up moral realism, accept a rationalism that is incongruous with naturalism, or give up naturalism. Non-naturalists are free and clear.

This paper examines the skillful, yet precarious imbrication of sentimental and realist voices in Edith Wharton‘s The House of Mirth. While the novel about the social decline of its heroine Lily Barth presents itself as a realist portrait of the upper class in turn-of-the-20th-America, its narrative structure adheres to a sentimental logic that puts the protagonist through a series of trials in order to demonstrate her moral character. As a result Wharton‘s novel needs to mediate the competing demands of sentimental and realist modes; and it does so by relying on a narration that hints at, alludes to, suggests and insinuates events, relationships between characters, and their actions instead of presenting them openly, directly, and in detail. In order to come to terms with the function of, as well as the rationale behind this way of storytelling, this article engages with the realist and sentimental aspects of Wharton‘s novel and considers several key scenes.

Статья посвящена медитативному прозаическому этюду Н. М. Карамзина "Прогулка" (1789). Демонстрируется, что представленный в этом тексте рассказ об интенсивном субъективном религиозно-эстетическом опыте, который основывается на по-видимому спонтанных эмоциональных реакциях чувствительного человека, складывается из дискурсов, топосов, тропов и мотивов, которые Карамзин мог обнаружить в описательной поэзии Дж. Томсона и К. М. Виланда, эссе о воображении Дж. Аддисона и ранней книге И. Г. Гердера по библейской экзегезе.

This paper shows that William James borrowed a rhetorical
framework from sentimental prose – both narrative and
argumentative – which helped him grapple with novel problems in
modern philosophy. The new direction I take to Jamesian studies is
to place James into a context – sentimental culture – that can reveal
to scholars how sentimental discourse influenced his thought, and
how sentimental discourse might vibrate across pragmatism’s
genealogy. I pay special attention to the philosophical tradition of
moral sentimentalism and the literary tradition of sentimental
fiction. Taken together, my efforts should help scholars to look at
James anew – as a rhetorical innovator who borrowed narrative and
argumentative tropes from the discursive environment available to
him.