Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1948. In the first essay of this collection, Lovejoy reflects on the nature, methods, and difficulties of the historiography of ideas. He maps out recurring phenomena in the history of ideas, which the essays illustrate. One phenomenon is the presence and influence of the same presuppositions or other operative ideas in very diverse provinces of thought and in different periods. Another is the role of semantic transitions and confusions, of shifts and of ambiguities in the meanings of terms, in the history of thought and taste. A third phenomenon is the internal tensions or waverings in the mind of almost every individual writersometimes discernible even in a single writing or on a single pagearising from conflicting ideas or incongruous propensities of feeling or taste to which the writer is susceptible. These essays do not contribute to metaphysical and epistemological questions; they are primarily historical.
Table of ContentsPrefatory Note
Foreword
Author's Preface
Chapter 1. The Historiography of Ideas
Chapter 2. The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality
Chapter 3. Monboddo and Rouseeau
Chapter 4. "Pride" in Eighteenth-Century Thought
Chapter 5. "Nature" as Aesthetic Norm
Chapter 6. The Parallel of Deism and Classicism
Chapter 7. The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism
Chapter 8. The First Gothic Revival and the Return to Nature
Chapter 9. Herder and the Enlightenment Philosophy of History
Chapter 10. The Meaning of "Romantic" in Early German Romanticism
Chapter 11. Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism
Chapter 12. On the Discrimination of Romanticisms
Chapter 13. Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds
Chapter 14. Milton and the Paradox of the fortunate Fall
Chapter 15. The Communism of St Ambrose
Chapter 16. "Nature" as Norm in Tertullian
Bibliography
Index
