Harmonizing Sentiments

Harmonizing Sentiments PDF

Author: Hans Louis Eicholz

Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Readers will be intrigued by the author's argument for approaching the Declaration with an understanding of eighteenth-century political economy and ideas about a natural social order. The importance of Jefferson as a conduit through which these ideas were expressed is defended against recent attempts to de-emphasize the centrality of the Declaration's author.

The Mind of Thomas Jefferson

The Mind of Thomas Jefferson PDF

Author: Peter S. Onuf

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2012-10-05

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0813934230

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, one of the foremost historians of Jefferson and his time, Peter S. Onuf, offers a collection of essays that seeks to historicize one of our nation’s founding fathers. Challenging current attempts to appropriate Jefferson to serve all manner of contemporary political agendas, Onuf argues that historians must look at Jefferson’s language and life within the context of his own place and time. In this effort to restore Jefferson to his own world, Onuf reconnects that world to ours, providing a fresh look at the distinction between private and public aspects of his character that Jefferson himself took such pains to cultivate. Breaking through Jefferson’s alleged opacity as a person by collapsing the contemporary interpretive frameworks often used to diagnose his psychological and moral states, Onuf raises new questions about what was on Jefferson’s mind as he looked toward an uncertain future. Particularly striking is his argument that Jefferson’s character as a moralist is nowhere more evident, ironically, than in his engagement with the institution of slavery. At once reinvigorating the tension between past and present and offering a new way to view our connection to one of our nation’s founders, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson helps redefine both Jefferson and his time and American nationhood.

The Soul of a Nation

The Soul of a Nation PDF

Author: Christopher R. Altieri

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2015-11-04

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1498225497

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood, Chris Altieri contends that the forma mentis of the founders of the political society often viewed--by its members and by those external to it--as the non plus ultra of modernity, i.e., the United States of America, is really steeped in the more ancient tradition of thinking that began in Athens and continued through the Christian centuries. Engaging the twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Cavell--in critical conversation with the founding fathers--the author shows that a broad conversation regarding the constitution of society is constitutively present in the public discourse of the people that began to recognize itself during the imperial crisis of the late eighteenth-century British America; that the participants in that conversation have at least an inchoate awareness of society as at once cosmic and anthropological; and that that political society is therefore an apt field of study in and for the general science of order.

The Lost Art of Declaring War

The Lost Art of Declaring War PDF

Author: Brien Hallett

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780252067266

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Historically, it has been assumed that war is violence and declarations of war are simply public announcements that serve to initiate combat. Brien Hallett denies both assumptions and claims that war is policy, not violence. The Lost Art of Declaring War analyzes the crucial differences between combat and war and convincingly argues that the power to "declare" war is in actuality the power to compose a text, draft a document, write a denunciation. Once written, the declaration then serves three functions: to articulate the political purposes of the war, to guide and direct military operations, and to establish the boundary between justified combat and unjustified devastation. Hallett sounds a clarion call urging the people and their representatives to take up the challenge and write fully reasoned declarations of war. Then, and only then, can a civilized nation like the United States lay claim to being fully democratic, not only in peacetime, but in wartime as well. "Brien Hallett has fashioned an original, incisive, and powerful argument for the proper standards for going to war. Tightly reasoned throughout and well timed to address the conceptual confusion that now reigns." -- Louis Fisher, author of Presidential War Power

Fragments of Union

Fragments of Union PDF

Author: S. Manning

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-12-17

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 023051183X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Fragments of Union , a new approach to comparative literary studies, is about forms of connections: between nations, literatures, individuals, words. It asks how, and why, connections get severed, and about the nature of the pieces that remain. Interdisciplinary readings of writings by Scots and Americans re-draw the literary map of both countries during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Political, philosophical, cultural and grammatical dimensions give its analysis sharp relevance to the new conditions presented by devolved government in Britain.

Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism

Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism PDF

Author: Gilbert Chinard

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2019-12-13

Total Pages: 623

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is an informational work on Thomas Jefferson, an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. This book comprehensively reviews Thomas Jefferson's education and subsequent political thought. It's not just a biography of Thomas Jefferson but rather an examination of the evolution of his political thought. His views on truth, politics, religion, morality, and the relationships between European entanglements and business are interesting. Moreover, the author intertwines the biography with many quotes from the tremendous volume of letters and journals Jefferson maintained throughout his lifetime.

American Philosophy Before Pragmatism

American Philosophy Before Pragmatism PDF

Author: Russell B. Goodman

Publisher: Oxford History of Philosophy

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0199577544

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Russell B. Goodman tells the story of the development of philosophy in America from the mid-18th century to the late 19th century. The key figures in this story, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the writers of The Federalist, and the romantics (or 'transcendentalists') Emerson and Thoreau, were not professors but men of the world, whose deep formative influence on American thought brought philosophy together with religion, politics, and literature. Goodman considers their work in relation to the philosophers and other thinkers they found important: the deism of John Toland and Matthew Tindal, the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, the political and religious philosophy of John Locke, the romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. Goodman discusses Edwards's condemnation and Franklin's acceptance of deism, argues that Jefferson was an Epicurean in his metaphysical views

Thirty-Six More Short Essays, Plus Another, on the Probing Mind of Thomas Jefferson

Thirty-Six More Short Essays, Plus Another, on the Probing Mind of Thomas Jefferson PDF

Author: M. Andrew Holowchak

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-02-03

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 1527546586

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book is a companion to the author’s previous volume, Thirty-Six Short Essays on the Probing Mind of Thomas Jefferson. It provides the reader with new short essays on Jefferson thoughts on political philosophy and religion and morality. There are, in addition, 10 essays on Jeffersonian historiography, as Jefferson, it is commonly complained, is an exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, task, for any historian. The book is crafted both to entertain—the essays are brisk and lively—and to enlighten. The essays are provocative and critical, and take the reader deep within the recesses of Jefferson’s large mind, while also highlighting that Jefferson is still quite relevant today.

The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era

The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era PDF

Author: Carli N. Conklin

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2019-03-20

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0826274277

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. For Blackstone, the pursuit of happiness was a science of jurisprudence, by which his students could know, and then rightly apply, the first principles of the Common Law. For the founders, the pursuit of happiness was the individual right to pursue a life lived in harmony with the law of nature and a public duty to govern in accordance with that law. Both applications suggest we consider anew how the phrase, and its underlying legal philosophies, were understood in the founding era. With this work, Conklin makes important contributions to the fields of early American intellectual and legal history.

Conscience and Its Enemies

Conscience and Its Enemies PDF

Author: Robert P. George

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-06-27

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1684516072

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Assaults on religious liberty and traditional morality are growing fiercer. Here, at last, is the counterattack. This revised and updated paperback edition of the acclaimed Conscience and Its Enemies showcases the talents that have made Robert P. George one of America's most influential thinkers. Here George explodes the myth that the secular elite represents the voice of reason. In fact, it is on the elite side of the cultural divide where the prevailing views are little more than articles of faith. Conscience and Its Enemies reveals the bankruptcy of these too often smugly held orthodoxies while presenting powerfully reasoned arguments for classical virtues.In defending what James Madison called the "sacred rights of conscience"—rights for which government shows frightening contempt—George grapples with today's most controversial issues: same-sex marriage, abortion, transgenderism, genetic manipulation, euthanasia and assisted suicide, religion in politics, judicial activism, and more. His brilliantly argued essays rely not on theological claims or religious authority but on established scientific facts and a philosophical tradition that extends back to Plato and Aristotle. Conscience and Its Enemies sets forth powerful arguments that secular liberals are unaccustomed to hearing—and that embattled defenders of traditional morality so often fail to marshal.