Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau Romantic Souls, Realist Lives

by Haines, Simon

• ISBN13: 9781403944184
• ISBN10: 1403944180
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-02
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book features readings of over twenty key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including Homer, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau. Simon Haines argues that the history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different conceptions of the self: the "romantic" vs. the "realist".

Author Biography

Simon Haines is in the English Department in the School of Humanities at the Australian National University, Australia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Preface	x
1 Homer: Passion in the Iliad	1	(16)
2 Sophocles' Antigone and Thucydides' Athens: Romanticism and Realism in Politics	17	(16)
Antigone	17	(6)
Thucydides	23	(10)
3 Plato and Aristotle: Concept and Passion	33	(20)
Socrates and early Plato	33	(3)
Plato: Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium	36	(3)
Plato; Gorgias, Republic	39	(3)
Aristotle: Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima	42	(3)
Aristotle: Ethics, Politics, Poetics	45	(8)
4 The Inheritance of Augustine: Confessions	53	(18)
Confessions (1)	53	(2)
Virgil: Aeneid IV	55	(2)
Ovid	57	(1)
Augustine and Platonism	58	(2)
St Paul's Epistle to the Romans	60	(2)
St Mark's Gospel	62	(2)
Confessions (2)	64	(7)
5 Aquinas and the Realist Revival	71	(19)
Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy	72	(1)
Abelard - and Heloise	73	(2)
Aquinas: God and the soul	75	(3)
Aquinas: Ethics	78	(6)
Chaucer: the wife and the clerk	84	(6)
6 Dante and Medieval Romanticism	90	(19)
Beowulf	90	(1)
La Chanson de Roland	91	(3)
Chrétien de Troyes and Courtly Love	94	(2)
The Roman de la Rose	96	(2)
Dante's Divine Comedy	98	(11)
7 Renaissance, Reformation and Shakespeare's Realism	109	(22)
Machiavelli	110	(5)
Humanism	115	(1)
Luther	116	(2)
Shakespeare: Coriolanus	118	(13)
8 Romanticism from Descartes to Rousseau	131	(44)
Recapitulation	131	(1)
Descartes' eye	132	(3)
Hobbes's blobs	135	(3)
Leibniz and Spinoza	138	(3)
Locke's liberal self	141	(5)
Vico: realism romanticised	146	(5)
France: sensation and sentiment	151	(3)
Britain: sympathy and sentiment	154	(6)
Hume's realism	160	(3)
Rousseau's romanticism	163	(12)
Notes	175	(22)
Bibliography	197	(8)
Index	205