Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas - Second EditionIn this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance of dissenters in the history of ideas--among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen, and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times--and still challenge conventional wisdom. |
From inside the book
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... faith. He wittily observed, in a letter to Kant, that 'to eat an egg, to drink a glass of water, the Attic philosopher Hume needs faith'.2 This idiosyncratic take on modern scepticism (actually an old nominalist move in Christian ...
... faith of his earlier years, he set out to attack the ideals and values at the core of the rationalist tradition, and transmuted them into something like their opposites. He represents the most uncompromising backlash of human dignity ...
... faith. He attributed this doctrine of faith or belief to Hume. For he rightly perceived that Hume's epistemology rests upon primitive belief in reality unsupported by a priori demonstration; but in a manner which would certainly have ...
... faith in liberal rationalism, cosmopolitanism, science, progress and rational organisation: a battle waged throughout the nineteenth century by the great unsettling rebels, Fourier, Proudhon, Stirner, Kierkegaard, Carlyle, Nietzsche ...
... faith, like the great Protestant reformers and their followers, and the Jansenist wing of the Roman Church. The rationalist belief in a single coherent body of logically deduced conclusions, arrived at by universally valid principles of ...
Contents
ix | |
xxi | |
xxiii | |
xxix | |
xxxi | |
1 | |
The Originality of Machiavelli | 33 |
The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities | 101 |
Hume and the Sources of German AntiRationalism | 204 |
Herzen and His Memoirs | 236 |
The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess | 267 |
Benjamin Disraeli Karl Marx and the Search for Identity | 317 |
The Naivety of Verdi | 361 |
Georges Sorel | 373 |
Past Neglect and Present Power | 420 |
Appendix to the Second Edition | 449 |
Vicos Concept of Knowledge | 140 |
Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment | 151 |
Montesquieu | 164 |
Index | 467 |
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Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas - Second Edition Isaiah Berlin Limited preview - 2013 |