Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: identify strengths and weaknesses as a writer of fiction demonstrate a general awareness of fiction writing discuss fiction using basic vocabulary.
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5.3 Do we have a duty to God not to commit suicide? Why, you may be wondering, would anyone think that we have a duty to God not to take our own lives? Because it would have been so familiar to his original readership, Hume barely bothers to state the position he is opposing before criticising it. His concern is to refute the charge that in taking our own lives we would be ‘encroaching on the office of divine providence, and disturbing the order of the universe’ (paragraph 8). This position can be expressed less elegantly but more t
5.2 Philosophy, religion and everyday life Perhaps because he is aware he will be stirring up trouble by publishing his views on this topic, Hume warms to his theme by talking in paragraphs 1–4 about how he conceives of the relation between philosophy, religious ‘superstition’ and ordinary life. The rest of the essay can be read independently of this opening, but these early ruminations are worth pausing over. They reveal subtleties in Hume's sceptical outlook that are drowned out in the more polemical parts of the two essays.
5.1 The reception of Hume's views ‘Of suicide’ was received with the same degree of public hostility as his essay on immortality. Here is what an anonymous reviewer of the 1777 posthumous edition of both essays had to say in the Monthly Review (1784, vol. 70, pp. 427–8): Were a drunken libertine to throw out such nauseous stuff in the presence of his Bacchanalian companions, there might be some excuse for him; but were any man to advan Acknowledgements This course was written by Professor Tony Lentin
This free course is an adapted extract from the course A207 From Enlightenment to Romanticism, which is currently out of presentation Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Author(s): 5.2 The cult of the Revolution With the suppression of aristocrats, royalists and counter-revolutionary priests came a cultural revolution against symbols and monuments of the Old Regime, the monarchy and the Catholic Church (see Figure 6, below). Freedom of religion was decreed in 1793. The Abbey of St Denis outside Paris, burial place of the French kings since the s 5.1 Revolutionary calendar and metric system We considered earlier the universalist principles of 1789 deriving from the Enlightenment that inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the redivision of France into departments. As the dominant group in the Convention by 1793, the Jacobins regarded themselves as mandated to enact the ‘general will’ of the people in a sense inspired by Rousseau: not as the aggregate weight of the individual aspirations of 28 million Frenchmen, but as the expression of that which, as virtuous men 2.5.1 Imagery of the Declaration The decree on the abolition of nobility drew the line at damage to property, ownership of property having been proclaimed a natural right in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (The decree is evidence that, as is known from other sources, the crowd was taking the law into its own hands by ransacking chateaux, destroying records of seigneurial dues, etc.) 1.5 Water power This second phase was achieved by focusing on the water-power potential of the site. Water power had been the catalyst for the original industrial development, and it seemed apt to capitalise on that. It was decided to install a new waterwheel where the original one had been. This provided an important visitor attraction, and also presented the opportunity to use the waterwheel to generate electricity for the site, thus providing significant cost savings. Furthermore, as part of that building 1.3 Stages of development As a result of the consultation and decision-making process, it was decided, as a primary objective, to undertake a systematic survey of the site in order to uncover and understand the industrial archaeology of Aberdulais Falls. This involved removing tons of rubbish, infill and vegetation, and examining in detail the archaeological remains discovered. During this process, no evidence from the sixteenth-century copper smelting works was uncovered, and it is assumed that this lies beneat 3.3 ‘Intentionality’ Is the work of art a free-standing artefact to be interpreted entirely on its own terms, extracted from its historical context, as Bal does it? Or can the artist and the artwork be brought back together again without committing the intentional fallacy? Joseph Margolis makes several important points about the relationship of an artwork to its maker which has significant implications for the limits and possibilities of interpretation of works of art. Margolis puts it thus: 3.2 Interpretation beyond biography The three interpretative strategies outlined in the previous section, and represented by Langdon, Freedberg, and Reynolds and Ostrow, largely rely on recreating the context contemporary with Caravaggio's painting. Other interpretations seem to have more to do with the context and priorities of the modern historian. If, therefore, the interpretation of a work of art is about more than the artist's particular intention regarding that work of art, then, as Martin Kemp asks, 2.7 Art, life and the interpretation of pictures David Carrier's book, Principles of Art History Writing (1991) considers the way that Caravaggio has been constructed as an artistic personality (the relevant chapter is below). The objective of Carrier's book as a whole is to demonstrate that the ‘appeal to the artist's intention adds nothing’ to the interpretation of his artworks (recall the discussion of Wimsatt and Beardsley in Author(s): 2.4 The intentional fallacy In the final sentence of the Gombrich quotation in Section 2.3, he claims there is only one reason why what the artist meant could matter to us and that is the artist's meaning or intention is ‘the real, the true meaning’. Questions about interpretation of works of art by resorting to the 2.3 Biography and psychobiography A significant, inescapable identifying feature of the twentieth century was the birth and development of psychoanalysis. Combined with romantic notions of the artist-genius and the attractiveness of the artist's ‘Life’ as evidence for writing the history of Renaissance art, psychoanalysis further ensured the continued success of the monographic construction of art history. A good example of this overlap between the increasingly redundant/discredited ‘Life’ of an artist and the more re 1.1 Biography and art history The biographical monograph, that is, a book about a single artist and his or her works, is one of the most common forms of art history writing. Biography, as a literary form, applied to art history, is underpinned by the assumption that knowing about an artist's life can help to establish both the significance and the meaning of that artist's work. This is a very common, and it seems a reasonable, assumption to make in the interpretation of pictures. It is therefore a central theme in this co Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: analyse the pros and cons of the biographical monograph in art history examine the strengths and weaknesses of the biographical monograph in relation to other kinds of art history writing. References Keep on learning   There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you to
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