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A classicist, philosopher, and poet, Poul Martin Møller was an important figure in the Danish Golden Age. The traumatic event of the death of his wife led him to think more profoundly about the question of the immortality of the soul. In 1837 he published his most important philosophical treatise, “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality,” presented here in English for the first time. It was read and commented upon by the leading figures of the Golden Age, such as Søren Kierkegaard. It proved to be the last important work that Møller wrote before his death in March of 1838 at the age of 43.
Due to numerous translations, Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen have long been familiar names in the anglophone world. However, as is well known inside Denmark, Kierkegaard and Andersen were not isolated figures in the Danish intellectual and artistic scene of the day; rather, they were merely the best-known representatives of an extremely rich period in Danish cultural life that began at the start of the nineteenth century and continued for some fifty or sixty years. This period, which has been designated "the Golden Age of Denmark," is only now coming to be appreciated for its full significance. The main goal of this interdisciplinary series is to make available for the first time in English some of the most important texts from the leading writers and intellectual figures of this period.

Volumes 1-7 have been published by Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen, and can be found here: Texts from Golden Age Denmark.

See also our parallel monograph series, Danish Golden Age Studies.
Bio-Politics, Race and Nation in Interwar Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 1918-1940
Volume Editors: and
The history of eugenics in the Baltic States is largely unknown. The book compares for the first time the eugenic projects of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the related disciplines of racial anthropology and psychiatry, and situates them within the wider European context. Strong ethno-nationalism defined the nation as a biological group, which was fostered by authoritarian regimes established in Lithuania in 1926, and in Estonia and Latvia in 1934. The eugenics projects were designed to establish a nation in biological terms. Their aims were to render the nation ethnically, genetically and racially homogeneous. The main agenda was a non-democratic state that defined its population in biological terms. Eugenic policies were to regenerate the nation and to reconstruct it as a “pure” and “original” race, Such schemes for national regeneration contained strong elements of secular religion.
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“At last, Russia has begun to speak in a truly original voice.” So said Anatoly Vaneev, a Soviet dissident who became Karsavin’s disciple in the Siberian gulag where the philosopher spent his last two years. The book traces the unusual trajectory of this inspiring voice: Karsavin started his career as Russia’s brightest historian of Catholic mysticism; however, his radical methods – which were far ahead of their time – shocked his conservative colleagues. The shock continued when Karsavin turned to philosophy, writing flamboyant and dense essays in a polyphonic style, which both Marxists and religious traditionalists found provocative. There was no let-up after he was expelled by Lenin from Soviet Russia: in exile, he became a leading theorist in the Eurasian political movement, combining Orthodox theology with a left-wing political orientation. Finally, Karsavin found stability when he was invited to teach history in Lithuania: there he spent twenty years reworking his philosophy, before suffering the German and Soviet invasions of his new homeland, and then deportation and death. Clearing away misunderstandings and putting the work and life in context, this book shows how Karsavin made an original contribution to European philosophy, inter-religious dialogue, Orthodox and Catholic theology, and the understanding of history.
For 20 years Soviet psychiatric abuse dominated the agenda of the World Psychiatric Association. It ended only after the Soviet Foreign Ministry intervened. Cold War in Psychiatry tells the full story for the first time and from inside, among others on basis of extensive reports by Stasi and KGB – who were the secret actors, what were the hidden factors?
Based on a wealth of new evidence and documentation as well as interviews with many of the main actors, including leading Western psychiatrists, Soviet dissidents and Soviet and East German key figures, the book describes the issue in all its complexity and puts it in a broader context. In the book opposite sides find common ground and a common understanding of what actually happened.
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Volume Editors: and
The Baltic philosopher Vasily Sesemann (1884-1963), rooted in the Classics and influenced but not dominated by Kant, Herder, Bergson, Husserl, and Lossky, was a first-rate scholar in the fields of aesthetics, epistemology, logic, and history of philosophy. But he is still relatively unknown internationally because he wrote mostly in Lithuanian and some of his many works are only now being translated into English. This successor volume to his Aesthetics collects eight noteworthy essays, ranging from the scholarly to the popular, on aesthetics, aesthetic education, national culture, and theory of knowledge. They reveal a sympathetic and responsive mind equally at home in Ancient Greek and modern French, German, and Russian philosophy; and capable both of untendentiously expounding their dominant ideas and fruitfully anticipating newer developments even as the latter began to take shape in early-to-mid-20th-century Western European philosophy. Hallmarks of Sesemann’s thought are the Heraclitean preference for becoming (dynamism, change) over being (stasis, timelessness) and the idea that any culture, in order to survive and grow, must be intellectually deep and open to foreign influences. This insight has crucial relevance to the debates about multiculturalism today.
Two Essays on the Ontotopy of the Work of Art
On the grounds of the interpretation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and Paul Cézanne’s paintings the book attempts to approach the work of art as a thing. This lets to overcome a one-sided aesthetical interpretation of the origin of the work of art and to indicate its place in the cosmos of uncreated, i.e. not hominized things. So, the second fundamental issue raised is a try to point out a metaphysical difference between a hominized and not hominized (natural) thing. Such a non-aesthetical point of view is called ontotopy by the author and is opposed to traditional ontology and the philosophy of art.
In this book, probably for the first time in Western philosophy, an attempt has been made to point out and systematically explicate the problem scope of the Nothing (which is called Nihil in the book) and to try to explain the springhead of the excessive negativity, inherent only in the human being, or in other words, the springhead of the human’s natural nihilism. Nihilism is treated here not as a posture, pose, or an ideological attitude, but as the spread of the human metaphysical nucleus, of Nihil. Nihilistic annihilation, manifesting itself as the road of the naming of Nihil and of the production of thingly crystals (artificial world) as a result of that naming, usually is called “history”. Names of Nihil (language phenomena), being the antithesis of Nihil, falsify and cover up Nihil itself, turning it into “supreme” being, e.g. into “the One”, “God”, “Substance”, “Matter”, “Spirit”, ad infinitum. This book should be interesting not only to philosophers or humanitarians, but also to all those who concern themselves with the total human condition.
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Volume Editors: , , and
This volume on anthropology and authority in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) offers its reader nineteen timely discussions of two fundamental categories pertaining to the literary, philosophical, and theological production of this prominent 19th century Danish thinker, whose vast influence upon 20th century intellectual life continues to grow as the new millennium approaches.
The volume's nineteen contributors - from Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and the United States - inquire into such complex problematics in Kierkegaard's oeuvre as the interrelationship between the human, the divine, and the spiritual; between the secular and the Christian; between human and Christian love; between state and church institutions and the single individual of faith; and between this individual's concern for quality in civic and religious life and the quantitative forces of modern society's masses and crowds. Special attention is given to the indisputable authority of God, Christ, and the apostles as opposed to the debatable authority, or non-authority, of the author. Of particular interest is the nexus between Kierkegaard's existential and religious concerns, on the one hand, and his intricate textual conceptions, multifarious poetic strategies, and various means of pseudonymous and indirect communication, on the other.
Between the covers of Anthropology and Authority some chapters seek to refine received knowledge of Kierkegaard in such disciplines as theology and moral philosophy. Conversely, other chapters submit rather postmodern critiques of the author's stylistic and rhetorical devices. A summary assessment of the nineteen contributions would fail to recognize this considerable methodological and theoretical diversity. Instead, the reader's access to the smorgasbord of insights has been facilitated by an introduction in which one of the American editors briefly outline the individual contributions on a general historical and intellectual background.
Altogether, the probing insights of Anthropology and Authority go to the core of Søren Kierkegaard's authorship. Individual chapters either update previous responses to the many challenges presented by this work, or the chapters face new challenges and/or present critical challenges on their own.