Born during the ferment of the French Revolution, Auguste Comte was one of the foremost thinkers of the nineteenth century, his ideas influencing social reformers, philosophers, politicians and scientists. Advocating for what he called ‘the science of society’, he contended that facts and reason alone should matter in public discourse. But while Comte strove to create social harmony, he suffered from repeated disasters in his personal and professional life that ultimately endangered his he...

Friedrich Wieck's *Piano and Song* is both a practical treatise on musical education and a forceful statement of nineteenth-century German pianistic ideals. Addressing posture, touch, tone production, phrasing, sight-reading, improvisation, and the relationship between instrumental playing and vocal expression, Wieck insists that technique must serve intelligence, musical feeling, and disciplined listening. Its aphoristic advice, pedagogical examples, and argumentative digressions place it...

In "Piano and Song," Friedrich Wieck offers an insightful exploration of the intimate relationship between piano performance and vocal expression, advocating for a harmonious integration of musical elements. This pedagogical text, reflecting the Romantic era's emphasis on emotive expression, serves as both a practical guide for pianists and a philosophical treatise on the nature of music-making. Wieck employs a clear and engaging literary style, combining theoretical exposition with illust...

Auguste Comte's doctrine of positivism was both a philosophy of science and a political philosophy designed to organize a new, secular, stable society based on positive or scientific, ideas, rather than the theological dogmas and metaphysical speculations associated with the ancien regime. Love, Order, and Progress offers the most comprehensive English-language overview of Auguste Comte's philosophy, the relation of his work to the sciences of his day, and the extensive, continuin...

This volume continues to explore the life and works of Auguste Comte during his so-called second career. It covers the period from the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon in late 1851 to Comte's death in 1857. During these early years of the Second Empire, Comte became increasingly conservative and anxious to control his disciples. This study offers the first study of the tensions within his movement. Focusing on his second masterpiece, the Système de politique positive, and other important book...

This book tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form ...

**The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.“Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist.” —New Republic**When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously ...

The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach's Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach's house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.In A Wicked Company, acclaimed hist...

This is the story of Margarida de Portu, a fourteenth-century French medieval woman accused of poisoning her husband to death. As Bednarski points out, the story is important not so much for what it tells us about Margarida but for how it illuminates a past world. Through the depositions and accusations made in court, the reader learns much about medieval women, female agency, kin networks, solidarity, sex, sickness, medicine, and law.Unlike most histories, this book does not remov...

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule?It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articul...

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind.Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither.In this groundbreaking work, award-w...

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, ...