Theory As Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance - Couverture rigide

Struever, Nancy S.

 
9780226777429: Theory As Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 0226777421 ISBN 13 : 9780226777429
Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 1992

Synopsis

There is a tendency in modern scholarship to describe the Renaissance Humanists merely as readers--as interpreters happily absorbed within the bounds of their chosen classical texts. In Theory as Practice, Nancy Struever contests this accepted notion; by focusing on ethical inquiry, she presents the Humanists as engaged in subtle, innovative moral work.

Struever argues that the accomplishment of five major Renaissance figures--Petrarch, Nicolaus Cusanus, Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Montaigne--was to consider theory as practice and thus engage the ethics of inquiry. She notes three stages of investigation, the first represented by Petrarch, who "relocated" ethical inquiry from a theoretical realm to a familiar practice responsive to daily experience. Next, Struever describes how Cusanus and Valla assume Petrarch's relocation, yet confect ethics into discursive disciplines. Finally, while both Machiavelli and Montaigne produced strong revisions of discipline, they considered the problems of addressing the non-inquirer as well. Struever urges modern readers to employ both rhetorical and philosophical analysis to reveal these Humanists' aggressive tactics of presentation as well as their novel disciplinary reorientation. By doing so, she suggests, we discover how Renaissance ethical inquiry illuminates, and is illuminated by, the modern ethical theory of such philosophers as Peirce, Wittgenstein, Bernard Williams, and Quine.

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À propos de l?auteur

Nancy S. Struever is professor emerita in the History Department and the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
University of Chicago Press
Date d'édition
1992
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0226777421
ISBN 13 
9780226777429
Reliure
Relié
Nombre de pages
255
Coordonnées du fabricant
The University of Chicago Press
https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html

5801 S. Ellis Avenue
Chicago
IL
60637
Etats-Unis
Personne responsable
non disponible