Esta dissertação visa realizar uma revisão historiográfica da obra Considerações sobre a França (1797), de Joseph de Maistre, que representa um dos primeiros ensaios de interpretação histórica do fenômeno revolucionário em língua francesa e do ponto de vista da contra-revolução. Neste ínterim, pretendemos oferecer uma visão de conjunto do uso que a historiografia da Revolução Francesa fez das Considerações de Maistre. Simultaneamente, empreendemos uma síntese biográfica-intelectual do saboiano, com o objetivo de sublinhar a complexa natureza de sua reação à Revolução e ao Iluminismo reação esta caracterizada por uma excêntrica interação entre jesuitismo, iluminismo e filosofia das Luzes. Por fim, apresentamos ao público uma tradução dessa obra, ainda inédita em língua portuguesa. / The purpose of this study is to present a historical revision of Joseph de Maistres Considérations sur la France (1797), which represents a pioneering attempt of historical interpretation of the revolutionary phaenomenon in French language and from the point of view of the counter-revolution. In doing so, we intend to offer a panoramic view of the use made of Joseph de Maistres most famous pamphlet in the historiography of the French Revolution. It also provides a brief intellectual biography of the savoyard which tries to underline the complexity of the Maistrean reaction to the Enlightenment and the Revolution - marked by an eccentric interaction with certain currents of jesuitism, iluminism and the Enlightenment. Last but not least, we present a translation of the pamphlet, heretofore neglected in Portuguese.

Esta dissertação visa realizar uma revisão historiográfica da obra Considerações sobre a França (1797), de Joseph de Maistre, que representa um dos primeiros ensaios de interpretação histórica do fenômeno revolucionário em língua francesa e do ponto de vista da contra-revolução. Neste ínterim, pretendemos oferecer uma visão de conjunto do uso que a historiografia da Revolução Francesa fez das Considerações de Maistre. Simultaneamente, empreendemos uma síntese biográfica-intelectual do saboiano, com o objetivo de sublinhar a complexa natureza de sua reação à Revolução e ao Iluminismo reação esta caracterizada por uma excêntrica interação entre jesuitismo, iluminismo e filosofia das Luzes. Por fim, apresentamos ao público uma tradução dessa obra, ainda inédita em língua portuguesa. / The purpose of this study is to present a historical revision of Joseph de Maistres Considérations sur la France (1797), which represents a pioneering attempt of historical interpretation of the revolutionary phaenomenon in French language and from the point of view of the counter-revolution. In doing so, we intend to offer a panoramic view of the use made of Joseph de Maistres most famous pamphlet in the historiography of the French Revolution. It also provides a brief intellectual biography of the savoyard which tries to underline the complexity of the Maistrean reaction to the Enlightenment and the Revolution - marked by an eccentric interaction with certain currents of jesuitism, iluminism and the Enlightenment. Last but not least, we present a translation of the pamphlet, heretofore neglected in Portuguese.

This thesis explores the ways in which key holistic thinkers over the course of the last three hundred years have articulated unity between the human subject and objective world. I borrow the term “holism” from the philosopher J. C. Smuts, who coined it in his 1936 work Holism and Evolution, and I use it here in an expanded sense that includes all thinkers in the Western tradition who, like Smuts, have been preoccupied with the question of unity. Although the nature of cosmic unity and the individual’s place within it have been questions for philosophical debate since the classical Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, from the seventeenth century onwards these questions became largely associated with a series of thinkers who sought to overcome the dualistic separation of subject and object introduced by Galileo, Descartes and others in the mechanistic philosophical tradition of Western thought. My consideration of the holistic tradition includes selected writings by Leibniz, Hegel, Whitehead and Arne Naess, cofounder and key communicator of the deep ecology movement. In my discussion of these authors I observe an emerging pattern that has gradually carried holistic thought away from its traditional dependence on an absolute universal Being as the origin of unity in the world, towards an increasing emphasis on Becoming as the origin of Being. This pattern is confirmed by my broad analyses of Renaissance philosophy and of the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers Vico, Hamann and Herder. It is further confirmed by Naess’ vision of the deep ecology movement, which emphasizes plurality and diversity in the struggle to create more ecologically sustainable forms of human living. The pattern is challenged, however, by my discussions of Heraclitus and of the deep ecology movement, which both exhibit features that also contradict the existence of a definite linear progression “from Being to Becoming.” Insofar as the deep ecology movement recognizes the validity of a broad diversity of philosophical views and premises as grounds for ecological action and decision-making, it is part of a larger movement in contemporary societies that is helping create an open space wherein all perspectives are appreciated as valuable in their own right. This movement seeks to challenge all absolute and hegemonic claims to truth (which in the early twentieth century gave rise to fascism and in our present day continue to inform our views of nature and the self), and, as I suggest, is also contributing to the emergence of an apophatic perspective in our own day that is a precondition for change. / Graduate / 0422 / 0585 / jdesser@uvic.ca

This essay explores the topic of appropriation of nature and the resulting social alienation it imparts on several of the novel’s characters: Frankenstein, Walton, and the Creature. The Creature serves as a personification of both industrialism and urban atomization. His depiction as such follows Marxist critic Warren Montag’s argument that the novel renders the Creature more horrible through the suppression of modernity which makes him the embodiment of industrialism, and Frank Moretti’s claim that the novel favors pastoral, pre-industrial ideals (Montag, Moretti). Frankenstein’s materialist approach to science provides the driving force for this alienation and is informed by both mechanist philosophy (Hogsette) and a desire to remodel nature in accordance with human desire (Mellor). Rather than bringing prosperity, those endeavors alienate Frankenstein from his surrounding in a Marxian line of thought, and Frankenstein himself comes to resemble Bill Hughes’s concept of the negative version of Prometheus who loses himself in his materialist pursuits (Hughes). Drawing upon early German Romantic ideas of reconciliation with nature outlined by Alison Stone, this essay argues that much of the chaos in Frankenstein stems from anthropocentrism that is rooted in Hegelian philosophy and that a healthier solution to this view is proposed by early German Romantic organicism.

Amidst the upheaval of the French Revolution, the British parliamentarian and political theorist Edmund Burke received a vibrant reception in German-speaking Europe. Anxious to uncover the ideological roots of the anarchy that enveloped France – and worried that their own society might be vulnerable to a similar fate – a series of important German thinkers began studying his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This dissertation brings into focus the diverse interpretations of Burke that were assembled in this turbulent era, and explains them vis-à-vis contemporary debates among German idealists (Kant and his heirs) about the philosophical nature of freedom. This dissertation centers on Burke’s three most perceptive and influential students: the civil servant and philosopher August Wilhelm Rehberg; the journalist, translator, and diplomat Friedrich Gentz; and the political economist and cultural critic Adam Müller. For many decades, both German- and English-speaking intellectual historians have shoehorned these thinkers into a rigid ideological box labeled ‘conservatism’. Inspired by Burke, they are said to have turned away from the ideals of Enlightenment, theorizing an illiberal form of politics that was traditionalistic, authoritarian, and reactionary. A careful, contextualized reconstruction of their engagements with Burke, however, renders this thesis untenable. Far from triggering a monolithic backlash against Enlightenment, Burke in fact inspired a series of divergent, and often incompatible, analyses of the Revolution’s origins, grounded in different readings of his Reflections. Rehberg, for instance, saw Burke as a principled skeptic: he admired the Reflections as an incisive critique of the revolutionaries’ philosophical dogmatism. Gentz, an erstwhile student of Kant, disagreed completely, arguing that Burke’s politics were entirely compatible with Kantian metaphysics. In his view, the Reflections’ central insight was that it takes political prudence to realize the rights of man in practice. Müller, finally, read the Reflections as a lament for the fall of Christendom, and as a diagnosis of the social alienation and moral confusion that had followed its demise. In other words, whereas Rehberg was a Humean skeptic and Gentz was a Kantian liberal, Müller was a Trinitarian Christian. Each of these men, moreover, claimed Burke as an ally. What this means is that Rehberg, Gentz, and Müller cannot have jointly invented a single thing called ‘conservatism’, and Burke cannot have inspired it. This becomes clear only after we recognize that at the turn of the nineteenth century, neither the meaning of Enlightenment nor the crux of Burke’s Reflections was clear: these were not fixed variables, but points of contemporary debate. By recapturing the diversity of Burke’s German reception, this thesis invites scholars to consider the ways that his students shepherded their differing visions of Enlightenment through the fires of the Revolution, down into the nineteenth century.

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Le travail de thèse entreprend une reconstruction critique de la philosophie politique de Leo Strauss (1899-1973) en partant de ses écrits de jeunesse allemands, replacés dans leur contexte politique et philosophique d’émergence et particulièrement dans les mouvements de la « renaissance juive » des années 1920. Au lieu de comparer son œuvre à celle d’autres grands classiques de la philosophie politique du XXe siècle ou d’analyser ces textes de jeunesse à la lumière de sa réception aux États-Unis, où lui et ses disciples sont souvent associés au mouvement néoconservateur américain, il s’agit ici de voir comment son positionnement politico-philosophique spécifique se construit dans la confrontation au « dilemme théologico-politique » dans lequel la pensée juive-allemande est prise face à la radicalisation de l’antisémitisme allemand pendant et après la Première Guerre Mondiale : judaïsme national ou judaïsme religieux ? Dans ses premiers écrits des années 1920, Strauss transforme cette opposition en celle entre Lumières et orthodoxie, entre athéisme et théisme, opposition qu’il ne cessera de vouloir dépasser à travers la construction d’un « athéisme biblique ». Nous montrons que ce n’est cependant que dans les années 1930, après son « tournant platonicien », que Strauss trouvera, par l’intermédiaire d’une nouvelle interprétation de Maïmonide, sa solution au « dilemme théologico-politique », sur des bases philosophiques pré-modernes. Avec le retour à ces Lumières platoniciennes, Strauss tente d’harmoniser Lumières et anti-Lumières, la défense du rationalisme et la justification d’un ordre théologico-politique autoritaire, projet paradoxal qui forme le cœur de son néoconservatisme philosophique. / My thesis undertakes a critical reconstruction of the political philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899-1973) on the basis of his early writings, which I contextualize in the political and philosophical frame of the Weimar Republic and the “German-Jewish Renaissance” of the 1920s. My main hypothesis is that his concept of ”political philosophy” emerges from a confrontation with the “theological-political dilemma” that German-Jewish thought faced after the First World War, the radicalization of German Anti-Semitism and the problem of being torn between national and religious Judaism. I argue that in his early writings of the 1920s, Strauss transforms this dilemma into the opposition between Enlightenment and orthodoxy, atheism and theism that he tries to overcome in the form of an “biblical atheism”. In the 1930s, after his “Platonic turn”, Strauss finds another solution to the “dilemma”, now on pre-modern philosophical grounds, through a new interpretation of Maimonides. With the return to this “platonic” Enlightenment, Strauss tries to harmonize anti-Enlightenment and Enlightenment, pre-modern rationalism and the justification of authoritarian theological-political order. My argument ist that this paradoxical project is the core of his philosophical neo-conservatism.