The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took (...) root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took (...) root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

Ayn Rand projected her experiences in Russia onto an American canvas. The collapse of the economy described in Atlas Shrugged actually happened in Russia between 1916 and 1921. The economic and political policies of the government in the novel resemble those of the Bolsheviks in the first decade of their rule. The protagonists of Atlas Shrugged reject Russian values and ideals, especially the mystique of suffering and self-sacrifice. The subtext of The Fountainhead is the intellectual and cultural milieu of the (...) 1920s, the paradigmatic role of architecture, and the spiritual collectivism of prominent Christian opponents of "materialistic" Bolshevism. (shrink)

Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, andearly 20th century Russians' interpretationsand embellishments of it, informed Losev'stheories of music and myth and his studies ofthe religions of Apollo and Dionysus. Hiscomplex musical aesthetic includes the ideathat music is the expression of a fundamentallyDionysian reality structured by Apollonianelements. In The Dialectic of Myth, heargued that myth is a dialectical necessity(not just a necessity), attacked the secularmythologies of the Enlightenment and Marxism,and upheld ``Christian mythology'' (his term). In The Mythologies of the Greeks andRomans, he (...) traced the religions of Zeus,Apollo, and Dionysus from paleolithic Crete tothe end of the Roman Empire. (shrink)

This 1994 pioneering study documents the extent and diversity of the impact of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet literature and culture. It shows how these ideas, unacknowledged and reworked, entered and shaped that culture and stimulated the imagination of both supporters and detractors of the regime.

This article focuses on the “remarkable parallels” between the mystical anarchism formulated by Viacheslav Ivanov and Georgii Chulkov during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the ideas championed by Norman O. Brown, an American professor who became a guru of the 1960s. The article describes these parallels and accounts for their existence in societies that were polar opposites in other respects. Emphasis is placed on the loss of faith in an ideal and on the importance, to all three writers, of (...) Nietzsche and Christianity. (shrink)

This article focuses on the “remarkable parallels” between the mystical anarchism formulated by Viacheslav Ivanov and Georgii Chulkov during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the ideas championed by Norman O. Brown, an American professor who became a guru of the 1960s. The article describes these parallels and accounts for their existence in societies that were polar opposites in other respects. Emphasis is placed on the loss of faith in an ideal and on the importance, to all three writers, of (...) Nietzsche and Christianity. (shrink)

Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits with (...) and helps sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we're conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications. (shrink)

One phenomenon pertains roughly to being awake. A person or other creature is conscious when it's awake and mentally responsive to sensory input; otherwise it's unconscious. This kind of consciousness figures most often in everyday discourse.

A sourcebook of post-biblical Jewish literature from the Second Commonwealth to modern times.

It’s often held that undetectable inversion of mental qualities is, if not possible, at least conceivable. It’s thought to be conceivable that the mental quality your visual states exhibit when you see something red in standard conditions is literally of the same type as the mental quality my visual states exhibit when I see something green in such circumstances. It’s thought, moreover, to be conceivable that such inversion of mental qualities could be wholly undetectable by any third-person means. And since (...) first- person access is limited to a single individual, and so could not reveal a disparity in mental quality between us, third-person undetectability means undetectability tout court. (shrink)

A touchstone of much modern theorizing about the mind is the idea, still tac- itly accepted by many, that a state's being mental implies that it's conscious. This view is epitomized in the dictum, put forth by theorists as otherwise di-.

This book deals with more than political philosophy in medieval Islam. The Islamic community was a religio-political unity, and as a consequence Islamic thought drew no clearcut distinction between what was strictly religious and what was political or legal. This makes it impossible to study its political ideas without delving into its thought in general and the evolution of its institutions and legal systems. This delving Mr. Rosenthal has done well, and by doing so he has produced a book (...) which not only outlines the political philosophy of Islam... but gives us also an idea of its general thought and the development of its principal institutions. - American Historical Review. (shrink)

In "Knowledge Triumphant," Franz Rosenthal observes that the Islamic civilization is one that is essentially characterized by knowledge ("'ilm"), for "ilm is ...

All mental states, including thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations, often occur consciously. But they all occur also without being conscious. So the first thing a theory of consciousness must do is explain the difference between thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations that are conscious and those which are not.

Introduction CLASSICAL American pragmatism represents a historical period in American philosophy, spanning a particular time frame and including the ...

At the level of our platitudinous background knowledge about things, speech is the expression of thought. And understanding what such expressing involves is central to understanding the relation between thinking and speaking. Part of what it is for a speech act to express a mental state is that the speech act accurately captures the mental state and can convey to others what mental state it is. And for this to occur, the speech act at least must have propositional content that (...) somehow reflects that of the mental state, and perhaps must have other such properties as well. (shrink)

Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes, and holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes argued that, because minds have no spatial properties and physical reality is essentially extended in space, minds are wholly nonphysical. Every human being is accordingly a composite of two objects: a physical body, and a nonphysical object that is that human being's mind. On a weaker version of dualism, which contemporary thinkers (...) find more acceptable, human beings are physical substances but have mental properties, and those properties aren't physical. This view is known as property dualism, or the dual-aspect theory. (shrink)

A reprint of the Schocken Books edition of 1961.

ABSTRACT Psychological or political criticism of the parent‐child relation presupposes a normative account of that relation. Such an account is here provided. The normative account can shed most light when the parent‐child relation is presented recognizably, not in Utopian disguise. The purposes of reasonable people partly depend on their interpretations of those of their parents. This is so whether such people accept or reject any particular parental purposes. The filial art sticks to the project of working out the enacted interpretation—until (...) it gets it approximately right. There is a corresponding parental art, neither compensatory nor sacrificial. (shrink)

This book is a collection of biographical sketches of some of the leading figures of our time, though the figures aren't people but configurations of words.

This chapter contains sections titled: Selfhood and community Value The normative‐empirical split Environmental ethics.