Academic literature on the topic 'Soldier-philosopher'

Max Loxterkamp correctly attributes to us the view that people are living well if they act morally and find long-term satisfaction, regardless of the pursuits they choose. He disagrees with us, however, and suggests that lives are better if they benefit society, and he offers as examples a charity worker, a courageous soldier, and a philosopher of genius.

Contrary to its self-proclamation, philosophy started not with wonder, but with time thrown out of joint. It started when the past has become a problem. Such was the historical situation facing Athens when Plato composed his Socratic dialogues. For the philosopher of fifth century BCE, both the immediate past and the past as the Homeric tradition handed down to the citizens had been turned into problematicity itself. In this essay, I will examine the use of philosophy as memory theatre in Plato's Republic. I shall do so by interpreting Book X of the Republic as Plato's “odyssey” and suggest that such Platonic odyssey amounts to an attempt to re-inherit the collapsed spatial and temporal order of the fallen Athenian maritime empire. In my reading, the Odysseus in the Myth of Er comes forth for Plato as the exemplary Soldier-Citizen-Philosopher who must steer between the Scylla of ossified political principles and the whirling nihilism of devalued historical values, personified by Charybdis. I shall further suggest that Plato’s memory theatre also constitutes a device of amnesia and forgetting. The post-Iliadic Odysseus must drink of forgetfulness from the river Lethe, so that the revenant soldier, Er, and those who inherited the broken historical present during and after the Peloponnesian War, would be enabled to remember in a particular way. Such remembrance, I shall conclude, may be what Plato means by philosophy, a memory theatre of psychic regulation and moral economy that sets itself decidedly apart from earlier tragic and comic catharsis.

This paper analyzes “Futility”, one of the best poems by Wilfred Owen, a renowned British poet-soldier of the First World War. It shows that, in philosophical terms, the poem is based on existential nihilism as a view that human existence is intrinsically non-teleological. As the paper argues, Owen does not develop such a pessimistic world-view because of his great knowledge of Darwin’s or Nietzsche’s work as being emblematic of late nineteenth and early twentieth century pessimism, but because of his firsthand experience with the horrors of history’s first mechanized war. Owen’s nihilistic philosophy is viewed in contrast with the ideology of progress and utopianism as being prevalent over pessimism up until the outbreak of WWI and as being equally propounded by the secular philosopher Herbert Spencer and the Protestant liberal theologians. In brief, “Futility”, as a poem which presents the demise of a nameless British soldier, ends in the poet’s rhetorical question which explicitly doubts the purposefulness of human history. The paper also deals with “Futility’s” stylistic traits, and in doing so comes to the conclusion that the poem’s mood is for its most part temperate and elegiac with, in emotional terms, a somewhat more intense ending, just as it reveals that its irregular rhyming and metre reflect the poet’s reaction to the spiritual emptiness and chaos of war.

Rosh Yeshivat Kol Torah in Jerusalem for more than forty years, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach was one of the most influential Halakhic decisors of the twentieth century. Rabbi Auerbach was a major figure in Haredi society which makes his Halakhic involvement in military issues more interesting. An examination of his Halakhic rulings in this matter shows that Rabbi Auerbach comprehended not only the complexity of being a religious soldier in the Army but also the complexity of the operational needs of the Army. Here I identify and analyze Rabbi Auerbach’s Halakhic rulings on military issues in two aspects: a) regular military issues; b) different Halakhic issues on which Rabbi Auerbach imported military discussions and terminology into the halakhic discourse. Moreover, I show that Rabbi Auerbach worked in the light of the principle, “The Nullification of the Individual” (my terminology). Finally, I compare Rabbi Auerbach’s attitude towards Citizen-State issues to that of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel.

This article concerns two very different ways and methods of bringing up two Russian tsars – Alexander the First and Nicholas the First. Although they were brothers, one was born nearly twenty years before the second, and that influenced their future. Alexander, born in 1777, was the first son of the successor to the throne, and was raised from the beginning as a future ruler. The person who shaped his education most was his grandmother, empress Catherine the Second. She appointed the Swiss philosopher La Harpe as his teacher, and wanted Alexander to become an enlightened monarch. Nicholas, on the other hand, was never meant to rule and was never prepared for it. He was born in 1796 as the ninth child, and third son, and by the will of his parents, Tsar Paul I and Tsarina Maria Fyodorovna he received an education more suitable for a soldier than a tsar, but he eventually ascended to the throne after Alexander died. One may ask how these differences influenced them and how they shaped their personalities as people and as rulers.

This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, speaking to their intersecting ideas. Dostoevsky, true enough, predates the Shoah, whereas Grossman was a Soviet Jew who served as a journalist (most famously at the Battle of Stalingrad), and Levinas was a soldier in the French army, captured by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp. Each of these writers wrestles with the problem of evil in various ways, Dostoevsky and Levinas as theists—one Christian, the other Jewish—and Grossman as an atheist; yet, despite their differences, there are ever deeper resonances in that all are drawn to the idea of kenosis and the holy fool, and each writer employs variations of this idea in their respective answers to the problem of evil. Each argues, more or less, that evil arises in totalizing utopian thought which reifies individual humans to abstractions—to The Human, and goodness to The Good. Each looks to kenosis as the “antidote” to this utopian reification.

Benjamin Thompson, better known as Count Rumford, discovered the mechanical equivalent of heat. He was also soldier, administrator, founder of the Royal Institution in London and the English Garden in Munich. Fellow of the Royal Society and Membre de l'Institut, his career embraced rural New England, London society, service to the Elector of Bavaria and an unhappy marriage in Paris to the widow of Antoine Lavoisier.

The article provides a comprehensive analysis of domestic and foreign developments on the issues of a certain state of man in general and the state of TERMINATION in the religious and secular life of man in particular; the concept of «termination» is substantiated; the content of the leading concepts of the problem is revealed. The signs, types, functions, and qualities of the TERMINATION state are highlighted and systematized. The analysis is carried out on the materials of the documentary on religious and mystical culture. The philosopher in his theoretical reflections tries to cover both the objective state of affairs and the subjective world of man. Philosophy shows that external catastrophes can begin with an internal catastrophe, a subjective one, when people follow petty in petty ways, when the natural compensatory insight mechanism as a STATE OF CESSATION, a regulatory state of self-awareness, which results in the cessation of a trivial action, when this action is stopped as unnecessary. In religious and mystical culture, compensatory insight as a STATE of Cessation is the Divine state of the mystic as the cessation of action-actions. However, this is a cessation of small, trivial actions-actions. Compensatory insight as state of Cessation is the cessation of pettiness. The state of cessation is a cessation for a short time. And then there is action, actions for salvation. The state of Cessation - is a spontaneous experience in which the old personality dies in a person. It is experienced as a revelation, an insight. It is clear that there is relativity, what to consider important in the actions of a person, and what is not important. One person thinks some actions are important, while another person considers important, and another person considers completely different actions. But the state of STOP state can be triggered in both cases. in both cases. The state of STOP is a rather subjective state of the individual with his or her attitude to the world and to other people. But still, there is a more or less objective criterion. The objective criterion is that a person is somehow or another is orientated towards those actions that aimed at the development of life, at its preservation, its salvation, and not its destruction. And here the actions must be of a certain orientation. For example, a person of the XXI century, with his objective knowledge, his understanding of history, with his understanding of cosmic processes should be guided in their actions to preserve human life, to, to protect this life. But in the actions of people we. we see manifestations of cruelty and inhumanity. These actions are aimed simply at the destruction of human life. An example is, is the war that Russia has unleashed against Ukraine. In this war, the actions of the Russian occupiers - are actions to destroy all living things. Here the manifestation of the state of Suspension in a person does not does not work. The Russian soldier does not stop those his actions that destroy people.

The circle of Petrashevsky, getting into the act in 1840s in Petersburg, makes a notable contribution to Russian literature and philosophy. The members of the circle, composed of different professional fields like student, officer, poet, writer, philosopher, merchant and soldier, vociferously condemn the system of tsardom and serfdom. The members of Petrashevsky develop their utopian-socialist views majorly on the theories of the French philosopher François Marie Charles Fourier and the Russian philosopher Vissarion Grigorevich Belinsky. Meeting up every Friday night at the home of the circle leader Mihail Vasilevich Butashevich-Petrashevsky in Petersburg, the members discuss current, social, political, literary, religious and philosophical issues. The members of Petrashevsky circle plan to overthrow the existing regime. One of the most important propaganda organs of the circle of Petrashevsky is poetry. The poets of Petrashevsky aim to infuse their modern and liberal thoughts into the public. However, Tsar Nicholas I’s authoritarian government restricts poets’ actions and discourse. The Petrashevsky poets Aleksei Nikolaevich Pleshcheyev' and Dmitry Dmitrievich Achsharumov dream a free, independent, fair, equal and happy future in their poems. In Sergei Fedorovich Durov’s poems come into prominence dissatisfaction towards his period, disappointment, pessimism, desperation and hopelessness.

Cette thèse biographique étudie le rôle du chevalier puis marquis François-Jean de Chastellux dans la diffusion transatlantique des idées et des pratiques des Lumières entre son départ pour l’Amérique en 1780 et sa mort en 1788. Dans notre recherche la phase antérieure à la « période atlantique » de Chastellux est incluse, pour permettre de mieux saisir les origines de ses échanges. Pour l’analyse de son rôle, nous avons emprunté des outils d’analyse de la théorie des transferts culturels. Pour cette étude nous nous sommes principalement basés sur ses archives privées inédites. Dans celle-ci nous montrons que Chastellux est un exemple de soldat-philosophe du dix-huitième siècle. Par sa famille maternelle, il était, dès son plus jeune âge, familier avec la mouvance des Lumières. Il a appliqué certaines idées sur l’égalité et le bonheur au sein de son régiment pendant et après la guerre de Sept Ans. En parallèle, il évoluait comme un « homme de lettres », membre de l’Académie française, qui s’était donné comme mission de diffuser le plus de « lumières » possible dans son réseau composé de la haute aristocratie, l’armée et de la République des Lettres. En 1780, pendant « l’expédition particulière » en Amérique, Chasttellux était le major général de l’armée franco-américaine dans la guerre d’Indépendance américaine. En tant que soldat-philosophe, il était à même de remplir cette mission également outre-Atlantique. Après la guerre, alors qu’il est rentré à Paris, Chastellux, maintenant marquis, est resté en contact avec des américains. Chastellux servait ainsi d’intermédiaire entre la France et l’Amérique jusqu’à sa mort soudaine en 1788
This dissertation studies the role of François-Jean de Chastellux in the spread of enlightened ideas and practices in the Atlantic world between 1780 and 1788, his departure from France to America until his death. Our research covers much of his life before this "Atlantic period", to examine the origins of his transatlantic exchanges. As a result, we have written a biography of Chastellux and made use of tools of the theory of cultural transfers. We have had access to the private, unpublished, archive of Chastellux, which contains over 4000 folios. Based on this material, we are able to demonstrate that he was an example of a soldier-philosopher. Because of his family background, he became familiar with Enlightenment thinking. Thereafter, when entering the French army, he applied several Enlightenment ideas within his own regiment during and after the Seven Years War, and thus represented the "Military Enlightenment". In parallel, he evolved into a man of letters and was elected to the Académie Française. He conceived his mission in life as the duty to disseminate enlightened ideas and practices throughout his network, composed of members of the French court, the army and philosophers. In 1780, during the American War of Independence, he served as a major general. As a soldier-philosopher, he was in a position to accomplish his mission in America. After the war, back in Paris, the now marquis Chastellux stayed in touch with Americans. By his correspondence and publications Chastellux played a role as a bridge between France and America, until he died, in 1788

‘Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one’, said Charles Dickens, ‘stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.’ The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as ‘a teeming word … a haunted word … a word to conjure with’. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer’s Odysseus who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca (‘His native home deep imag’d in his soul’, as Pope’s translation has it). From Virgil’s Aeneid to James Joyce’s Ulysses, from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott’s Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, ‘Ithaca’ has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’. In essence it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo’s Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of nostalgia firmly under the microscope.

Abstract In May 1643, the French philosopher and one-time soldier Rene Descartes (1596-1650) began a long correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. In her first letter, of 6 May, Elizabeth asked him how, if the soul and the body were so different in their natures, the soul could influence the actions of the body.

Abstract As Disruptive boom brought insurgency to a crest in the mid-18 30s, Old Hickory executed the Jeffersonian legacy by pushing the American political system to its democratic limits. Where Jefferson’s patrician assurance had trusted farmers and workers to follow high-minded gentlemen, Jackson’s patriarchal afflatus forced majority will on recalcitrant politicians. Where the philosopher/statesman conducted a Fabian defense of the yeoman republic, the soldier/ tribune brought to politics the sanguinary maxims of the Roman sack of Carthage. Favoring “warr to the knife, and the knife to the hilt,” he was ever ready to “carry the warr into affrica.”