David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, first published in 1779, is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of religion and the most artful instance of philosophical dialogue since the dialogues of Plato. It presents a fictional conversation between a sceptic, an orthodox Christian, and a Newtonian theist concerning evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause of nature based on observable features of the world. This edition presents it together with several of Hume's other, shorter writings about religion, and with brief selections from the work of Pierre Bayle, who influenced both Hume's views on religion and the dialectical style of the Dialogues. The volume is completed by an introduction which sets the Dialogues in its philosophical and historical contexts.
David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, first published in 1779, is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of religion and the most artful instance of philosophical dialogue since the dialogues of Plato. It presents a fictional conversation between a sceptic, an orthodox Christian, and a Newtonian theist concerning evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause of nature based on observable features of the world. This edition presents it together with several of Hume's other, shorter writings about religion, and with brief selections from the work of Pierre Bayle, who influenced both Hume's views on religion and the dialectical style of the Dialogues. The volume is completed by an introduction which sets the Dialogues in its philosophical and historical contexts.
A study of Maurice Scève's sequence of love poems, the Délie - the first French canzoniere. There are two main themes: Scève's rendering of the intensity and complexity of the human experience of love, and secondly, his exploitation of the European tradition of love poetry. Dr Coleman tackles broad issues concerning appreciation of poetry, and more particularly, difficult poetry. Comparing individual poems by Horace, Scève and Mallarmé, she pinpoints the task of a serious reader: to experience sensitively and intellectually human emotions couched in artistic form. The book does not offer doctrines about Scève's love. instead, it looks at the contextual linguistic formulae which create love within the poems themselves: the allusiveness, the intellectual rigour, the tautness, the juxtaposition of words, combine with the voluptuousness and simplicity of the images, rhythm and sound, to make out of the poems a timeless an intensely personal experience.
It is well known in a general way that sixteenth-century French literature looked for its models towards Greece and Rome, but the topic is usually left there. This 1979 book begins with a reassessment of the original meaning and use of the work of Roman rhetoricians. It also identifies certain specific values or canons implicit in the actual texture of Latin poetry, and shows how these transformed French rhetorical theory and inaugurated the line of French poetry from Scève to Valéry. Mrs Coleman examines, both in general and in the work of Scève, Ronsard, Du Bellay and Montaigne, in particular, the way in which Roman values were recreated in the new language and the new literary forms. Scholars interested in the survival or prolongation of the classical tradition will be interested, and so, of course, will specialists in French and Renaissance literary studies.
Sweet Charity, based on Federico Fellini's screenplay for Nights of Cabiria, was directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and book by Neil Simon. I
