Russell B. Goodman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199577545
- eISBN:
- 9780191802621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577545.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
Emerson was a Romantic philosopher/poet who achieved fame in his own time and influenced philosophers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, and Stanley Cavell. This chapter begins with a ...
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Emerson was a Romantic philosopher/poet who achieved fame in his own time and influenced philosophers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, and Stanley Cavell. This chapter begins with a survey of some of the early intellectual influences on Emerson: Unitarian Christianity, Plato and Neoplatonism, Kant, Madame de Staël, Hume and Montaigne, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The discussion then turns to Concord in the 1830s: Emerson’s encounters with Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Bronson Alcott; his first book, Nature (1836); and his radical addresses, “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School Address.” Emerson develops his mature philosophy in his essays of the 1840s and 1850s, discussed here under the following headings: Emerson’s philosophical style, self-reliance, friendship, temporality, one and many, power, fate, race, and slavery.Less
Emerson was a Romantic philosopher/poet who achieved fame in his own time and influenced philosophers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, and Stanley Cavell. This chapter begins with a survey of some of the early intellectual influences on Emerson: Unitarian Christianity, Plato and Neoplatonism, Kant, Madame de Staël, Hume and Montaigne, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The discussion then turns to Concord in the 1830s: Emerson’s encounters with Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Bronson Alcott; his first book, Nature (1836); and his radical addresses, “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School Address.” Emerson develops his mature philosophy in his essays of the 1840s and 1850s, discussed here under the following headings: Emerson’s philosophical style, self-reliance, friendship, temporality, one and many, power, fate, race, and slavery.
