GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Essays and articles published in newspapers and magazines belong to the written form. And speeches, radio and TV commentaries, radio and TV talk shows belong to its oral form. The function of this style is to inform readers and listeners, to influence the public opinion, to convince the audience of smth and to express the point of view in an article or speech.

Public speeches

1) Being an oral form of publicistic style it contains some peculiarities of oral speeches which are directed to the audience *Ladies and gentlemen *Honorable members

2) The use of contracted forms *I’m, you’re, don’t

3) Use of colloquial words, use of the 1^st and 2^nd personal pronouns. Importance of standard pronunciation

4) The use of intonation to express shades of meaning, implication, different emotions. Also gestures and mimics play a great role.

In its leading features public speeches belong to the written variety of the language, thus they have the form of the monologue. Lexically there are lots of bookish words and some terms, very often the use of figurative language. In order to appeal to the emotions of the listeners, speakers resort to phraseological units, metaphors, similes, allusions, irony. But all stylistic devices used in speech are dead, so that the listeners won’t have any difficulties in understanding them and can easily get at the idea. Compositionally the text is logically constructed; the message is expressed clearly with argumentative power.

Syntactical constructions are not very much complicated and there are a lot of connectives, which link the idea of the speaker. Among syntactical stylistic devices most frequent one are: repetitions and rhetorical questions.

Written style

Newspaper articles, media articles.

A newspaper serves to inform and to convince the reader. It’s meant for different kinds of audience, people who differ in their background, education and culture. A newspaper is often read in places where it’s hard to concentrate: in the undergrounds or at lunch, during a break. The process of reading is often broken off. All these factors impose certain rules on creating a newspaper text. A media text should be understandable to everyone. It’s supposed to arouse the reader’s interest at once and keep it throughout the article and the main information should be imparted in a short concise and expressive way. A media article has the structure of an inverted pyramid and the information is presented according to the top-down relevant principles. The most important information is imparted in the headline and the 1^st sentence.

(45) General features of media articles (MA)

1) MA abound in proper names (people, geographical places, numerals)

2) Newspaper articles contain a great number of bookish words, abstract words, and economic and political terms.

3) Newspaper clichйs are widely used. They are stable, easily recognizable and understandable. *to step down

*to come to force

4) Lots of abbreviations and clipped forms are used to contribute conciseness

5) Abbreviations may stand for geographical places and well-known public figures.

6) Abbreviation and clipping must be well-known to the reader or explained in the text

7) A newspaper is very sensitive to everything new in the life of society therefore lots of neologisms have come into existence in mass media *long-haired

8) Some newspaper articles are written in a very expressive way. They are rich in various stylistic devices: epithets, irony, similes, metaphors, punning, and allusions. But they are all dead.

9) In syntax some news items may be very complicated. It usually refers to the news article.

The content may be expressed in 1 or 2 sentences, which are very long with a number of infinitive, participial, gerundial and nominative constructions.

10) The rules of sequences of tenses is not observe.

11) MAs contain plenty of quotations of direct speech, which may be presented without inverted commas. The content of quotations may be transformed for some purposes and supplied with ironic commas of a journalist.

(46) Newspaper headlines

The aim of headlines is informational. That is to express the content of an article in a short form and besides the other function is expressive, because the aim is to attract the reader’s attention. And these 2 functions have grammatical and syntactical features.

1) Articles are often omitted.*Long trip in strange car for 2 Frenchmen

2) Omission of the verb to be *Lost Botticelli unveiled

3) Present simple is used to refer to smth that has happened, is happening or happens regularly.*Somali gunman attacks British tourists in Kenya

4) To refer to the future the infinitive is used *Britain to spend more a cancer research

5) The possessive case is preferred to the off phrase *Muslim women struggle to wear what they like

6) Attributive use of nouns. 3,4,5 nouns may be put together into a sort of block with all the nouns except the last functioning as attribute *Bread Price Rise Shock

7) As far as the vocabulary is concerned here certain words keeps repeated in headlines. These recurring words are often short, one syllable words colored by expressive and evaluative shades of meaning *pledge-promise

8) Info is combined with appraisal. There are various stylistically colored words, pins, transformed idioms. Use of abbreviations and initials.

Syntactically the most widely used structure is an elliptical sentence, which is laconic and concise on the one hand and expressive on the other hand. Other syntactical structures employed are statements, nominative sentences, questions, quotations and direct speech.

Graphically punctuation marks are widely used, especially a dash.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

18th Century German Philosophy Prior to Kant

In Germany, the eighteenth century was the age of enlightenment, the age, that is, that called for the independence of reason. Although the ethos of this age found its clearest (and certainly its most famous) articulation towards the end of the century with Immanuel Kant and his critical philosophy, he was not the first to issue this call. Instead, that task fell to Christian Thomasius (Thomas) at the end of the seventeenth century. It was then taken up and further developed in a theological (pietist) direction by a number of minor figures, the Thomasians, and reissued in a rationalist direction in the early and middle part of the eighteenth century by Christian Wolff and his followers. The development of their position(s) as well as their philosophical (dis)agreements took place by and large at the University of Halle and against the context of pietism.

1. Christian Thomasius (1655-1724)

1.1 Biography/Work

1.2 Philosophy

2. Christian Wolff (1679-1754)

2.1 Biography/Work

2.2 Philosophy

3. Context, Influences, and Disciples

3.1 Pietism

3.2 The Thomasians

3.3 The Wolffians

3.4 Disputes

4. Beyond Wolff

4.1 Aesthetics

Bibliography

Other Internet Resources

Related Entries

1. Christian Thomasius (1655-1724)

Although Thomasius is now largely forgotten, he was a pivotal figure in early eighteenth century enlightenment thought. In this context, however, he was also a somewhat ambiguous figure. On the one hand, he was clearly an innovator. Both a lawyer and a philosophy professor, he advocated the independent use of healthy reason, fought against prejudice, against belief in any of the then prevailing superstitions, against any form of (religious) persecution, against the witch-hunt and the use of torture, and in general, against any form of intolerance. He took issue with dependence on authority and the school philosophy's dependence on the syllogism. He lectured in German rather than the traditional Latin or the then fashionable French and was the first person, in Germany, to found a popular monthly journal, written by and large in German, devoted to book reviews, the Monatsgespräche (Monthly Conversations). On the other hand, especially when it came to matters of morality, he was more of a traditionalist. Here he retained distinctly non-Enlightenment ideas, particularly the belief in an evil will and the belief in the necessity of God's salvation.

1.1 Biography/Work

By way of background to both Thomasius's and Wolff's life it is important to note that the Germany of the eighteenth century was a country split into numerous states, each of which had its own government. There was no central government. Reeling from the effects of the Thirty Years War, many of its states did not have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or, for that matter, a ‘national’ culture, though, given the variety of state governments, some states had relatively more freedom than others. It may seem surprising, therefore, that Christian Thomasius was able to issue the call to the enlightenment at the end of the seventeenth century, though not at all surprising that both Thomasius and Wolff were subject to arbitrary political power.

The son of jurist and philosopher Jakob Thomasius, Christian received his education at the University of Leipzig and his law degree at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder (in Eastern Germany) in 1679. He spent the early part of his career in his hometown Leipzig (in the state of Saxony), as a lawyer and (private) lecturer at the university there, but his controversial views and manner of expressing them, in particular, in the monthly journal Monatsgespräche, led to the prohibition to publish and hold lectures (private and academic) in Leipzig (and Saxony) in 1690. He was, however, welcome in the neighboring and comparatively more open-minded Halle (in the state of Brandenburg/Prussia), and was instrumental in founding the university there in 1694. He remained in Halle for the rest of his life, refusing an invitation to return to Leipzig in 1709.

Thomasius's body of work can be roughly divided into three parts. In his early Leipzig years, he was primarily interested in matters of law, particularly, following his father, in Pufendorf's natural law theory. This period ends around 1688 with the publication of Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Institutions of Divine Jurisprudence) in which he sought to complete Pufendorf's project of divorcing natural law from theology. This year, as well, saw the publication of Introductio ad philosophiam auliam (Introduction to Court Philosophy), a text that is somewhat misnamed since it has less to do with proper conduct or even thought at court than with the proper use of reason, a topic that Thomasius would take up in greater detail in his 1691 Introduction to the Doctrine of Reason.

In general, 1687-8 seems to have marked an endpoint of sorts and the beginning of the second major stage, the more clearly philosophical one, of Thomasius's life. Even though he would remain in Leipzig for another two years, he had clearly broken with tradition by 1687, when he began lecturing and publishing in German. In 1688, he began the publication of the controversial Monatsgespräche (which appeared monthly until April 1690) and turned his attention to matters of theoretical and practical philosophy. Here two sets of books, the Einleitung and Ausübung der Vernunftlehre (Introduction and Application of the Doctrine of Reason), and the Einleitung and Ausübung der Sittenlehre (Introduction and Application of Moral Theory) that appeared in Halle between 1691 and 1696 mark the second part of his career. Written by and large in German with a minimum of technical terminology, these books were intended not for an audience of experts, but instead, as the subtitle to the Introduction to the Doctrine of Reason specifies, for a general audience of “all rational persons of whatever social standing and sex…”

During the late 1690s (and after a religious crisis that led to an at least temporary (re)affirmation of his pietist beliefs), Thomasius produced two works on metaphysics that endorsed a mystical variety of vitalism. In subsequent years, his interests shifted back to matters of law. This was the third part of his life and will not be further considered in this context.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 694