Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1970"

Science and the Enlightenment

Abstract: Preface 1. The character of the enlightenment 2. Mathematics and the exact sciences 3. Experimental physics 4. Chemistry 5. Natural history and physiology 6. The moral sciences Bibliographic essay Sources of quotations Index.

The French Enlightenment and the Jews;: The origins of modern anti-Semitism

Abstract: Hertzberg develops his daring thesis that the modern, secular, anti-Semitism was fashioned not as a reaction to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, but within the Enlightenment and Revolution themselves. He finds that modern anti-Semitism owes less to Christian theological mentality than to doctrinaire libertarianism of figures such as Voltaire, d'Holbach, Diderot, and Marat.

Kings and philosophers, 1689-1789.

Abstract: These years also encompassed the birth, maturation, and waning of the Enlightenment. Leonard Krieger shows how the monarchical tradition and the new intellectual developments were reflected in the latter half of the period during the rule of "philosopher kings," the enlightened absolutists. He analyses, too, the origins of a movement toward representative government and the stirrings of political and social revolt that would bring the period to an abrupt end.

The Problem of the American Enlightenment

Abstract: THE PROBLEM of the American Enlightenment is full of paradoxes. The first of these is that while most American historians are its partisans, only a few choose to write about it. The opponents of the Enlightenment, Calvinists and revivalists and romantics, have been favorite subjects of our intellectual historians and literary scholars. Many historians, it is true, have written good books about some aspects of the Enlightenment: its social background, its science, and especially its great political figures. Yet few have made much effort to analyze its philosophical or religious allegiances, fewer still have tried hard to compare or relate it to the various European Enlightenments, and nobody at all has attempted anything like a quantitative enquiry into the spread of Enlightened ideas among Americans. One result is that general historians allow themselves to make in passing all sorts of statements that seem perhaps more than they really are contradictory. The Enlightenment met little resistance in colonial America, yet was mostly an upper-class affair. The founding fathers were mostly deists, yet the Calvinist clergy were the most consistent partisans of the Revolution. Some sharper contradictions have had less attention than they deserve. When our only real philosophe was elected president in 18oo, evangelical revivals were sweeping sections of the country that had voted for him. One cannot blame American historians too much for their failure

Is there an Ethiopian Philosophy? Rereading the Hatetas of Zara Yaecob and Walda Hewat in the Context of Knowledge Production

Abstract: The hatetas of Zara Yaecob and Walda Hewat are widely regarded as the precursors of societal enlightenment and written philosophy in Ethiopia. Mainly taking a form of an autobiographical exercise that tries to reflect on inherited horizons and conventional authority, the hatetas are seen as philosophical treatises that establish the need for societal rationality. Earlier on debates existed on the originality of the hatetas and whether or not the idea found within the hatetas qualifies as a philosophy. Claude Summer could be regarded as the ardent advocate of the position which celebrates the hatetas as original works of Ethiopian philosophy. Based on an attempt to refute the originality of the hatetas initiated by the Italian orientalist Carlo Conti Rossini, Daniel Kibret recently argued that the whole idea of an Ethiopian philosophy founded on the works of Zara Yaecob and Walda Hewat is a Western fabrication. He proceeded to argue that it was an Italian Jesuit by the name of Giusto d'Urbino who wrote the hatetas and that the hatetas had a hidden motive of initiating a reformist movement within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. In this paper we will try to evaluate the credibility of such arguments by initiating a rereading of the hatetas.

The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, and the Enlightenment

Abstract: THE Glorious Revolution of I688-I689 can be taken as a convenient point of departure for many developments within the British Isles, in colonial America, and in the relationships between the two. Changes, including important ones in views about the nature of the state and government, attitudes about society, education, and even colonial policies, developed during the last years of the seventeenth century and first years of the eighteenth. It was at this period that the Anglo-American Enlightenment emerged. Specific evidence in the New World of changes which took place and the influence of the "new philosophy" were the founding of the College of William and Mary and the creation of Williamsburg. Perhaps it would be better not to separate the College from the town, for, as they were brought into existence, they were really aspects of one thing-the capital, which has been rather cogently described as the "seat of empire." John Locke was a very powerful force in Britain at this time. Some scholars have gone so far as to describe him as the intellectual voice of the Revolution. Through his influential connections, his writings, and his active participation in government, he helped to bring about a general shift from traditional appeals to authority, royal prerogative, and the divine right of kings, characteristic of the Stuarts, to a greater dependence on empiricism, reason, knowledge, and experience in dealing with problems. Dissatisfaction among Englishmen with affairs of the colonies and the weaknesses of the whole structure of control had been developing for a long time. It continued to mount until it was brought to a head in the middle of the last decade of the seventeenth century. Edward Randolph, King William's Surveyor-General of Customs in North America, reported after an extensive and careful investigation that the whole colonial administration was disintegrating and called for urgent reforms. A step in the direction of change was made when a Board of Trade ("His Majesty's Commissioners for promoting the Trade of this Kingdom and for inspecting and improving the Plantations in America and elsewhere") was established under Parliamentary control. Locke accepted a position on this Board and assumed a leading role in its activities. He took a special interest in the colony of Virginia.1 It is not always sufficiently recognized that the age of the Enlightenment also involved a new approach to imperialism. Insofar as Williamsburg and the College were concerned, this imperialism was of two kinds. One came from Britain, the other had its center of development within the colony and can be called American. Locke was an enthusiastic advocate of commercial imperialism on the part of the English nation, both for personal and national enrichment. His interest appeared very early and has been related to his close association with the Earl of Shaftesbury. In I668, he became involved with the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, and he continued with them for about seven years. The experience was not a remunerative one but may have been profitable in other ways.2 Later, he accepted the position on the Board of Trade to help put the colonies in a rational and profitable order, realizing the connection between a powerful empire and the preservation of English liberties. Virginia had no city and very little cohesive order; much about the colony tended toward isolation, decentralization, and fragmentation. Furthermore, it had missed the opportunity of having a center of learning when the project for establishing a university at Henrico in 1617 came to noth-

Behaviour Adaptation in Late Life

Abstract: ever, would have us use a logical analogy. The second volume is designed to stand in synthetic relationship, as the last part of a triad, to the thesis and antithesis of Books One and Two in Volume I. This dialectical development is intended to emphasize the resolution of the tension between what Professor Gay called modern paganism in his first volume and the insecure Christianity of the enlightened century. Neither of the titles he gives to this resolutionThe Science of Freedom as applied to the volume or The Pursuit of Modernity as applied to Book Threeadequately conveys the principal theme of the third act. Indeed, it would be very difficult to do so in a few words, for it is easier to bring out the tension in the clashes of conviction during the Enlightenment than to characterize its resolution. Alfred Cobban, shortly before his death, wrote of the Enlightenment: 'If we ask what it was, the answer is bound to be that it was primarily an attitude of mind. ... It was above all, I believe, an age of rational optimism.

Introduction: Kant and the Enlightenment

Abstract: Immanuel Kant was born in Konigsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad in the U.S.S.R.) in 1724, and died in the same town in 1804, having taught philosophy in the university there from 1755. With the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 he became the founder and head of a new school of philosophy, the so-called Critical Philosophy, which was quickly accepted in universities all over Germany and soon gave Kant himself an international reputation. The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgment (1790) completed Kant’s systematic exposition of his views, but both before he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and afterwards, he published voluminously in books and in the press. Furthermore, he lectured on a wide range of topics, including mathematics, physics, cosmology, anthropology (i.e. what today is called psychology), physical geography and education, as well as on natural theology and the various branches of philosophy. His lectures were witty and learned, and people went to Konigsberg from all over Germany in order to hear them.

Social and Religious Disillusionment of the Age (1850–1900)

Abstract: The second half of the nineteenth century is one of the most complex epochs in the development of Russian social, intellectual, political, and religious thought. The period has justifiably been called the “Epoch of Russian Enlightenment” and that of the “Fighting Intelligentsia.” It is the epoch in which Russia experienced an enormous cultural expansion. She emerged from this Renaissance as a substantial contributor to world culture even though she was spiritually divided into halves; the old structure of absolutism, Orthodoxy, Russian nationalism, and the new liberal, European-directed Russia. The incompatibility of the old conservative and the new liberal forces inevitably resulted in a series of extended political, social, and religious dissensions. Reform and liberalism alternated with Nihilism and terrorism; various social movements with revolutionary activities and the spread of religious nonconformity was met with reaction, repression, and persecution. The rising enthusiasm for public affairs following the reforms of the 1860’s was thwarted by disillusionment, pessimism, and scepticism. Russia’s spirit seemed to have been permanently thwarted, and attempts to appease and unify the opposing forces were, indeed, never achieved during the Imperial regime. The prolonged instability and altercation instead paved the way for the formation of an entirely new social order by means of a genuine revolutionary upheaval.

The Source of Kant's Mature Moral Theory

Abstract: Some thirty years ago Klaus Reich claimed that Kant's abandonment of feeling as the source of our moral appraisals was due to his reading of Plato and the Stoics, and more interestingly that it led him to the fundamental concept of his mature moral theory, the autonomy of the will. Despite the obvious importance of the latter claim, it seems to have gone either unnoticed or unchallenged, at least in the English philosophical literature. This is particularly surprising since, apart from holding any view as to the legitimacy of singling out the source of Kant's mature moral theory, more obvious influences than those of Plato and the Stoics seem to have played such a role : the variant of Lutheran Christianity, Pietism, Rousseau, and the cultural context of the Enlightenment.