Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1979"

Tropics of discourse : essays in cultural criticism

Abstract: "Tropics of Discourse" develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also offers original interpretations of a number of literary themes, including the Wild Man and the Noble Savage. White's commentary ranges from a reappraisal of Enlightenment history to a reflective summary of the current state of literary criticism.

A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism

Abstract: Part 1 Trends in Enlightenment thought: Catherine II and Enlightenment philosophy the emergence of Russian Enlightenment philosophy Nikolai Novikov and Freemasonry the aristocratic opposition. Part 2 The culmination of the Enlightenment in Russia - Aleksandr Radishchev: Radishchev's life Radishchev's social philosophy Radishchev's views on ethics and education radical reform or revolution? the treatise on immortality. Part 3 Gentry conservatives and gentry revolutionaries: Nikolai Karamzin the Decembrists. Part 4 Anti-Enlightenment trends in the early 19th century: mysticism the Wisdom-lovers and Russian Schellingianism. Part 5 Petr Chaadaev: Chaadaev's metaphysics and philosophy of history Russia's past and future Chaadaev's place in Russian intellectual history. Part 6 The Slavophiles: the Slavophiles' philosophy of history and social ideals the concept of the "integral personality" and "new principles in philosophy" Slavophile ecclesiology Slavophilism as conservative Utopianism the disintegration of Slavophilism. Part 7 The Russian Hegelians - from "reconciliation with reality" to "philosophy of action": Nikolai Stankevich Mikhail Bakunin Vissarion Belinsky Aleksandr Herzen. Part 8 Belinsky and different variants of westernism: Belinsky's westernism the liberal westernizers. Part 9 The Petrashevtsy: the social and political ideas of the Petrashevtsy the philosophical ideas of the Petrashevtsy. Part 10 The origins of "Russian socialism": the evolution of Herzen's views Nikolai Ogarev. Part 11 Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the "Enlighteners" of the sixties: Chernyshevsky's anthropological materialism Nikolai Dobroliubov and the dispute over the "superfluous men" Dmitry Pisarev and "nihilism" critics of the "Enlighteners" Apollon Grigoriev and Nikolai Strakhov. Part 12 Populist ideologies: from "go to the people" to the "people's will" Petr Lavrov Petr Tkachev Nikolai Mikhailovsky. Part 13 Anarchism: Mikhail Bakunin Petr Kropotkin. Part 14 Ideologies of reaction after the reforms: Nikolai Danilevsky Konstantin Pobedonostsev Konstantin Leontiev. Part 15 Two prophetic writers: Fyodor Dostoevsky Lev Tolstoy Dostoevsky and Tolstoy - a comparison. Part 16 Variants of positivism: dogmatic positivism Grigory Wyrouboff critical positivism - Vladimir Lesevich positivism and psychology positivism and sociology. Part 17 Vladimir Soloviev and metaphysical idealism: Soloviev's religious philosophy Aleksei Kozlov and pan-psychism Boris Chicherin and the Hegelians of the second half of the 19th century. Part 18 From populism to Marxism: between populism and Marxism Plekhanov and the "rational reality" Plekhanov's literary criticism and aesthetics legal populism legal Marxism Lenin's early writings. Index.

The business of enlightenment : a publishing history of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800

Abstract: A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Darnton's history of the "Encyclopedie" is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of "histoire du livre," and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization. In tracing the publishing story of Diderot's "Encyclopedie," Darnton uses new sources--the papers of eighteenth-century publishers--that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict. The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas, ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in which the Enlightenment had flourished. Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn without reference to this work. Darnton has written an indispensable book for historians of modern Europe.

The Ego Dilemma and the Buddhist Experience of Enlightenment

Abstract: The author examines the core problem of existence, the dread of nonbeing, from the standpoint of object-relations theory and subsequently demonstrates that the experience of enlightenment, emerging from religious mysticism, may be seen as the resolution of this basic human problem. The investigation of the experience of enlightenment is pursued from the perspective of Buddhism, a subject with which the author is most familiar.

Personal Identity and Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism”

Abstract: In the \"Refutation of Idealism\" which Kant added in the second edition of the Critique ofPure Reason Kant offers a defense of the thesis that \"The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me\" (B275). In the Preface added in the second edition he puts the same claim this way: \"This consciousness of my existence in time is bound up in the way of identity [identisch verbunden] with the consciousness of a relation to something outside me\" (Bxl. note). Commentators have not agreed äs to the Interpretation of Kant's claim. There is of course a temptation to view it äs developing a point already argued in the Transcendental Deduction. There Kant maintains, in a first edition formulation, that \"The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the seif is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts, that is, according to rules, which ... determine an object for their Intuition...\" (A 108); or, in a second edition Statement, \"The transcendental unity of apperception [\"The Objective Unity of Self-Consciousness\"] is that unity through which all the manifold given in a intuition is united in a concept of the object'' (B 139). Thus both Bennett and Strawson, for example, view the two sections of the Critique a containing a single line of argument, presented more abstractly in the earlier and then more concretely in the later of these sections. Recent interpretations fail to elucidate the problem Kant raises in the Refutation of Idealism. I shall argue that this problem differs from the problem of \"unity of consciousness\" dealt with in the Transcendental Deduction. The distinction rests on a contrast between two different notions of \"unity of consciousness\" and of \"personal identity.\

Popular Anti-Catholicism in England, 1850-1851

Abstract: Traditional religious distinctions gradually eroded in eighteenth-century England under the impact of enlightenment rationalism: reason replaced revelation as the criterion for belief, order ousted enthusiasm in worship, and interdenominationalism blurred sectarian boundaries in philanthropic endeavors. But the French Revolution, economic troubles and radical political activity after 1815, and intellectual Romanticism put an end to co-operation and encouraged the growth of denominational self-consciousness. That rise of denominationalism led to the greatest conflict between the sects and the Establishment since perhaps the mid-seventeenth century. The clash began on the local level in the 1820s when the Church attempted to use its legal powers to collect rates; the events of 1828-1829 ushered in a period of conflict on the national level, as well. The Church turned to the state for support, only to find that Whigs and Liberals, in power for most of the period before 1874, were erastians and latitudinarians. So the Church in its turn became militant; high-churchmen in particular came to distrust Parliament and to emphasize the independent sources of clerical authority in sacerdotalism and the apostolic succession.The period from roughly 1830 to 1870 was one of heightened religious tension. Nonconformists, having gained civil equality, now attempted to eliminate other symbols of the Anglican hegemony. Roman Catholics, sloughing off anglo-gallicanism for ultramontanism, asserted their spiritual claims and talked of converting England.

The example of the Dutch Republic for American federalism

Abstract: History is philosophy teaching by examples. That famous saying expresses the eighteenth-century approach to the past better than long explanations. The philosophers and political scientists of the Enlightenment were eager to find examples to justify their actual deeds and opinions. Perhaps the deepest reason for this quest for an imitable past is to be found in their belief in the unity of Western civilization. There was a great chain of being, not only in space, as has been so magnificently described by Arthur Lovejoy, but also in time.

Paradoxes of psychotherapy. In honor and memory of Ludwig Binswanger.

Abstract: Existential analysis has made us face the paradoxes, if not antinomies, in psychotherapy that we did not seem to be aware of. Existential philosophy is a highly elaborate, technical and linguisticly difficult field. In psychiatry, existential analysis of turned out to be just a set of hallowed commonplaces. As philosophy, its intent is the discovery of the grounds for our existence and in this way it seems to approach theology. In some instances it may turn into atheistic arrogance. With the stern zeal of philosophy and the pessimistic theology of existentialism, one hardly knows where to begin with psychotherapy. Often it fascinates the mediators, the writers who seem to offer us patterns helpful in our daily work. The effort, to take a radical stand to try to rewrite psychiatry, seems to be justified. And, if existential analysis hardly succeeds in bringing back into 'existence' (Dasein) some of our disturbed patients, it has aroused a review of our stale and abused terms and concepts. Psychiatry cannot exist, disciplined and sensible, without the enlightenment which philosophy offers. Some new departures could be attempted again. But if philosophy is not a way of talking and teaching but a way of living, is the psys goal. If he failed, his work remains a lighthouse in our time, warning us on our voyage.

A Logical Analysis of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

Abstract: It is the general view of Buddhism that one should escape from the world of transmigration (saṁsāra) and obtain enlightenment (nirvāna) by means of the path (mārga) of religious practices.1 Buddhists call transmigration the cause of enlightenment; enlightenment, the effect of religious practices. Nāgārjuna, who not only established the Mādhyamika philosophy but also determined the fundamental direction of Mahayana Buddhism, was also one of those Buddhists who endeavored to leave the world of transmigration by means of religious practices. He calls the world of transmigration the profane world (saṁvṛti); enlightenment, ultimate truth (paramārtha).

Compassionate Politics: Buddhist Concepts as Political Guide

Abstract: Buddhism, a religion-philosophy asserting nonattachment to society as a summum bonum, would seem to have little or no relevance for politics. References to statecraft, scattered through out the massive literature, reinforce the fundamental disdain of political-governmental affairs by eschewing participation in the low-level activities of the here and now. The Buddhist antidote to endemic human suffering, caused by man's refusal or inability to grasp the illusoriness of life, is an individual transcendence of earthly existence, giving additional weight to accusations that Buddhism is not only antisocial but also escapist and other worldly. Yet, for all its failure to postulate an "explicitly political theory"1 and its negativity toward government, Buddhism and its founder have had considerable impact on political thought. Aside from the guidelines for society implicit in its ethics for individual behavior, historical examples—both early and con temporary, Theravada (southern school) and Mahayana (north ern school)2—abound and attest to that impact. Even Gotama, the historical Buddha, who chose spiritual enlightenment over the