Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1987"

Toward Desacralizing Secularization Theory

Abstract: The theory of secularization is a product of the social and cultural milieu from which it emerged The expectation of receding religious influence fits well the evolutionary model of modernization Critical reexamination reveals secularization to be an orienting concept grounded in an ideological preference rather than a systematic theory This paper examines the historical context which permitted the idea of secularization to go unchallenged for so long, and then develops four discrete types of evidence to account for the present challenge to the theory Few forecasts have been uttered with more unshakable confidence than sociology's belief that religion is in the midst of its final death throes Writes Gerhard Lenski in the introduction to The Religious Factor in 1961: from its inception [sociology] was committed to the positivist view that religion in the modern world is merely a survival from man's primitive past, and doomed to disappear in an era of science and general enlightenment From the positivist standpoint, religion is, basically, institutionalized ignorance and superstition (p 3)

The Hermeneutics reader : texts of the German tradition from the Enlightenment to the present

Abstract: Contains extracts which are designed to be both representative and of a sufficient length to allow the reader to follow through developments and controversies.

Europe and the mystique of Islam

Abstract: Part 1 Western views of the Muslim world: the Middle Ages toward a less polemical image coexistence and reconciliation from coexistence to objectivity the birth of Orientalism the enlightenment the 19th century challenges to Eurocentrism. Part 2 Toward a new approach to Arab and Islamic studies: traditional Orientalism in the past the present crisis and current problems the present state of the craft - the continuance of the past impetus theologocentrism in scholarship new fields and disciplines regional influences in Islamic studies the modalities of future progress proposals for future study.

The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy

Abstract: The French, it is well known, love revolutions, political, scientific or philosophical. There is nothing they like more than a radical upheaval of the past, an upheaval so complete that a new tabula rasa is levelled, on which a new history can be built. None of our Prime Ministers starts his mandate without promising to write on a new blank page or to furnish a complete change in values and even, for some, in life. Each researcher would think of him or herself as a failure, if he or she did not make such a complete change in the discipline that nothing will hereafter be the same. As to the philosophers they feed, from Descartes up to Foucault's days, on radical cuts, on ‘coupure epistemologique’, on complete subversion of everything which has been thought in the past by everybody. No French thinker, indeed no student of philosophy, would seriously contemplate doing anything short of a complete revolution in theories. To hesitate, to respect the past, would be to compromise, to be a funk, or worse, to be eclectic like a vulgar Anglo-Saxon!

The fabrication of ancient Greece, 1785-1985

Abstract: Classical civilisation, Martin Bernal argues, has deep roots in Afro-Asiatic cultures. But these Afro-Asiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied, or suppressed since the eighteenth century - chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilisation was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers--or Aryans--from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this "Aryan model." They did not see their political institutions, science, philosophy, or religion as original, but rather as derived from the East in general, and Egypt in particular. Black Athena is a three-volume work. Volume 1 concentrates on the crucial period between 1785 and 1850, which saw the Romantic and racist reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and the consolidation of Northern expansion into other continents. In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal makes meaningful links between a wide range of areas and disciplines--drama poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of "modern scholarship."

Enlightenment and the Spirit of the Vienna Circle

Abstract: I have two aims in this paper. My wide one is to discuss what it is for philosophy to enlighten. I am using the same concept of enlightenment that Kant wrote about: It is what brings a rational outlook to social and political life, in opposition to superstition, self-deception and other forms of immaturity. If philosophy is to do this, it is not sufficient for it to have a rational theory about society, nor is having such a theory even necessary, since philosophers can try to make a community more reasonable without formulating a social philosophy. The Vienna Circle is an example. The point of enlightenment is to change society rather than to develop research programs. The difference is between involvement with real life on the one hand and an idle theory on the other. My narrow aim is to display the self-image of the Vienna Circle as philosophers of enlightenment. They agreed that the important task of any philosophical school was to enlighten and that positivism did so because it expressed the scientific spirit. This is the second concept I discuss. I will show that what they meant by ‘the scientific spirit’ was a moral outlook present in socialism and hostile to fascism. This is not what people usually understand by it. I am also not giving the received historical view of the Circle. Rather the English and American idea is that positivism was entirely an academic movement. The social concerns of its advocates were incidental to its philosophical significance. The Frankfurt School's view is that it had a hidden alliance with technology. My purpose is to counter both these misinterpretations.

Critical Legal Education in Britain

Abstract: frequently heard in legal academic discussion in Britain today, there exists a widespread uncertainty, felt by both those who identify with these terms and by curious outsiders, about what they refer to. In the first section of this paper I consider, particularly in relation to education, what the critical movement is and where it came from, concluding with a few remarks on the relation of that movement to the critique of the Enlightenment at large. In the second section I offer some thoughts on the distinctive nature of critical education in general, which I follow up by discussing in the third section some possibilities and

Buddhism: The Path to Nirvana

Abstract: Traces the development of Buddhism, discusses its beliefs, traditions, and practices, and identifies the path to enlightenment.

Idealism as Modernism: Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem]

Abstract: J. here IS A GREAT and confusing irony in what many regard as the culmination of the post-Enlightenment Western European tra dition, the culmination of "modernity." Sometime in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the story goes, the radically new rather suddenly seemed surprisingly old, "outdated" because self-deceived, unjustifiably self-satisfied, "really" an expression of an older, reli gious consciousness or of a premodern, even primitive will to power, or of an ancient forgetting of Being. In such a context, to be truly "modern" (here the confusion and the irony) was to be "modernist," to have seen modernity to its conclusion and to find it incapable of fulfilling its promise of a new beginning. As painter, or poet, or composer, or thinker, one could stand resolutely on the other side of a great historical abyss, across from which one could now see the continuity of say, Socrates and Bacon, or Augustine and Descartes, the historical collapse of the option they all represent, and could say goodbye to the whole territory. In the long aftermath of such modernist suspicions about the still dominant "official" Enlightenment culture, the very title of the recently translated book by Hans Blumenberg is a bluntly direct invitation to controversy?The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. For Blumenberg, when Giordano Bruno, condemned to burn at the stake

Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought

Abstract: 1 Fruits of Enlightenment.- 2 "I am learning to honor man".- 3 The Self-Critique of Reason.- 4 The Idea of Personality.- 5 The True, the Good and the Beautiful.- 6 Faith as Hope. And Love.- 7 Perpetual Peace.- By Way of an Epilogue.- Chronology.- Notes on the Sources.- Footnotes.

Christian Apologetics in France, 1730-1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion

Abstract: This text seeks to show why and how the anti-religious attitude of Enlightenment writers gave way to the acceptance and even revival of religious sentiment in the early 19th century.

The American Image of Technology From the Revolution to 1840

Abstract: IN 1797, AMOS WHITTEMORE PATENTED A MACHINE FOR USE IN TEXTILE MANUfacture. John Randolph could only comment: "All but the immortal soul." I In postRevolutionary America, the idea of technology captured the imagination of the newly liberated citizens, embodying advances in knowledge and the awakening of human potential. The possibilities of science and technology were thought to be limitless, leading to material independence, intellectual understanding, wealth, control over the forces of nature and the reanimation of agriculture. Perhaps this was partly the myopic vision of the naive, but it was also the optimism of the patriot who linked the potential of technology to the potential of America. With the English example before him, the American apologist for technology recognized the misery of industrialization, but thanks to American republicanism, the feasibility of decentralization, initiative and the belief in self-determination, mechanical technology could exist in purity in America, serving to strengthen values and fortify the nation. The early American perception of technology prompted an aesthetic response, raised economic questions and involved political issues, but all of these elements, in the final analysis, formed part of a concern for national direction and purpose. The image of technology was concomitant with the image of America, and in the early years of the new nation both were positive. For intellectuals influenced by the promises of the Enlightenment, science had been accepted as the way to knowledge and an intimate, if not absolute, understanding of the universe. As scientific principles were applied to practical problems, machinery appeared to revolutionize the visible world and the way men, women and children functioned within it. More specifically, machinery greatly affected the production of manufactured goods and the practice of the "useful arts." This brought about such change that Jacob Bigelow, holder of the first Chair of the Application of the Sciences to the Useful Arts established at Harvard in 1812, resurrected the term "technology" from old dictionaries in his efforts to provide a more suitable vocabulary for the new developments. Indeed, in 1829, Bigelow published his lectures as Elements of Technology in an attempt to facilitate public education about those new inventions and discoveries which he believed were "promoting the benefit of society together with the emolument of those who pursue them."2 The term technology embraces diverse processes and objects and, according to David

Fruits of Enlightenment

Abstract: We begin the biography of Kant in the traditional manner, with a history of the city of his birth. The granite of the city shaped, as it were, the rigorous architecture of his thought, the air of the city breathes in it ...

Rammohun Roy and the new language of monotheism

Abstract: Rammohun Roy, the great 19th‐century intellectual, was the first Indian to respond to western ideas. His approach was selective, rejecting what he felt to be incompatible with the needs of Hindu society. This paper deals with his response to Western religious ideas. Roy sought to reform Hindu religion by claiming to restore the original monotheism of the ancient vedic‐Upanisadic period by cleansing Hinduism of its later corruption, as represented by 19th‐century Hindu Idolatry. This paper argues that firstly, Roy's claim rested on the appropriation of the Enlightenment discourse contra orthodox Christianity, for he too, like deists and freethinkers, sought to undermine institutional priesthood. However, the fundamental issue here is Roy's claim that Vedic‐Upanisadic religion was monotheistic. Monotheism is a doctine entirely rooted in the traditions of the Religions of the Book, which believe in the total “otherness”; of God, thus setting up a binary opposition between monotheism and polytheism. Hinduism,...

The influence of the Buddhist practice of sange on literary form: Revelatory tales

Abstract: There was a type of short story in medieval Japan which was essentially a cleric’s public meditation on his or her previous lay life and his or her experience of religious awakening. These revelatory tales, or zange monogatari 懺;海物語， are a literary transformation of a Buddhist meditative or devotional practice called sange 懺悔. The profound importance of Bud­ dhism in medieval Japanese literature has been studied primarily in terms of cultural content, but revelatory tales are a relatively rare instance in which religious practice influenced literary/omz.1 In the medieval Japanese context a religious awakening is the sudden revelatory experience of the Buddhist tenet that human sorrows are caused by our ignorant refusal to accept the inevitability of change (mujo 無常） .2 By forming attachments to changeable things we virtually invite suffering into our lives. When we grasp the fundamental truth of the inevitability of change, we may be inspired to abandon mundane passions and to strive for enlightenment. Realizing that past emotional attachments hinder enlighten­ ment, we renounce them in order to devote ourselves exclusively to the cultivation of an understanding of religious truths, knowledge of which emancipates us from pain and suffering. Sange was the practice of medita­ tively reviewing those attachments in order to deepen the previously experi­ enced realization of transience. This practice is directly reflected in revelatory tales in which multiple narrators recount, in the first person, their former attachments and emotional losses.

Giving Paternalism a Bad Name: The Economy of Enlightenment

Abstract: Enlightenment’s discussion of the individual’s relation to authority is fundamentally colored by the structure and legal limits of the “ganzes Haus,” which had provided the analogy for the organization of the absolutist state. Although enlightenment rhetoric relies heavily on the concept of “house,” enlightenment itself dissolves the theoretical assumptions underlying the “ganzes Haus.”

The Knights, Nationalists and the Historians: Images of Medieval Prussia from the Enlightenment to 1945:

Abstract: For a long time the history of the German or Teutonic Order has caught the imaginations of historians, poets, painters, publicists, novelists and film-makers. A list would be long and would embrace obscure figures like the early nineteenth-century narrative history painter Karl Wilhelm Kolbe as well as, to conjure with a few famous names, Eichendorff, Freytag, Treitschke, Sienkiewicz and Eisenstein. However, since 1945 in Germany, the circle of those interested in the history of the Order has narrowed to a small number of professional medievalists who, in the nature of things, are not household names. One major West German creative writer Gfnter Grass has

Locke's Theory of Language and Johnson's Dictionary

Abstract: IN AN ESSAY ON JOHN LOCKE in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Norman Kretzmann writes that "no work had a greater influence over the development of semantics during the Enlightenment than did Book III" of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding-"Of Words."' As Kretzmann points out, and as other students of Locke have recognized, Locke's principal innovation in the field of linguistic theory lay in the fact that he expressly connected his thoughts on language with a theory of knowledge, and his emphasis on the mind as crucial to the process of signification had a critical influence on several generations of linguistic theoreticians in both England and France.2 By the time Samuel Johnson began work on his Dictionary in 1746, Locke's ideas on language and the mind had become commonplaces. Johnson himself-in the Ramblers, in Boswell's Life, in the Preface to the Dictionary, and elsewhere-not infrequently echoes both Lockean sentiments and Lockean phraseology, sometimes with a parenthetical off-handedness that reveals more effectively than direct quotation ever could, the extent to which Locke's notions had

Musical thought in Britain and Germany during the early eighteenth century

Abstract: Contents: Important shifts in British and German musical thought during the early enlightenment are explored by examining aesthetic issues in the writings of philosophers and musicians.