Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1988"

The Writing of History

Abstract: Introduction: Writings and HistoriesPart 1: Productions of Places 1. Making History: Problems of Method and Problems of Meaning 2. The Historiographical OperationPart II. Productions of Time: A Religious Archeology Introduction: Questions of Method3. The Inversion of What Can Be Thought: Religious History in the Seventeenth Century 4. The Formality of Practices: From Religious Systems to the Ethics of the Enlightenment ( the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) Part III: Systems of Meaning: Speech and Writing 5. Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other , by Jean de L ry6. Language Altered: The Sorcerer's Speech 7. A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification Part IV. Freudian Writing 8. What Freud Makes of History: "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis" 9. The Fiction of History: The Writing of Moses and Monotheism Index

Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

Abstract: Critique and Crisis established Reinhart Koselleck's reputation as the most important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. This first English translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences.Like Tocqueville, Koselleck views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics.Koselleck describes how this disjunction between political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres that later became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for political society that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politicians must inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite.The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe to illustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and the necessities of the political realm at our own risk.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of History at the University of Bielefeld and author of Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Critique and Crisis is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations

Abstract: Part I: Debate and Interpretations 1 Intellectual History and History of "Mentalites": A Dual Re-evaluation 2 Philosophy and History 3 Social Figuration and Habitus: Reading Elias 4 Text, Symbols and Frenchness: Historical Use of Symbolic Anthropology Part II: Representations of the Social: Four Case Studies 5 The World Turned Upside Down 6 Time for Understanding The `Frustrated Intellectuals'. 7 Figures of the Other: Peasant Reading in the Age of the Enlightenment 8 The Two Frances: The History of a Geographical Idea.

Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency

Abstract: "Mind-Forg'd Manacles" explores attitudes towards and treatments for madness in the age before the mass asylum and the emergence of the psychiatric profession. It aims to show how vernacular culture and Christian doctrine had traditionally offered explanations of insanity and how these views were displaced by the secularizing mind of the Enlightenment. It explores early social policy towards the insane and how this led to the piecemeal development of lunatic asylums. It also looks at the theoretical and practical aspects of psychiatric therapies.

The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman's Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism

Abstract: In my second essay in Res (Pietz 1987), I traced the origin of the term \"Fetisso.\"1 I argued that it came to express a novel idea whose fundamental problematic lay outside the theoretical horizon of Christian theology despite its linguistic derivation from Christian juristic discourse as the Spanish and Portuguese word for \"witchcraft.\" In that essay, the formation of the fetish idea in sixteenth-century Afro-European discourse was explored in terms of a shift in core concepts: the key Christian ideas about witchcraft were \"manufactured resemblance\" and \"voluntary verbal pact,\" whereas the central concepts of the Fetisso were \"personification of material objects\" and \"fixed belief in an object's supernatural power arising in the chance or arbitrary conjunctions.\" Indeed, I argued that what was most marginal and conceptually obscure for the Christian theory of witchcraft?\"vain observances\" and \"veneficia\"?became central in the notion of the Fetisso. In the present essay I look more closely at the complex idea of the fetish found in the travelogues written by northern European merchants and clerics visiting black Africa, texts that were read and appropriated by radical intellectuals of what might be called the anti-Leibnitzian moiety among champions of the Enlightenment (a category broad enough to include figures as theoretically diverse as Hume, Voltaire, de Brosses, and Kant). In the first two sections, I reconsider the original idea of the Fetisso, not in order to contrast it with feudal Christian thought as in my previous essay, but in order to grasp its practical and ideological significance for the commerce-minded Europeans who authored the travel accounts. In particular I focus on the 1703 text of the Dutch merchant Willem Bosman and on accounts of the serpent worship at the slave port of Ouidah, for these were, respectively, the great authority on black Africa and the paradigmatic example of a fetish cult for eighteenth-century Europe.2 For merchants like Bosman, as for the clerics who accompanied them, such as the French priest Loyer who first asserted the nontheistic status of African

The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel's Account of 'Civil Society'

Abstract: One. General Introduction.- A: The Need for a Living Hegel: From `Dichotomy' ("Entzweiung") to `Reconciliation' ("Versoehnung").- B: The Whole Hegel and the Particulars of Scholarship.- C: Hegel and the Enlightenment.- D: The Scottish Enlightenment.- E: The Role of Newton.- F: The Structure of the Present Study.- Two. The Scottish Enlightenment in Germany - Stages of Reception.- A: Eighteenth Century German Translations of the Writings of the Scottish Enlightenment.- B: Contemporary Reviews.- C: The Popularizations.- D: The Impact on Teaching.- E: Conclusion and Outlook.- Three. Hegel's Contacts with and Knowledge of the Scottish Enlightenment.- A: Hegel's Knowledge of English.- B: Hegel's Reading and Indirect Knowledge of the Scottish Enlightenment - A Reconstruction of the Dates and Extent.- C: Hegel's Explicit References to the Scottish Enlightenment.- Four. Hegel's Account of the Market Economy.- A: Some Presuppositions.- B: Human Needs.- C: Free Labour and Exchange.- D: Social Division of Labour: The Classes (`Die Stande').- Five. Hegel's `Liberalisme Interventionniste' and the Legacy of Steuart and Smith.- A: Introduction.- B: Steuart and Smith.- C: Hegel's Qualifications to Liberalism.- Six. The Division of Labour.- A: The Scottish Contribution to the Problem.- B: Hegel's Discussion of the Division of Labour.- Conclusion and Outlook.- Bibliography and Bibliographical Appendices.- Appendix I. A Bibliography of Contemporary German Translations of the Writings of the Scottish Enlightenment..- Appendix II. A Bibliography of Contemporary German Reviews of the Writings of the Scottish Enlightenment..- Appendix III. A Bibliography of Contemporary German Popularizations of the Theories of the Scottish Enlightenment..- Appendix IV. All English Books and all Scottish Enlightenment Authors in Hegel's Library - An Extract from the Auction Catalogue..- Appendix V. All English Books and all Scottish Enlightenment Authors in the Steiger of Tschugg Library - An Extract from the Auction Catalogue..

Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self

Abstract: The explosion of creative and speculative philosophy that emerged in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century is a thrilling intellectual adventure story, as well as an essential chapter in the history of philosophy. The main theme of this story is the rise and fall of the Self. The Self in question is no ordinary self - no individual personality nor even one of the many heroic or mock-heroic personalities of the early nineteenth century. The Self is the Transcendental Self, whose nature and ambitions are unprecedently arrogant, cosmic and often obscure. In modest terms, this universal self is human nature. In less modest terms, the Transcendental Self is nothing less than God. This thesis is what Solomon terms the Transcendental Pretence. The book is an accessible introduction to the difficult authors of modern European philosophy. The major figures and movements are treated in an integrated narrative, free of jargon. Included are: The Enlightenment and Romanticism, German Idealism, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Max Bretano, Meinong, Frege, Dilthey, Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Hermeneutics, Sartre, Post-Modernism, Structuralism, Foucault and Derrida.

Political Science and the Enlightenment of Enthusiasm

Abstract: I provide a narrative of the emergence of an expressly articulated “political science” in the Scottish Enlightenment. Political science was designed by Hume, Smith, and others to advance both a Newtonian method for the study of politics and a politics of moderation whose tasks included a critique of enthusiasm. In this way, political science, moderation, and (anti)enthusiasm were conceptually connected. The emergence of political science, understood in this way, required a number of conceptual changes in a structure of argument shaped largely by Locke. These conceptual changes, in turn, fixed a rhetorical framework for persistent debates over the methodological and political identity of political science, even as ideology literally replaced enthusiasm. These persistent debates reveal the relevance of the history of political science as a forum for remembrance, reflection, and critique.

John Locke and the Problem of Depravity

Abstract: The religious thought of the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) is examined in this book, which focuses in particular on his view of original sin and its consequences for education in the early Enlightenment. The author argues that Locke has been wrongly accused of denying original sin, ignoring the atonement, and preaching moralism, and that in fact he was much closer to traditional Protestant teaching on human sinfulness than is generally recognized. While education might serve as an effective counterweight to man's innate propensity to overturn God's laws, he recognised that it could never reduce the importance of the central drama: Christ's work of salvation.

Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826-1836

Abstract: This is a study of the Antimasonry Party, but it is also a sweeping reinterpretation of America between 1820 and 1840 in social, political, cultural, and religious terms. The Order of the Masons became important in Europe and America in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. It was a cosmopolitan and tolerant Order that reflected the best aspects of the Enlightenment in many ways. But it was also a secret society, open only to men, that stressed sociability and appealed particularly to middle-class and upper-class members in small towns. When a former Mason, William Morgan, disappeared in western New York in 1826, the Antimasonary movement was fuelled and soon became a presence in state and national politics. The opposition was partly class inspired (against the ruling and upper classes) and partly religious (for an open religion with more emotional content). Part of the book provides a detailed account of Antimasonry politics in the six New England states. Scholars and students of American history; those interested in Masronry.

The Emergence of Jewish Historiography: Motives and Motifs

Abstract: The modernization of European Jewry was a gradual process that spread from individuals to communities and from one social class to another. It travelled from city to small town and from central and western Europe eastward. Among its component elements were economic redistribution, acculturation, secular education, and religious reform. Scholars have examined each of these elements and their interrelation. They have also recognized the appearance of a new historical consciousness that began to play a crucial role in the formation of modern Jewish identity. Recently, the shifting relation of Jews to their history has received much attention, both in general surveys and in specific studies.. Yet the emergence of a fresh historical awareness, after centuries in which historical interest was at best limited, deserves further consideration, for the process was by no means simple and straightforward. As Jews began to attribute major significance to history in general and to Jewish history in particular, they faced issues that were not speedily or uniformly resolved: What was the purpose of historical study? What history should be learned? How was the study of history related to Jewish religion and its possible reform? And perhaps most important, should the study of Jewish history principally serve to liberate the Jew from tradition by historicizing it or create a new attachment to the past by reconceiving it as a model or anchorage for the present? These questions emerge especially among German Jews during the periods of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The answers given reflect both the intellectual milieu and the specific historical situation of the Jews.

Herder's Critique of the Enlightenment: Cultural Community versus Cosmopolitan Rationalism

Abstract: Recent continental social theory has seen the emergence of a body of literature which represents a radical challenge to the primary concerns and assumptions of traditional Western social and political thought. While this challenge involves a number of aspects and embraces a heterogeneous group of thinkers, one theme common to them all is their opposition to the attempts of traditional scientific, social, and political disciplines to construct general theoretical programs as guides to the practical actualization of a rational order within human society, however defined. What is most objectionable about this general project for such thinkers, included among them figures like Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, is its implicit assumption of the possibility of establishing a hierarchy in the forms of knowledge an ordering of discourses in accordance with their relative approximation to the objective principles of an ultimate discourse of reason or truth. Their special sensitivity to language, and their shared belief in the infinite creative potential of human linguistic activity,1 led these thinkers to attack such "totalizing" rationalist discourses as legitimating forms for exclusionary practices which repress the full diversity of discursive interpretations of the real implicit in human linguistic activity in favor of one dominant, repressive discourse. Far from being unique to the postmodernist writers of the late twentieth century, however, this type of relativistic critique of totalizing discourses has some notable antecedents in modern social thought. The purpose of this article is to examine one such precursor of this form of critique presented in the writings of the eighteenthcentury theorist, Gottfried von Herder. In his theory of history Herder presents a radical critique of the rationalist discourse of cosmopolitan human development advanced by the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, one which is predicated upon a profound sensitivity to the importance of language in the process of historical human development. In the

The Jews in Christian Europe, 1400-1700

Abstract: This social and religious history of European Jews in the early modern period is unique in placing Jewish experience in the context of Christian society. Beginning with late medieval Jewry and the expulsion from Spain in 1492 of Jews who refused to convert to Christianity, John Edwards goes on to analyse the role of Jews during the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and ends with the early development of religious toleration and the Enlightenment. He examines the complexity of personal and communal belief and practice, and also describes the social, political and economic experience of Jews and Christians, bringing together Christian and Jewish historiography in order to enrich our understanding of the social relations between the two.

Postmodernism and the Deconstruction of Modernism

Abstract: Postmodernism has an ancient history. This fact is not postmodernism's only paradox, although it is the best known and certainly the richest in philosophical consequences. Since JeanFrancois Lyotard's 1979 pamphlet, La Condition Postmoderne, which initiated the philosophical and European debate on postmodernism, philosophical postmodernism has been characterized (at least by its promoters) as the consequence of a dissolution of modernist projects, rather than as a new age's allergic, polemic reaction to modernism. If prephilosophical postmodernism, in architecture or literature, is passably ancient this was the name given in the 1930s to the Spanish literary period from 1905 to 1914 philosophical postmodernism undoubtedly originated much earlier, from the modernity of the Enlightenment and idealism, with their desire to break with the past and go beyond their inner contradictions. In short, the birth of modernism sanctioned the birth of postmodernism, just as Plato's dialectic marked the beginning of sophistry or its differentiation from and ostracism by philosophy. Postmodernism, however, as an explicitly debated and thematized philosophical problem is not old. It originated between 1979, the year of Lyotard's pamphlet, and 1980, the year of Jurgen Habermas's conference on modernism. Before these dates, postmodernism was not a philosophical topos but belonged to the tradition of "localized" disciplines, such as literature or architecture. By entering the realm of philosophy, the modernism/postmodernism alternative abandoned its localized character and acquired universal significance (although in certain cases, postmodernism calls into question philosophy's claim to universality another paradox that will be discussed). As a philosophical theme, postmodernism or better, the modernism/postmodernism alternative brings together many earlier philosophical themes, such as the Enlightenment, idealism, the technology-metaphysics relationship and the concepts of progress and secularization. This history of themes explains how such a recent philosophical theme could appear so ancient, even at the moment it asserted itself.

Coleridge and the friend (1809-1810)

Abstract: Abbreviations. Editorial symbols in letters and notebooks. Introduction. Some unresolved conflicts Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson - the failure of idealism false starts and new beginnings metaphysics and the new theodicy Coleridge's Quaker subscribers the conservative tradition - Hooker and Burke the Enlightenment tradition - Kant and Rousseau religion and politics - the Gordian knot. Conclusion. Appendix of subscribers. Bibliography. Index.

The Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution

Abstract: The Chemical Revolution is becoming a focus of renewed interest among historians and philosophers of science, some of whom wish to relate it to the wider sociocultural context of eighteenth-century life. This context included the cultural movement known as the Enlightenment, at the core of which was a set of metaphysical presuppositions concerning the nature of the knowing mind and its relation to the object of inquiry. The Enlightenment notion of the self-defining subject established a unitary framework of regulative principles, dealing with the relation between science and metaphysics, the method of analysis, and the relation between thought and language, which were variously interpreted in the opposing views that Lavoisier and Priestley developed about the ontology of chemistry, the nature of experimentation, the reform of the chemical nomenclature, and the institutional organization of science. The ensuing dialectic occurred within an historiographical framework in which both sides viewed the chemical upheavals of the eighteenth-century in terms of the Enlightenment notion of the dawning of a new age, radically different from anything that had gone before. The interpretation of the Chemical Revolution developed here calls for a more balanced view of the moments of continuity and discontinuity in scientific change; it also suggests that an adequate conception of scientific change can be formulated only within a framework provided by a robust contextual model of science, in which the distinction between the constitutive aspects of science and the contextual factors is rejected in favour of a relational view of each as constitutive of the other.

Some Ancient Notions of Boredom

Abstract: There is no need to apologise for a discussion of ancient concepts of boredom. Through fifteen hundred years of Western culture the notion of boredom has been a vital one. Ranging from dark age and medieval monastic acedia, from the "English disease" of the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries and the French Enlightenment, from the mai de siicle of nineteenth century Europe, to the "nausea" and alienation of twentieth century existentialists and Marxists, the concept has had a long and powerful history.1 It is a history, furthermore, of literary and sociological significance. (As much felt, that is, as written about.) The topic did not have the same importance for the ancients as it does for moderns. Yet there are references to the concept in ancient literature. These provide the justification for my paper. In spite of its ubiquity the notion of boredom—in ancient or modern literature—is very hard to pin down. The meaning seems to shift with the centuries and, even within these centuries, to shift according to the sensibility and the age of the person using it. It is, however, a notion which most eras take for granted. Definitions, therefore, must come first. The concept of boredom cannot be isolated in ancient contexts unless we are sure of that to which we are referring. Here are some of the definitions which are currently in use.2 The bulk of these are, because of the obvious danger of anachronism, inapplicable to the ancient world. Thoroughness, however, demands at least a partial listing.