Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 2000"

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

Abstract: A blind spot? the birth of an ideology clearing away the rubbish print culture nationalising religion the culture of science anatomising human nature the science of politics secularising modernising happiness from good sense to sensibility nature did the mind have a sex? education - a panacea the vulgar the pursuit of wealth reform progress the revolutionary era - "modern philosophy" lasting light?

Kant and the fate of autonomy : problems in the appropriation of the critical philosophy

Abstract: It has been argued that Kant's all-consuming efforts to place autonomy at the center of philosophy have had, in the long-run, the unintended effect of leading to the widespread discrediting of philosophy and of undermining the notion of autonomy itself. The result of this 'Copernican revolution' has seemed to many commentators the de-centring, if not the self-destruction, of the autonomous self. In this major reinterpretation of Kant and the post-Kantian response to his critical philosophy, Karl Ameriks argues that such a view of Kant rests on a series of misconceptions. By providing the first systematic study of the underlying structure of the reaction to Kant's critical philosophy in the writings of Reinhold, Fichte and Hegel, Karl Ameriks challenges the presumptions that dominate popular approaches to the concept of freedom, and to the interpretation of the relation between the Enlightenment, Kant and post-Kantian thought.

Islam: A Short History

Abstract: In the public mind, Islam is a religion of extremes: it is the world's fastest growing faith; more than three quarters of the world's refugees are Islamic; it has produced government by authoritarian monarchies in Saudi Arabia and ultra republicans in Iran. Whether we are reading about civil war in Algeria or Afghanistan, the struggle for the soul of Turkey, or political turmoil in Pakistan or Malaysia, the Islamic context permeates all these situations. Karen Armstrong's elegant and concise book traces how Islam grew from the other religions of the book, Judaism and Christianity; introduces us to the character of Muhammed; and demonstrates that for much of its history, the religion has been a force for enlightenment that promoted liberties for women and allowed the arts and sciences to flourish. Islam shows how this progressive legacy is today often set aside as the faith struggles to come to terms with the economic and political weakness of most of its believers and with the forces of modernity itself.

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment

Abstract: *1. Introduction *2. Responding to a Revolutionary Tradition *3. Enterprise *4. Careers *5. Distinctions *6. Intimate Relations *7. Reform *8. A New National Identity * Notes * Index

The Power of Ideas

Abstract: The essays collected in this new volume reveal Isaiah Berlin at his most lucid and accessible. He was constitutionally incapable of writing with the opacity of the specialist, but these shorter, more introductory pieces provide the perfect starting-point for the reader new to his work. Those who are already familiar with his writing will also be grateful for this further addition to his collected essays. The connecting theme of these essays, as in the case of earlier volumes, is the crucial social and political role--past, present and future--of ideas, and of their progenitors. A rich variety of subject-matters is represented--from philosophy to education, from Russia to Israel, from Marxism to romanticism--so that the truth of Heine's warning is exemplified on a broad front. It is a warning that Berlin often referred to, and provides an answer to those who ask, as from time to time they do, why intellectual history matters. Among the contributions are "My Intellectual Path," Berlin's last essay, a retrospective autobiographical survey of his main preoccupations; and "Jewish Slavery and Emancipation," the classic statement of his Zionist views, long unavailable in print. His other subjects include the Enlightenment, Giambattista Vico, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, G.V. Plekhanov, the Russian intelligentsia, the idea of liberty, political realism, nationalism, and historicism. The book exhibits the full range of his enormously wide expertise and demonstrates the striking and enormously engaging individuality, as well as the power, of his own ideas. "Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization."--Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958

History of suicide : voluntary death in Western culture

Abstract: According to the author, the complexity of the philosophical problem of suicide is reflected in Western culture's contradictory and ambivalent attitudes on the subject: Cato, Cleopatra and Samson were heroic in taking their own lives; Judas, Brutus and Achitophel were cowards. In this history, he examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values - attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable, even heroic, under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as "self-murder" and an insult to God, who alone had the right to give and take life. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide re-emerged as a philosophical issue. Minois finds examples of changing attitudes in Renaissance texts by Bacon, Montaigne, Donne and Shakespeare, whose question "To be, or not to be?" signalled the return of a more ambivalent view of suicide and a more open discussion of its meaning. Minois follows the ongoing re-evaluation of suicide through the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods, and examines attitudes which emerge in 19th- and 20th-century science, law, philosophy and literature - developments that would enable a writer such as Camus to place the issue of suicide at the heart of modern philosophy. Minois comments on the most recent turn in this long and complex history - the emotive debate over euthanasia and the right to die.

Be sober and reasonable : the critique of enthusiasm in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

Abstract: This book analyses the theological, medical and scientific critique of “enthusiasm” — claims to direct divine inspiration — in early modern Europe, and the contribution of that critique to a more secular culture on the eve of the Enlightenment.

The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment

Abstract: From the author of The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award) comes a "sumptuous and spicy volume" (Washington Post Book World) that highlights Britain's long-underestimated and pivotal role in disseminating the ideas and culture of the Enlightenment. In response to numerous histories centered on France and Germany, Roy Porter explains how the monumental transformation of thinking in Britain influenced worldwide developments. This "splendidly imaginative" work "propels the debate forward...and makes a valuable point" (New York Times Book Review).

Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy

Abstract: Paget introduces the general reader to Afro-Caribbean philosophy in this ground-breaking work. Since Afro-Caribbean thought is inherently hybrid in nature, he traces the roots of this discourse in traditional African thought and in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions of Western Europe.

The Sciences in Enlightened Europe

Abstract: This text explores the complex relations between "enlightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academies and boisterous clubs are all given their due place in the landscape of enlightened Europe The contributors examine the production of new disciplines through work with instruments and techniques; consider how institutions of public taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book seeks to offer an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment

The Adorno Reader

Abstract: Acknowledgements. A Note on Selections. Introduction. Part I: The Task of Philosophy: . 1. The Actuality of Philosophy. 2. Why Philosophy?. 3. Negative Dialectics and The Possibility of Philosophy. 4. The Melancholy Science. 5. Meditations on Metaphysics: After Auschwitz. Part II: The Concepts of Philosophy: . 6. The Essay as Form. 7. Metacritique of Epistemology. 8. Subject and Object. Part III: Sociology: . 9. The Concept of Enlightenment. 10. Sociology and Empirical Research. Part IV: Art, Culture and Society:. 11. Cultural Criticism and Society. 12. Lyric Poetry and Society. 13. Culture Industry Reconsidered. 14. The Autonomy of Art. Part V: Criticism: . 15. The Perennial Fashion -- Jazz. 16. Arnold Schoenberg, 1874--1951. 17. Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis. 18. Trying to Understand Endgame. Select Bibliography. Index.

The Scottish enlightenment : essays in reinterpretation

Abstract: Despite the recent surge of scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment, no single volume has attempted to take stock of the field since the 1980s. The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation brings together essays by an international group of experts who are all well known for their publications on eighteenth-century Scotland. Individually, the essays cover a wide range of topics, from medicine to moral philosophy, and each chapter expands our knowledge of the Enlightenment in Scotland by providing new information or a fresh look at significant questions which have aroused controversy in the past. Readers will find the latest research on the culture of print in the Scottish Enlightenment; the medical world of eighteenth-century Scotland; the relations between the Scottish literati and Enlightened savants in England and Europe; geography and the rise of public science in Scotland; the philosophical systemes of Francis Hutcheson, George Campbell, and Thomas Reid; the manuscripts of David Hume; and the historical works of Dugald Stewart. In their different ways, the essays additionally explore some of the most important historiographical issues associated with the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. Readers are introduced to debates over the very definition of the term 'the Scottish Enlightenment'; the coherence of the 'school' of Scottish philosophy; the Scottish Enlightenment and the making of Scottish identity; the roles of science, medicine, moral philosophy, and political economy in enlightened culture; and the cosmopolitan character of the Enlightenment. This volume thus enriches our picture not only of the Scottish Enlightenment, but of the Enlightenment in general.

Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values

Abstract: Intellectuals occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary American culture as they struggle both to maintain their critical independence and to connect to the larger society. In Anxious Intellects John Michael discusses how critics from the right and the left have conceived of the intellectual’s role in a pluralized society, weighing intellectual authority against public democracy, universal against particularistic standards, and criticism against the respect of popular movements. Michael asserts that these Enlightenment-born issues, although not “resolvable,” are the very grounds from which real intellectual work must proceed. As part of his investigation of intellectuals’ self-conceptions and their roles in society, Michael concentrates on several well-known contemporary African American intellectuals, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West. To illuminate public debates over pedagogy and the role of university, he turns to the work of Todd Gitlin, Michael Berube, and Allan Bloom. Stanley Fish’s pragmatic tome, Doing What Comes Naturally , along with a juxtaposition of Fredric Jameson and Samuel Huntington’s work, proves fertile ground for Michael’s argument that democratic politics without intellectuals is not possible. In the second half of Anxious Intellects , Michael relies on three popular conceptions of the intellectual—as critic, scientist, and professional—to discuss the work of scholars Constance Penley, Henry Jenkins, the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking, and others, insisting that ambivalence, anxiety, projection, identification, hybridity, and various forms of psychosocial complexity constitute the real meaning of Enlightenment intellectuality. As a new and refreshing contribution to the recently emergent culture and science wars, Michael’s take on contemporary intellectuals and their place in society will enliven and redirect these ongoing debates.

A history of Polish Christianity

Abstract: 1. Foundations 2. The turning-point: the thirteenth century 3. The expansion of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 4. Great reforms 5. Post-Tridentine Catholicism and Polish baroque 6. Enlightenment and partitions 7. Slow revival in Bondage 8. The twentieth century defeats and successes 9. Postscript: after 1989.

The Enlightenment and Modernity

Abstract: Notes on the Contributors Editor's Preface Introduction R.Wokler PART I: INTERPRETING ENLIGHTENMENT PRINCIPLES The Sceptical Enlightenment: Philosopher Travellers look back at Europe U.Vogel Education Can Do All G.Parry Kant: The Arch-enlightener A.T.Baumeister Kant, Property and the General Will H.Steiner Can Enlightenment Morality be Justified Teleologically? I.Carter Ganging a'gley A.Edwards PART II: ASSESSING THE ENLIGHTENMENT ROOTS OF MODERNITY English Conservatism and Enlightenment Rationalism I.Holliday Four Assumptions about Human Nature N.Geras The Enlightenment, the Nation-state and the Primal Patricide of Modernity R.Wokler Critique and Enlightenment: Michael Foucault on Was ist Aufklarung M.P.d'Entreves The Enlightenment, Contractualism, and the Moral Polity V.Bufacchi Index

The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity

Abstract: One of the most discussed topics of our time is Christianity's relation to other religions. In this important new book, one of Britain's leading contemporary theologians develops a sharp and penetrating critique of the pluralist position. In the tradition of Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank, D'Costa shows that too often it masks a secularizing agenda, traceable to the worst apects of Enlightenment modernity. Even by its own criteria, pluralism does not succeed. D'Costa demonstrates this by exploring the 'meeting of the religions' in its leading exponents from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. He discovers the influence of Western modernist thought or else a veiled exclusivism not only in Hick, Knitter, Cohn-Sherbok and Panikkar, but even in Radhakrishnan and the Dalai Lama. He then goes on to establish an alternative Trinitarian approach to interreligious prayer and tolerance, drawing on recent discussions of other religions as 'vehicles of salvation'. The final section of the book represents the first major systematic theological study of interfaith prayer.

David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-revolution

Abstract: Though Edmund Burke is usually identified as the first to articulate the principles of a modern conservative political tradition, he was actually preceded by a Scotsman who is better known for espousing a brilliant concept of scepticism. David Hume was undoubtedly the eighteenth-century British writer whose works were most widely known and acclaimed on the Continent during the later Enlightenment period. Hume's impact [in France] was of undeniable importance, greater even for a time than the related influence of Burke, although it represents a contribution to French counter-revolutionary thought which, unlike that of Burke, has been almost totally ignored by historians to this day.

Perspectives on Habermas

Abstract: This collection of writings by eminent philosophers explores the controversial career of jurgen Habermas, whose adherence to the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, humanism, and respect for discourse has set him apart from most postmodernist thinkers.

The Problem of Being Modern, or the German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution

Abstract: A reading of German intellectual history in the context of European thought, this book aims to give insights into the development of the Enlightenment in Germany. It argues that writers of the period tried to reconcile traditional Protestant beliefs about God with modern scientific discoveries.

Taking Science out of Organization Science: How Would Postmodernism Reconstruct the Analysis of Organizations?

Abstract: Postmodernism, an intellectual movement that originated in the humanities, has received considerable attention in the organization theory literature. Because many scholars remain uncertain as to just what this controversial perspective is, the present article offers a straightforward explanation of postmodernism's basic themes. Additionally, the author attempts to provide some balance to the overwhelmingly sympathetic presentations of postmodernism in the organization theory literature by offering a critical assessment of how it would redirect the study of organizations. Consistent with an intellectual divide dating to the Enlightenment, while those engaged in "normal science" are concerned with the question of what is true, it appears that those who sympathize with postmodernism are addressing the question of what is good. Postmodernists, it is argued here, wish to engage in advocacy for values and preferences that they view as putting them in radical opposition to the status quo. To facilitate such advocacy they call for the repudiation of "modernism," in particular the key modernist notion that there is an objective truth that can be sought out rationally and systematically. Postmodernists adopt, instead, a relativist philosophy, which contends that "truth" must be considered merely subjective, such that one's view of truth is only relative to one's circumstances. Although taking the position that no one can say what is or is not "true" puts them in opposition to mainstream science, it supports their ability to discredit views they oppose, and simultaneously provides a defense against those who would claim that the postmodernist's view is not "true." Whether the postmodernist approach has the potential to enhance our understanding of organizations is addressed here by examining its philosophical and historical roots, the research and theory that it has so far inspired, and the critical commentary on our field that its adherents have offered.

The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History 1721-1794

Abstract: The Enlightenment: words, images, and symbols in daily life / Broadening the horizon - ways and means / Book and readers / The press / Reason and the dissolution of certainty / Social stability and the underprivileged / State, subject and citizen.

European architecture 1750-1890

Abstract: INTRODUCTION 1. NEOCLASSICISM: SCIENCE, ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROGRESS 2. WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? THE CITY AND THE PUBLIC, 1750-1789 3. SENSATIONALISM FROM LANDSCAPE GARDEN TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF REFORM, 1750-1800 4. REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE 5. NATIONALISM AND DEBATES ON ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 6. HISTORICISM AND NEW BUILDING TYPES 7. NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM 8. THE CITY TRANSFORMED 9. FIN-DE-SIECLE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY TIMELINE GLOSSARY INDEX.

Embodying Enlightenment. Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction Naming the Body, Knowing the Body: Anatomy, Medicine, and the Language of 'Experience' Seeing the Body: Pornography, Sensation, and the Nexus of Sight and Desire Reading the Body: Petimetres, Physiognomics, and Gendered Otherness Other Bodies, Other Selves: The Virtuous Masculine Body in the Cartas Marruecas Conclusion Notes Bibliography

The Enlightenment and Idealism

Abstract: Introduction It is a commonplace of intellectual history that any philosophical movement must be understood in its historical context. This dictum is especially true of German Idealism, whose aims and problems become intelligible only in the context of the culture of late eighteenth-century Germany. This culture was essentially that of the Enlightenment or Aufklarung , which had dominated intellectual life in Germany since the middle of the eighteenth century. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment began to show signs of a crisis. The more it extended its fundamental principles, the more they seemed to lead to dire consequences. The fundamental principles of the Enlightenment were rational criticism and scientific naturalism. While criticism seemed to end in skepticism, naturalism appeared to result in materialism. Both results were unacceptable. If skepticism undermines our common-sense beliefs in the reality of the external world, other minds, and even our own selves, materialism threatens the beliefs in freedom, immortality, and the sui generis status of the mind. There were few Aufklarer in Germany ready to admit such disastrous consequences; but there were also few willing to limit the principles of criticism and naturalism.

The Enlightenment, the Nation-state and the Primal Patricide of Modernity

Abstract: Critics of a so-called ‘Enlightenment Project’, however striking the differences between them, characteristically subscribe in one way or another to two fundamental propositions. They believe, on the one hand, that in replacing dogmatic faith with dogmatic reason the Enlightenment loved the thing it killed and framed the secular world of modernity within an ideological mould which merely turned Christianity inside out, in the service of absolutist principles of another sort. They imagine that it made science the new religion of mankind and offered terrestrial grace or happiness to its true believers alone. That in essence is the thesis of Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers, first published in 1932, and in its more political manifestations, such as in Jacob Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy or Simon Schama’s Citizens,1 much the same proposition informs their authors’ interpretation of the excesses of the French Revolution.

Productive Men, Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres During the German Enlightenment

Abstract: Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Chapter 1. Gender Norms and the Language of Economics Chapter 2. The Historical Context: Patriarchy and Community (1600-1800) Chapter 3. The Household as the Economy: Hierarchy and Interdependence in Seventeenth-Century Economic Thought (1600-1720) Chapter 4. The Economics of Cameralism: Redefining the Male World by Separating It from the Household (1720-1780) Chapter 5. The Enlightenment: Civil Society and the Emancipation of Middle-Class Males (1750-1790) Chapter 6. The Enlightenment and the "Character of the Sexes" (1750-1790) Chapter 7. The Household Ideal in a Changing World (1750-1790) Chapter 8. The Primacy of the Public Sphere: the Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon (1790-1815) Chapter 9. "Scientific Agriculture" and the Sexual Division of Labor (1810-1830) Chapter 10. "Every Man is King in his Own House" Bibliography Index

The Concept of Enlightenment

Abstract: lishing their sovereignty. yet the fully enlightened earth radiate~ b~ disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was 4-IJ the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and f#lJ)·r the substitution of knowledge for fancy. Bacon, the \"father of experimental philosophy,\"l had defined its motives. He looked down on the masters of tradition, the \"great reputed authors\" who first \"believe that others know that which they know not; and after themselves know that which they know not. But indeed facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to answer, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, seeking things in words, resting in part of nature; thes~ and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things; and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments: and what the posterity and issue of so honorable a match may be, it is not hard to consmer. Printing, a gross invention; artillery, a thing that lay not far out of the way; the needle, a thing partly known before: what a change have these three things made in the world in these times; the one in state of learning, the other in the state of war, the third in the state of treasure, commodities. and navigation I And those, I say, were but stumbled upon and lighted upon by chance. Therefore. no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with