Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 2012"

Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique

Abstract: THE ENLIGHTENMENT HAS LONG HELD a pivotal place in narratives of world history. It has served as a sign of the modern, and continues to play that role yet today. The standard interpretations, however, have tended to assume, and to perpetuate, a Eurocentric mythology. They have helped entrench a view of global interactions as having essentially been energized by Europe alone. Historians have now begun to challenge this view. A global history perspective is emerging in the literature that moves beyond the obsession with the Enlightenment’s European origins. The dominant readings are based on narratives of uniqueness and diffusion. The assumption that the Enlightenment was a specifically European phenomenon remains one of the foundational premises of Western modernity, and of the modern West. The Enlightenment appears as an original and autonomous product of Europe, deeply embedded in the cultural traditions of the Occident. According to this master narrative, the Renaissance, humanism, and the Reformation “gave a new impetus to intellectual and scientific development that, a little more than three and a half centuries later, flowered in the scientific revolution and then in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.”1 The results included the world of the individual, human rights, rationalization, and what Max Weber famously called the “disenchantment of the world.”2 Over the course of the nineteenth century, or so the received wisdom has it, these ingredients of the modern were then exported to the rest of the world. As William McNeill exulted in his Rise of the West, “We, and all the world of the twentieth century, are peculiarly the creatures and heirs of a handful of geniuses of early modern Europe.”3 This interpretation is no longer tenable. Scholars are now challenging the Eurocentric account of the “birth of the modern world.” Such a rereading implies three

The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment

Abstract: 1. Art, craft, and court 2. The ways of the mind 3. The ways of the heart 4. A delicate balance 5. Representative assemblies 6. The journalist 7. The education of princes 8. Changing the world.

The Church Act: The expansion of Christianity or the imposition of moral enlightenment?

Abstract: i

The politics of transhumanism and the techno-millennial imagination, 1626-2030

Abstract: Transhumanism is a modern expression of ancient and transcultural aspirations to radically transform human existence, socially and bodily. Before the Enlightenment these aspirations were only expressed in religious millennialism, magical medicine, and spiritual practices. The Enlightenment channeled these desires into projects to use science and technology to improve health, longevity, and human abilities, and to use reason to revolutionize society. Since the Enlightenment, techno-utopian movements have dynamically interacted with supernaturalist millennialism, sometimes syncretically, and often in violent opposition. Today the transhumanist movement, a modern form of Enlightenment techno-utopianism, has evolved a number of subsects, from the libertarian utopians funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, to religious syncretists like the Mormon Transhumanist Association, to the left-wing technoprogressives and their bioliberal intellectual allies. In reaction to accelerating technological innovation and transhumanist ideas, apocalyptic Christians, and even secular catastrophists, have begun to incorporate human enhancement into their End Times scenarios. With all sides believing that the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, there is a growing likelihood of violent confrontation.

The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon

Abstract: In the years immediately following Napoleon's defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment's emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society. Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today. Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, "The Romantic Machine" is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.

Air's Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794

Abstract: In "Air's Appearance", Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. "Air's Appearance" links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth's atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era's theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners - or, as they are now known, "airs". Lewis thus offers a striking new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment - the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel - that considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works like "Paradise Lost", "The Rape of the Lock", "Robinson Crusoe", and "The Mysteries of Udolpho", this book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.

The categorical imperative

Abstract: Book synopsis: Immanuel Kant is widely considered to be the most important and influential thinker of modern Europe and the late Enlightenment. His philosophy is extraordinarily wide-ranging and his influence has been pervasive throughout eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century thought, in particular in the work of the German Idealists, and also in both Analytic and Continental philosophy today. This comprehensive and accessible companion to Kant's historical and philosophical context, philosophical concerns, major works and enduring influence features more than 100 specially commissioned entries, written by a team of experts in the field, covering every aspect of his philosophy. The Companion presents a comprehensive overview of the historical and philosophical context in which Kant wrote and the various features, themes and topics apparent in his thought. It also includes extensive synopses of all his major published works and a survey of the key lines of reception and influence. It concludes with a thoroughly comprehensive bibliography of English language secondary literature. This is an essential reference tool for anyone working in the field of eighteenth-century German philosophy.

The Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom

Abstract: 1. The Vedanta of Conciousness: Transcendence, Enlightenment and Everyday Life 2. The Alienated Self and the Kabbala of Transformation 3. The Zen of Creativity and the Critique of the Discursive Intellect 4. The Tao of Love and Unconditionality In Commitment 5. The Yoga of Action and Effortless Efficiency 6. The Nous of Perception and the Re-enchantment of the Tree of Life 7. The Gnosis of Freedom and the Fana of Fulfilment

Commerce and its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century French Political Thought

Abstract: Histories of economics tend to portray attitudes towards commerce in the era of Adam Smith as celebrating what is termed doux commerce, that is, sweet or gentle commerce. Commerce and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century French Political Thought proposes that reliance on this doux commerce thesis has obscured our comprehension of the theory and experience of commerce in Enlightenment Europe. Instead, it uncovers ambivalence towards commerce in eighteenth-century France, distinguished by an awareness of its limits - slavery, piracy and monopoly. Through a careful analysis of the Histoire des deux Indes (1780), the Enlightenment's best-selling history of comparative empires, Anoush Fraser Terjanian offers a new perspective on the connections between political economy, imperialism and the Enlightenment. In discussing how a 'politics of definition' governed the early debates about global commerce and its impact, this book enriches our understanding of the prehistory of globalisation.

Introduction: From University to Pluriversity: A Decolonial Approach to the Present Crisis of Western Universities

Abstract: The articles included in this volume of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge were presented at the conference entitled Quelles universites et quels universalismes demain en Europe? un dialogue avec les Ameriques (Which University and Universalism for Europe Tomorrow? A Dialogue with the Americas) organized by the Institute des Hautes d'Etudes de l'Amerique Latine (IHEAL) with the support of the Universite de Cergy-Pontoise and the Maison des Science de l'Homme (MSH) in Paris on June 10-11, 2010. The aim of the conference was to think about what it could mean to decolonize the Westernized university and its Eurocentric knowledge structures. The articles in this volume are, in one way or another, decolonial interventions in the rethinking and decolonization of academic knowledge production and Western university structures. The crisis that American and European universities suffer today are not only the result of pressures created by neoliberalism, the financial crisis and global capitalism (such as the "Bologna Process" in Europe, budget cuts in American universities, state abandonment of its historical policies of strong support to public education, etc.). This crisis also originates in the exhaustion of the present academic model with its origins in the universalism of the Enlightenment. The participants in the conference were in broad agreement that this type of universalism has been complicit with processes of not only class exploitation but also processes of racial, gender, and sexual dehumanization. In fact, internal criticisms of Western forms of knowledge are not new. But in the last decade, the Kantian-Humboldtian model of university (including "science by and for science" detached from theology, the encyclopedic character of research, the figure of the teacher-researcher and of the researcher-student) has been widely questioned and criticized by Asian, Latin-American, North American and European postcolonial thinkers who call for decolonial social sciences and humanities. In particular, the Latin American and US Latino critical intellectuals, who prefer to refer to themselves as decolonial rather than postcolonial, are questioning the epistemic Eurocentrism and even the epistemic racism and sexism that guide academic practices and knowledge production in Westernized universities. They use these terms in critical reference to theories that are (1) based on European traditions and produced nearly always by European or Euro-American men who are the only ones accepted as capable of reaching universality, and (2) truly foundational to the canon of the disciplines in the Westernized university's institutions of social sciences and the humanities. Moreover, they question the intention of total encyclopedic knowledge, in particular anthropological knowledge, which is a process of knowing about "others" that never fully acknowledges these "others" as thinking and knowledge-producing subjects. Such criticism does not necessarily lead to a narrow relativism and/or to the rejection of all research-making claims of universality. on the contrary, the most interesting dimension of Latin American and US Latino thinkers' latest reflections is that they underline the necessity of a process of universal thinking, built on dialogue between researchers from diverse epistemic horizons. This is what some Latin American decolonial intellectuals, following the Latin American philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel, has characterized as transmodernity. The latter refers to pluri-versalism as opposed to uni-versalism. It is striking to note that the reforms proposed by the Bologna Process and the budget cuts to universities in the Americas do not address the internal and external critiques of the university outlined above. on the contrary, they reinforce the academic world's disenchantment with traditional forms of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities. …

Scottish missions and religious enlightenment in Colonial America: the SSPCK in transatlantic context

Abstract: In recent years, the relationship between religion and Enlightenment, traditionally cast in opposition to one another, has received increasing reconsideration. Scholars now recognise that even orthodox religion played a central role within the Enlightenment project. This development has marked a paradigm shift in Atlantic world and Enlightenment historiography. However, while the relationship between religion and Enlightenment has been greatly clarified, there remain major gaps in our understanding of the nature and parameters of this relationship. This thesis contributes to the understanding of religion’s function within Enlightenment thought and practice through a case study of the colonial missionary work of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Using primary sources such as institutional records, sermons, journals, diaries and letters, it examines evangelism within the framework of the Enlightenment. The study demonstrates first how both the founders of the SSPCK and the Society’s most fervent advocates of missionary work in the colonies were simultaneously the foremost leaders of the British and American Enlightenment. It then traces the implications of this religious Enlightenment dynamic, illuminating not only the ambitions of the Society’s leadership but also certain contours of intimate encounters between Native Americans, Native Christians and white missionaries. As the SSPCK’s missionary endeavours demonstrate, the relationship between evangelism and Enlightenment not only changed all individuals and institutions involved. It also transformed the very landscape of British Protestant religion. This assessment points to the overarching conclusion that the Enlightenment shaped the very foundation of modern missions. In the process, however, British Atlantic Protestants of many different varieties wove the discourse of the Enlightenment into the tapestry of their understanding of evangelism as a primary means of identity formation, both personally and institutionally. Historiographically, this research forces a reexamination of the nuances of the religious Enlightenment. It also problematizes the static (albeit dominant) interpretation of evangelicalism by observing its emergence in light of the broader conditions of British Atlantic Protestantism.

Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment

Abstract: This is the publisher's version of the article published in Social Research (1998). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author and is included with permission from the publisher, The New School. The journal's website is .

Eating the Enlightenment : food and the sciences in Paris

Abstract: "Eating the Enlightenment" offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners - from physicians and poets to philosophers and playwrights - E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the chess-playing cafe owner Charles Manoury, the "Turkish envoy" Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d'Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, "Eating the Enlightenment" will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.

Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease

Abstract: Helmut Illbruck traces the concept of nostalgia from the earliest uses of the term in the seventeenth century to today as it evolves with different meanings and intensities in the discourses of medicine, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Following nostalgia s troubled relations to the philosophical project of the Enlightenment, Illbruck s study builds a cumulative argument about nostalgia s modern significance that often revises and thoroughly enriches our understanding of cultural, literary, and intellectual history. Illbruck concludes with an attempt at a reinterpretation and defense of nostalgia, which seduces us to read and think with, rather than against, nostalgia s wistful yearning for the past. "Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease "is a comprehensive, insistent, and profound interdisciplinary investigation of the history of an idea. It should appeal to readers interested in the cultural makings of the Enlightenment and modernity or in the histories of medicine, literature, and philosophy."

The Culture of Disaster

Abstract: From antiquity through the Enlightenment, disasters were attributed to the obscure power of the stars or the vengeance of angry gods. As philosophers sought to reassess the origins of natural disasters, they also made it clear that humans shared responsibility for the damages caused by a violent universe. This far-ranging book explores the way writers, thinkers, and artists have responded to the increasingly political concept of disaster from the Enlightenment until today. Marie-Helene Huet argues that post-Enlightenment culture has been haunted by the sense of emergency that made natural catastrophes and human deeds both a collective crisis and a personal tragedy. From the plague of 1720 to the cholera of 1832, from shipwrecks to film dystopias, disasters raise questions about identity and memory, technology, control, and liability. In her analysis, Huet considers anew the mythical figures of Medusa and Apollo, theories of epidemics, earthquakes, political crises, and films such as "Blow-Up" and "Blade Runner". With its scope and precision, "The Culture of Disaster" will appeal to a wide public interested in modern culture, philosophy, and intellectual history.

A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Origins of Natural Philosophy 2. The Roman Era and the Rise of Islam 3. The Revival of Natural Philosophy in Western Europe 4. Science in the Renaissance: The Courtly Philosophers 5. The Scientific Revolution: Contested Territory 6. The Enlightenment and Enterprise 7. Science and Empire 8. Entering the Atomic Age 9. Science and War 10. The Death of Certainty 11. 1957: The Year the World Became a Planet 12. Man on the Moon, Microwave in the Kitchen 13. New Frontiers: Science and Choice in the New Millennium Further Reading Index

The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract: There has been a tendency to view science in nineteenth-century France as the exclusive territory of the nation's leading academic centers and the powerful Paris-based administrators who controlled them. Ministries and the great savants and institutions of the capital seem to have defined the field, while historians have ignored or glossed over traditions on the periphery of science. In "The Savant and the State", Robert Fox charts new historiographical territory by synthesizing the practices and thought of state-sanctioned scientists and those of independent communities of savants and commentators with very different political, religious, and cultural priorities. Fox provides a comprehensive history of the public face of French science from the Bourbon Restoration to the outbreak of the Great War. Following the Enlightenment, many different interests competed to define the role of science and technology in French society. Political and religious conservatives tended to blame the scientific community for upsetting traditional values and, implicitly, delivering France into the hands of revolutionary extremists and Napoleonic bureaucrats. Scientists, for their part, embraced the belief that observation and experimentation offered the surest way to the knowledge and wisdom on which the welfare of society depended. This debate, Fox argues, became a contest for the hearts and minds of the French citizenry.

Science of Enlightenment

Abstract: A chemical engineer’s perspective on the science of enlightenment is presented. Rational but open-minded scientists have been relentlessly pursuing evidence which would support the wisdom of our enlightened ancestors. Western scientists have done an awful lot of wonderful work in recent decades that is chipping away at the mystery surrounding the phenomenon of enlightenment. The resulting ideas and concepts cut across all boundaries of religion, race, caste, cultures and nationality. The framework is made possible by ancient Eastern wisdom and the work of Western scientists. The concepts are not only for individual transformation but also for world transformation and as a subset, national transformation. While there appears to be a theoretical limit on national or world transformation and therefore the extent to which global peace can be achieved, the framework in this paper is capable of making a real difference for humanity.

From Blood Vessels to Global Networks of Exchange: The Physiology of Benjamin Rush's Early Republic

Abstract: As the Revolutionary War ended, Founding Father, popular lecturer, prolific writer, and prominent physician Benjamin Rush vociferously advocated the value of transnational commercial circulation for the nascent republic. International commerce, he wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette, "forms the only barrier that can be contrived to check the aristocratic tendency of a monopoly of land. It opens the door to power, rank and influence to everybody. It is the magnet of talents and cherisher of virtue. It is calculated to restore men to their original equality, and to expel tyranny from the world." Global networks of exchange maintained health and virtue by "checking] the aristocratic tendency" of land ownership. Keeping the republic's veins open to transnational circulation provided the equality of opportunity key to national health. Only through this transnational circulation of goods and ideas could meritocracy be maintained on settled land and "tyranny" be expelled from "the world" (or at least America). For Rush, whose interest in commerce would make him the treasurer of the U.S. Mint, participation in global circulation secured the health of the republic.1While unfettered flow was necessary, Rush recognized some trade threatened the nation. In his satirical essay "On the Different Species of Mania," for example, Rush mocks participants in circum- Atlantic slave trade,The Negro Mania. The disease, which formerly prevailed in the eastern and middle, is now confined chiefly to the southern states. The inhabitants of these states mistake their interest and happiness in supposing that their lands can be cultivated only by Negro slaves. ... It is true, if the owners of the soil in the Carolinas and Georgia, cultivated their lands with their own hands, they would not be able to roll in coaches, or to squander thousands of pounds yearly in visiting all the cities of Europe, but they would enjoy more health and happiness in a competency acquired without violating the laws of nature and religion.Mistakenly believing they cannot thrive as yeoman farmers, diseased southern planters forgo the opportunity to better themselves through continual contact with American soil. These citizens overindulge in circum- Atlantic trade, not only in their sources of labor but also in their "squandering]" of "thousands of pounds yearly in visiting all the cities of Europe" thus "violating the laws of nature and religion." Through sinful trade, they develop the "aristocratic tendencies]" the global market was supposed to "expel." For Rush, transnational commerce was "absolutely necessary to the happiness of America" but, if misused, could "[violate] the laws of nature and religion."2The tonal shift between these descriptions of circulation is instructive. Writing persuasively in favor of transnational trade, of "open[ing] the door" to "everyone," Rush rallies his audience around the Enlightenment rhetoric of "talent," "virtue," and "original equality." Open circuits of circulation enable all readers - "everyone" - to partake of the promises of the American Revolution. His call for the free flow of commerce subtly crafts a readership that, supporting the revolution, cannot but sympathize. "Negro mania" functions through opposite logic. Ridiculing slave owners for not virtuously working their own farms, Rush alienates them from the republican ideal. Licentious Europhiles, they are hardly American. Satire promotes readerly distance from these "disease [d]" citizens. Finding "negro mania" alongside "dress mania" - the insanity of impractical fashion invading every city street and "place of public resort" - and "church phobia" - in which sunny weather spurs "chariots, phaetons, chairs, and even stage-waggons" to flee churches "every Sunday in summer, as soon as they are open for divine worship" - readers are encouraged to laugh with Rush, distancing themselves from inappropriate transactions. These examples are more broadly emblematic of Rush's thinking. …

Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning

Abstract: For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called "geosophy," a blending of geography and philosophy to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. His latest book, "Humanist Geography," is a testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer. In returning to and reappraising his previous books, Tuan emphasizes how the study of humanist geography can offer a younger generation of students, scholars, and teachers a path toward self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and even enlightenment. He argues that in the study of place can be found the wonders of the human mind and imagination, especially as understood by the senses, even as we human beings deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws."

Ends of Enlightenment

Abstract: Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.

The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel

Abstract: According to the textbook version of history, the Enlightenment played a crucial role in the creation of the modern, liberal democracies of the West. Ever since this view – which we might describe as the modernization thesis – was first formulated by Peter Gay, it has been repeatedly criticized as misguided: a myth. Yet, as this paper shows, it continues to survive in postwar historiography, in particular in the Anglophone world. Indeed, Gay's most important and influential successors – historians such as Robert Darnton and Roy Porter – all ended up defending the idea that the Enlightenment was a major force in the creation of modern democratic values and institutions. More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy on the Enlightenment has revived the modernization thesis, albeit in a dramatic new form. Yet, even Israel's work, as its critical reception highlights, does not convincingly demonstrate that the Enlightenment, as an intellectual movement, contributed in any meaningful way to the creation of modern political culture. This conclusion raises a new question: if the Enlightenment did not create our modern democracies, then what did it do? In answer to that question, this paper suggests that we should take more seriously the writings of enlightened monarchists like Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. Studying the Enlightenment might not allow us to understand why democratic political culture came into being. But, as Boulanger's work underscores, it might throw light on an equally important problem: why democracy came so late in the day.

No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn's Jewish Enlightenment

Abstract: Moses Mendelssohn (1725 1786) is considered the foremost representative of Jewish Enlightenment. In "No Religion without Idolatry," Gideon Freudenthal offers a novel interpretation of Mendelssohn s general philosophy and discusses for the first time Mendelssohn s semiotic interpretation of idolatry in his "Jerusalem "and in his Hebrew biblical commentary. Mendelssohn emerges from this study as an original philosopher, not a shallow popularizer of rationalist metaphysics, as he is sometimes portrayed. Of special and lasting value is his semiotic theory of idolatry.From a semiotic perspective, both idolatry and enlightenment are necessary constituents of religion. Idolatry ascribes to religious symbols an intrinsic value: enlightenment maintains that symbols are conventional and merely signify religious content but do not share its properties and value. Without enlightenment, religion degenerates to fetishism; without idolatry it turns into philosophy and frustrates religious experience. Freudenthal demonstrates that in Mendelssohn s view, Judaism is the optimal religious synthesis. It consists of transient ceremonies of a living script. Its ceremonies are symbols, but they are not permanent objects that could be venerated. Jewish ceremonies thus provide a religious experience but frustrate fetishism. Throughout the book, Freudenthal fruitfully contrasts Mendelssohn's views on religion and philosophy with those of his contemporary critic and opponent, Salomon Maimon. "No Religion without Idolatry "breaks new ground in Mendelssohn studies. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of religion, Judaism, and semiotics."In this lucid and provocative study, Gideon Freudenthal offers an original and compelling reading of Mendelssohn as well as a defense of the possibility of religious rationalism more generally. This book is not only an excellent contribution to a growing body of scholarship on Mendelssohn and early modern philosophy, but it also significantly sharpens and advances contemporary conversations about the relations between religion and reason." Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University"In this masterful study, Gideon Freudenthal demonstrates how Mendelssohn s philosophy, including his philosophy of religion, is grounded in semiotics. The result is a landmark work that not only successfully challenges standard interpretations of Mendelssohn s 'enlightened Judaism' and its alleged inconsistency but also effectively invites reconsideration of the very possibility of 'religion without idolatry.'" Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Boston University"In focusing on Mendelssohn's 'semiotics of idolatry, ' Gideon Freudenthal writes as a philosopher fully at home in multiple traditions: contemporary philosophy, eighteenth-century philosophy, Jewish biblical exegesis, and comparative religion. The result is a systematic and penetrating study, based on the Hebrew as well as the German texts, that engages Mendelssohn on perhaps the most critical issue of his understanding of religion with unprecedented philosophical rigor and imagination." David Sorkin, City University of New York Graduate Center"

Review of "Love the questions: University education and enlightenment"

Abstract: Angus, I. (2009). Love the questions: University education and enlightenment. Winnipeg, MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing. Pages: 176. Price: 14.95 CAD (paper).This "little book", as Angus modestly describes it, is tome-like in its elucidation of the forces that have altered the university from its traditional ideals into a contemporary corporate ethos. Angus champions enlightenment as a worthy and viable enterprise to protect as the raison d'etre of the university. Inspired by the poet Rilke's statement to "love the questions themselves" (p. 29, italics in original), Angus declares self-knowledge and self-expression to be the enlightenment ideal. He is careful not to romance the concept, and instead seeks to redefine enlightenment and demonstrate its rootedness despite the trending toward "practical" and "material" endeavors that mark the contemporary university. The commitment to questioning self and world gives a university coherence-that necessary "unity of knowledge" (p. 61). Ultimately, enlightenment is a disposition and process of critique rather than a product, much like education is something one lives rather than has, as Angus explains. It is these careful dissections of definitions and concepts that give Love the Questions explanatory power and argumentative force.Angus outlines his agenda in the preface and defines the problem in the first three chapters. The purpose of his book is to explain how university has changed and why, and to champion enlightenment as the epitome of education. His writing is personable, if not vulnerable, for he shares his experience of teaching university seminars and admits to being "horrified" (p. 30) at students' nonchalance with ideas. This admission is a narrative hook: readers are drawn into the notion that university and what goes on there is not (or should not be) an abstract or inert idea or venture. It has affect. Angus' willingness to share his disillusionment may be a position with which others in the academic community may resonate. That professors such as Angus care about students' experiences is something about which those outside the academy should know. Despite the shiftin students' posturing toward ideas, and the corporatized environment in which they seek their credentials, Angus constructs a positive argument and not a "narrative of decline" (p. 101). What makes Love the Questions different from some books about the changing nature of the university is that it presents a changing reality while resisting resignation to it. This book calls for professors, students, administrators, and the lay public to become aware of how and why the university has changed.Angus charts his course using history, philosophy, and observation. He engages in what he promotes: reflecting on the historical application of concepts as a means to reorienting them for modern times. To understand how enlightenment can be applied to the contemporary university requires one to know from where it has come. Although organized like a footnote, the section "A Note on Enlightenment" that follows the main chapters provides a foundational overview of how enlightenment has been considered by key thinkers. Besides displaying Angus' philosophical acumen, this section serves to nuance the meaning of enlightenment. Angus cleaves what may be considered cannon or cliche by showing how "enlightenment" is not the same as its capitalized progeny, "Enlightenment." The historical insight and conceptual clarity is central to Angus' claim that critique which is both reflective and forward-looking is a sine quo non of a university. Angus justifies appending this Note to "lighten the often over-burdened academic style" (p. 11), and this is what makes the book appealing and accessible to a broad readership. Unequivocally, however, the exposition anchors his project.The same can be said about the "Note on Techno-Science" which follows the exposition on enlightenment. …

Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism

Abstract: Commonly translated as the "Jewish Enlightenment," the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Olga Litvak argues that the idea of a Jewish modernity, championed by adherents of this movement, did not originate in Western Europe's age of reason. Litvak contends that the Haskalah spearheaded a Jewish cultural revival, better understood against the background of Eastern European Romanticism. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the most important concepts that currently inform the positioning of the Haskalah within the context of Jewish emancipation, nationalism, and secularization. Most importantly, she challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah was the political and philosophical mainspring of Jewish liberalism. In Litvak's ambitious rereading, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals emerge as the authors of a Jewish Romantic revolution. Fueled by unfulfilled longings for community, spiritual perfection, and historical authenticity, the poets and scholars associated with the Haskalah were ambivalent about the contemporary struggle for Jewish equality and the quest for material improvement. Their skepticism about the universal promise of Enlightenment continues to shape Jewish political and religious values.

Liberty and property : a social history of Western political throught from Renaissance to Enlightenment

Abstract: The formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment - all these have been credited to the "early modern" period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. Ideas of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born into those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. From Machiavelli, Luther and Calvin to Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Meiksins Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.

The BiTer BiTTen: ireland and The rude enlighTenmenT

Abstract: This article examines the literary relationship between the Presbyterian James Arbuckle and the Anglican Jonathan Swift, arguing that Enlightenment praxis was frequently impolite, antagonistic, and rude. It draws on Michael Waner’s notion of a “counterpublic” to isolate the rude Enlightenment which evolved in Ireland in the late 1720s and 1730s. It further contends that the counterpublic developed new modes of polite and sociable living—which we term the Enlightenment —while attracting criticism and distrust from scholastic writers who feared it and wanted to control it. This tension lay at the heart of the Arbuckle-Swift fracas.

Odysseus and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung

Abstract: Dialektik der Aufklarung a seminal text in twentieth-century intellectual history, at the heart of which lies a mournful reading of the Odyssey. Odysseus and the adventures of his voyage home provide Horkheimer and Adorno with critical material for exploring the history and nature of barbarous enlightenment and their – seemingly paradoxical – thesis: namely, that myth is already enlightenment; and that enlightenment reverts to mythology. This article argues that closer attention ought to be paid to the authors' choice and interpretation of the Odyssey. Dialektik der Aufklarung is, this article shall suggest, a confrontation with the German philhellenic tradition itself, from Hegel to Wilamowitz, out of which arises a powerful, ethical statement about the nature of that tradition, and the politics and cultural identity in which it plays a central part.