Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 2013"

Answer the question: What is Enlightenment?

Abstract: Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in the whole of Europe, who changed Western thought with his examinations of reason and the nature of reality. In these writings he investigates human progress, civilization, morality and why, to be truly enlightened, we must all have the freedom and courage to use our own intellect. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

Abstract: Introduction: What is Enlightenment? 1. All Coherence Gone 2. Bringing Pity Back In 3. The Fatherless World 4. The Science of Man 5. Discovering Man in Nature 6. The Defence of Civilization 7. The Great Society of Mankind 8. The Vast Commonwealth of Nature Conclusion: Enlightenment and its Enemies Notes Bibliography Index

Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism

Abstract: Enlightenment's Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

On the Muslim Question

Abstract: Marx’s essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ marks the Jew as the site where post-Enlightenment Europe confronted the spectre of theology in the question of citizenship. In our time, the figure of the Muslim has become the axis where questions of political philosophy and political theology, politics and ethics meet. Islam is marked as the pre-eminent site of danger to politics; to Christians, Jews, and secular humanism; to women, human rights and the state system; to democracy and free speech; to the values and the institutions of the Enlightenment. The Muslim question does not displace the Jewish question, but rather emerges out of it as ‘the general question of the age.’ This question takes different forms in the institutions and imaginaries of Europe and the United States, in popular political discourse and in political philosophy, yet all demand reconsideration of a politics founded on enmity and an Enlightenment still held within the limits of Christendom.

Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, 1780-1820 by Leslie Tomory

Abstract: Title: Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry 1780–1820 Ph.D. thesis (2009) by Leslie Tomory, completed at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto Gaslight, an Industrial Revolution technology, developed in the period 1780–1820. The foundations for the technology are partly found in the pneumatic chemistry of the eighteenth century, both in terms of the knowledge of gases and their properties, and the instruments used to manipulate them, such as the gasometer, making gaslight one of the earliest instances of a technology heavily based on science. Although many people experimented with lighting with gases in the late eighteenth century, the move to a commercial technology began with Philippe Lebon and William Murdock who had a clear commercial purpose in mind. The technology in its early phases was found everywhere in Europe, but it was at Boulton & Watt in Birmingham that it was first successfully applied. As Boulton & Watt developed the technology they identified many and solved some of the problems associated with scaling up the technology. They were not, however, very interested in gaslight and only sporadically gave attention to it, before effectively abandoning it around 1812. They nevertheless had an important role to play in its development not only because if their technical work, but also because they demonstrated the technology!s viability to the broad public, and by giving people experience in gas engineering. The technology!s final form as a network utility was partly as a result of a battle fought between Boulton & Watt and Frederick Winsor!s Gas Light and Coke Company in London during 1807–1810. Boutlon & Watt did not want a

Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement

Abstract: Introduction Man Chapter 1. Lives in Context Chapter 2. The Contextual Theology of Gulen: Islamic Enlightenment Movement Chapter 3. The Structure of the Movement: Authority, Networks, and Communal Spaces Chapter 4. Education and the Golden Generation Chapter 5. Islamic Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism Meaning and Ideas Chapter 6. Islam in the Public Sphere Chapter 7. Secularism and Science Chapter 8. Interfaith Dialogue Chapter 9. The Military and the JDP Chapter 10. The Critics of the Movement Conclusion Notes Index

The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory

Abstract: PART ONE: SUBJECTS AND SOVEREIGNTY PART TWO: ENLIGHTENMENT CATEGORIES AND POSTCOLONIAL CLASSIFICATIONS PART THREE: NATION, COLONY, AND ENLIGHTENMENT UNIVERSALITY

Forms of intersubjectivity in Kant's 'An answer to the question: what is enlightenment?'

Abstract: In this paper I advance the thesis that in Kant's well-know writing on Enlightenment there are three forms of inter-subjective relations (forms of recognition). IN each of these forms of inter-subjectivity individuals are conceived in different ways depending on whether the involved subjectivities consider each other either as free beings or as objects to be used as means for an individual or a common purpose.

The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire

Abstract: This is a study of the political theory of the Enlightenment, focusing on four leading eighteenth-century thinkers: David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire. Dennis C. Rasmussen calls attention to the particular strand of the Enlightenment these thinkers represent, which he terms the 'pragmatic Enlightenment'. He defends this strand of Enlightenment thought against both the Enlightenment's critics and some of the more idealistic Enlightenment figures who tend to have more followers today, such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. Professor Rasmussen argues that Hume, Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire exemplify an especially attractive type of liberalism, one that is more realistic, moderate, flexible, and contextually sensitive than most other branches of this tradition.

Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution

Abstract: In the reign of James II, minority groups from across the religious spectrum, led by the Quaker William Penn, rallied together under the Catholic King James in an effort to bring religious toleration to England Known as repealers, these reformers aimed to convince Parliament to repeal laws that penalized worshippers who failed to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England Although the movement was destroyed by the Glorious Revolution, it profoundly influenced the post-revolutionary settlement, helping to develop the ideals of tolerance that would define the European Enlightenment Based on a rich array of newly discovered archival sources, Scott Sowerby's groundbreaking history rescues the repealers from undeserved obscurity, telling the forgotten story of men and women who stood up for their beliefs at a formative moment in British history By restoring the repealer movement to its rightful prominence, Making Toleration also overturns traditional interpretations of King James II's reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne The Glorious Revolution, Sowerby finds, was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained

The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract: This is the first exposition of how Enlightenment thinkers viewed this idea that shapes the world today The Scottish Enlightenment was the first intellectual movement to view commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation - one that still shapes our everyday lives Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the arguments Scottish philosophers put forward for and against the idea This is the first book to focus on the Scottish Enlightenment's conception of commercial society, revealing it to be the movement's core idea It analyses key works like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, David Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects and Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society It looks at lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind

Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations

Abstract: Human liberation has become an epochal challenge in today’s world, requiring not only emancipation from oppressive structures but also from the oppressive self. It is a multidimensional struggle and aspiration in which knowledge – self, social and spiritual – can play a transformative role. ‘Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations’ undertakes such a journey of transformation, and seeks to rethink knowledge vis-a-vis the familiar themes of human interest, critical theory, enlightenment, ethnography, democracy, pluralism, rationality, secularism and cosmopolitanism. The volume also features a Foreword by John Clammer (United Nations University, Tokyo) and an Afterword by Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame).

International education in a post-Enlightenment world

Abstract: This article focuses on the ideology of international education as it developed during the twentieth century and analyses it into three elements: core beliefs about internationalism; the characteristics of a virtuous and worthy human being; and a set of pedagogical principles, based on enquiry, collaboration and debate. The idea, encapsulated by the International Baccalaureate (IB), of a universally available and applicable programme of international education is examined and the contrast drawn between the period in which the IB first emerged, when its target audience was mainly international schools for expatriate communities, and the current situation where the vast majority of IB programmes are taught in state and private “national” schools. The idea of a universal educational programme is seen as having its origins in the Enlightenment project whose key features are analysed. The principles of the Enlightenment have been under attack in recent decades as a result of developments in philosophy and the ...

Thinking as a subversive activity: doing philosophy in the corporate university

Abstract: The academy is in a mess. The cultural theorist Bill Readings claimed that it is in ruins, while the political scientist Michael Oakeshott suggested that it has all but ceased to exist. At the very least, we might argue that the current financial squeeze has distorted the University into a shape that would be all but unrecognizable to Oakeshott and others writing in the 1950s and 1960s. I will begin this paper by tracing the development of the modern Enlightenment University over the past 200 years from its roots in late 18th century Berlin to its current predicament. I will then turn my attention to the introduction during the 1990s of nursing education into the University, and examine the particular difficulties and tensions encountered at the interface between a professional practice and an academic discipline. Finally, I will propose philosophy as a way of dwelling in the ruins of the Enlightenment University and of reconciling the corporate demands of the University with the obligations of the nursing profession.

Between "Self-Murder" and "Suicide": The Modern Etymology of Self-Killing

Abstract: Suicide" is a modern concept. In English, the wording did not emerge before the 1650s and in the Romance languages not before the second half of the eighteenth century ("suicide" in French, "suicidio" in Italian). The invention of the latinized term mirrored less stringent criminal prosecution of self-killing, in the wake of harsher punishments and the creation of a statutory offense that had found their semantic expression in the nominalization of "self-murder" since the second half of the sixteenth century. The concept of "suicide"—as well as "Selbstentleibung" ("self-disembodiment") in German—reflects a historical process of pathologizing and decriminalizing the act of taking one's own life. However, regardless of new words, the social stigmatization of self-killing was not eliminated, but merely trans- formed. Criminal sanctions began to be abolished, but the a priori criticism of "self-murder" did not. In the eighteenth century, the traditional condemnation of self-killing, which had been based on religious and cosmological ideas, was turned into a moral one, in the specific Enlightenment sense of the term. What "self- murder" and "suicide" have in common is their denunciation of the act of killing oneself, not only in characterizing it as a crime, but also in pathologizing it as an expression of melancholic madness. In doing so, both of them have become key concepts for the emergent disciplines of moral statistics and suicidology in the nine- teenth century and for the modern understanding of self-killing within the dis- courses of social science, psychology, and psychiatry.

Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment

Abstract: Entries include: Aesthetics Atheism Bourgeoisie, Professional Capitalism Clergy: Catholic Colonialism Drama Earth, Shape of the Enlightenment, Representations of Fatherhood Feudalism Germany and the Holy Roman Empire Guild History, Philosophy of Industrialization Judaism Justice and Prisons Law, Public Mathematics Medicine Music: Overview Natural Law and the Rights of Man Nobility Novel, Gothic Orders and Classes Pietism Popular Culture Protestantism Rococo Satire Sexuality, Representations of Slavery Social Contract Technology Theatre and Staging Transport Systems Utopia Village Communities Witchcraft Women Writers and Feminism and many more.

Organizing International Society: The French Peace Movement and the Origins of Reformist Internationalism, 1821-1853

Abstract: Author(s): Lincoln, Vanessa Fabius | Advisor(s): Hesse, Carla A | Abstract: This dissertation seeks to contribute to the history of internationalism through an examination of the early nineteenth century French peace movement. It argues that the French movement contributed to the international peace movement both in theory and practice, by drawing on the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment to make peace the subject of organized activism. The early nineteenth century international peace movement is seen as the work of Dissenting sects in Britain and America, with the assistance of Free Traders like Richard Cobden. The French peace advocates' ideological roots, in contrast, can be found in the Enlightenment - in the peace thinking of the philosophes, but also in debates on economy, culture, religion, politics, etc. They drew upon the work of particular authors like Jean-Baptiste Say, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, but above all continued general Enlightenment notions like historical progress and human perfectability. This intellectual heritage helped French peace advocates to imagine a distinct model of international cooperation, one in which political, cultural and economic borders remained in flux. It also gave them the tools to denounce colonialism - all while attempting to maintain forms of soft power for French `civilization'.French peace advocates were more restricted than American and British pacifists in their forms of activism, but they also published a wide range of materials on peace, developed arguments for peace within associations, and participated in and promoted the international congresses. Through these practices, French peace advocates contributed to the development of civil society, nationally and internationally. A study of their movement shows how and why this transition from philosophy to organized action became possible.Often dismissed as utopian, the history of the early peace movement can help us to better understand the development of French, European and international history. Like many groups in the early nineteenth century, French peace advocates were deeply optimistic about their program and their potential agency. However, this seemingly utopian program continues to have considerable resonance today, in contemporary international institutions as well as in ongoing debates about democracy and political change.

Sensibility, enlightenment and Romanticism: British fiction, 1789 - 1820

Abstract: This thesis is a study of the discourse of sensibility in Romantic-period fiction It suggests that sensibility was not, as has often been assumed, merely a transient and fashionable mode that peaked in the mid eighteenth-century before its association with radicalism and subsequent demise in the 1790s Instead, it was redirected and refashioned during the first decades of the nineteenth century, functioning in effect as a metanarrative for the Romantic novel The discourse of sensibility was both a formative influence on and a central ideological component of literary Romanticism and this thesis reads it as a creative, protean and self-conscious force that is capable of challenging many of our assumptions about the Romantic period Analysing representative fictions by Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, William Godwin, Sydney Owenson and Walter Scott, each chapter traces the complex interactions of eighteenth-century discourses of moral philosophy and perception in the sub-genres of the gothic novel, the Jacobin novel, the national tale and historical fiction In doing so, the evidence of sensibility’s pervasive influence destabilises any notion of discrete and fixed generic categories by suggesting widespread correlations and overlaps Likewise, this generic assimilation and mutation that operates under the banner of sensibility proposes a challenge to conventional notions of Romantic aesthetic unity and spontaneity, suggesting instead a self-conscious and experimental engagement with genre Finally, the novels considered depict a hybrid model of sensibility in which Enlightenment formations of feeling and perception as a means of social coherence coexist with Romantic models of alienated selfhood As a result, the exploration of the discourse of sensibility in the Romantic novel provides an opportunity to reassess the complex and often contradictory relationship between the aesthetics of Enlightenment and Romanticism

The significance of Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment:

Abstract: This paper takes a close look at Berlin’s claim that the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples’, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on which they relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’s pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge.

From Enlightenment to Receptivity: Rethinking Our Values

Abstract: Introduction PART I -- BEYOND ENLIGHTENMENT Foreword to Part I Chapter 1 -- Empathy and Objectivity Chapter 2 -- Epistemology and Emotion Chapter 3 -- Caring and Enlightenment Chapter 4 -- How Important Is Morality? Chapter 5 -- The Impossibility of Perfection Chapter 6 -- A New Picture PART II -- RECEPTIVITY Foreword to Part II Chapter 7 -- Receptivity to Life Chapter 8 -- Green Thinking Chapter 9 -- From Enlightenment to Receptivity Chapter 10 -- The Virtue of Receptivity Conclusion

Leading the Good Life: Peng Shaosheng's Biographical Narratives and Instructions for Buddhist Laywomen in High Qing China (1683-1796)

Abstract: This dissertation is focused on the Shan nuren zhuan (Biographies of Good Women), the only collection of biographies devoted exclusively to Buddhist laywomen that crossed sectarian lines, composed by Peng Shaosheng (1740-1796), a Confucian literatus turned Buddhist layman and a leading lay voice in early modern Chinese Buddhism. The dissertation examines the life stories of these exemplary Buddhist laywomen in the High Qing (1683-1796), a period marked by social and political change that included the revival of Confucian classicism, increased visibility of women’s work, and government policies that reinforced an intrusive morality into the lives of women. Buddhism, long established as both working in tandem and sometimes in conflict with traditional Chinese values, was part of that change. Among the conspicuous features of this period in Chinese Buddhist history are the developments of independent leadership roles for the laity as distinct from the clergy and a prevailing notion of syncretism, which was reflected in the efforts of many Buddhists of the time to combine Buddhism and Confucianism. In addition, Buddhism in early modern China saw an increased focus on the proper behavior of the laity, family values and social concerns, and the religious consequences of such behavior in the form of promises of a happy afterlife, that is, rebirth in the Pure Land of Amitābha Buddha. Moreover, especially for lay society, enlightenment and rebirth in the Pure Land became fundamentally the same goal. This project examines how the biographical narratives of Buddhist laywomen were incorporated into Buddhist-Confucian debates to defend against Confucian accusations against Buddhism for its perceived lack of concern for social issues and morality while, at the same time, trumpeting Buddhism over Confucianism for its attention to the afterlife or rebirth in the Pure Land. The dissertation also investigates how the biographies proselytize the early modern notion of the dual cultivation of Chan meditative and Pure Land devotional practices within the Buddhist community as well as motivate male Buddhists to accelerate their own spiritual progress through the employment of gendered rhetoric.

Theosis, Sino-Christian Theology and the Second Chinese Enlightenment

Abstract: This thesis explores various trajectories of contextual theology as they have developed in the two Chinese enlightenments of twentieth and twenty-first century China. Drawing methodologically from the typological works of historian Justo Gonzalez and the missiologists Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder, one of the main aims of this study is to map and evaluate the various types of Chinese theology. An analysis of three major Chinese Protestant representatives will identify the tendencies of each type, highlight the importance of a contextual theology in dealing with a context’s socio-political concerns and religiophilosophical tradition, and show a bias in Chinese theology towards Latin Christianity. This leads to the second major aim of the study to explore the usefulness of Eastern Orthodox category of theosis and related subjects in the Second Chinese Enlightenment. It will highlight the tendencies of Chinese philosophy and religion, inclusive of Chinese Protestantism, to exhibit many themes from Byzantine Christianity. It will also call attention to the potential usefulness of this other “Eastern” theology in China’s socio-political concerns. This study will conclude by discussing the possibilities of Eastern Orthodoxy in playing an important role in complementing and supplementing future developments of a Chinese contextual theology.

The edge of enlightenment: ireland and scotland in the eighteenth century

Abstract: Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctively Irish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the “Cambridge school”. Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the “Molesworth Circle” by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin. At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey. His previous research on the “commercial republicanism” of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.

Irony and Modernity in the Early Slave Narrative: Bonds of Duty, Contracts of Meaning

Abstract: In his 1810 narrative, the African American Methodist deacon George White recounts a particularly terrifying dream he experienced following a camp meeting in 1804. Some time after awaking, White tells his wife about the dream and its visions of hell: "I related the whole to my bosom companion; who, having heard it with astonishment, and much affection, was desirous to know what I thought would be the result; concerning which, I gave her my opinion in full; and we covenanted together from that time, to be more faithful to God than ever, and to escape, if possible, the torments I had seen" (11). A similar moment of mutual "covenanting" occurs in the 1810 narrative of Boyrereau Brinch, which extends from Brinch's childhood in Africa through the Middle Passage to his service in the American Revolution and his struggle for economic independence in Vermont. In Barbados, where he and the other slaves are put up for sale, Brinch meets an African brother and sister who "had pledged themselves never to part but by death" (Brinch and Prentiss 101). Yet the brother, Bangoo, is soon sold to a man "who had doubtless been devoted to the covenants of our Lord and Saviour, perhaps had crossed himself before the image of Christ, suspended upon the cross" (101). What these passages, among many others in the literature of the Black Atlantic, help to illuminate is the power of "covenanting together" in the early slave narrative. (1) That phrase aptly captures both the religious and the personal dimensions of a whole pattern of meaning that runs throughout the genre, one in which the Christian doctrine of duty to God is mirrored and supplemented by, and at times even secondary to, an ethic of interpersonal obligation. For many writers of the Black Atlantic, the ancient notion of a covenant with God, rooted in biblical theology, provided a means of understanding suffering within a providential framework and promised that the faithful would be rewarded and the unfaithful punished. Yet an evolving intellectual and ideological environment rendered traditional covenantalism, in itself, insufficent as a strategy of either survival or literary rhetoric. "Man is accountable to God and his fellow creatures," wrote Adam Smith in 1761. "But tho' he is, no doubt, principally accountable to God, in the order of time, he must necessarily conceive himself as accountable to his fellow creatures, before he can form any idea of the Deity, or of the rules by which that Divine Being will judge of his conduct" (130n2). Not all of his contemporaries would have agreed, but Smith's observation, offered during his exegesis of moral judgment, reflects a subtle epistemic shift, toward a kind of ethical pragmatism whereby responsible conduct in this world becomes, "necessarily," a prerequisite to religious understanding. Here was a more secular form of thinking about duty, one less reliant on scriptural doctrine and more embedded in the evolving social currents of the eighteenth-century world. What I argue in this essay is that this expanded concept of human duty, especially as captured in the notion of a "social contract," functioned as a complex, unpredictable, and energizing force in the slave narrative during its formative decades. This perspective provides leverage on a key issue that has intrigued, even bedeviled, scholarship on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, namely the relation--philosophical, social, and material--between the emergence of Western "modernity" during this period and the African or "black" persons who found themselves caught up in the international system of commerce managed by European imperial powers. In any analysis of that relation, difficult questions press forward: How did Enlightenment liberalism--with its image of the rational, accountable, and essentially "free" human subject--interact with intensifying political debates surrounding slavery, abolition, and race? How were those debates influenced, and their participants imagined, by the testimony of African-descended persons; and conversely, how was this testimony itself shaped and constrained by the discursive protocols they observed? …

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

Abstract: During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America's enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as "the Great Agnostic." The nation's most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separation of church and state with a vigor unmatched since America's revolutionary generation. When he died in 1899, even his religious enemies acknowledged that he might have aspired to the U.S. presidency had he been willing to mask his opposition to religion. To the question that retains its controversial power today-was the United States founded as a Christian nation?-Ingersoll answered an emphatic no. In this provocative biography, Susan Jacoby, the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, restores Ingersoll to his rightful place in an American intellectual tradition extending from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to the current generation of "new atheists." Jacoby illuminates the ways in which America's often-denigrated and forgotten secular history encompasses issues, ranging from women's rights to evolution, as potent and divisive today as they were in Ingersoll's time. Ingersoll emerges in this portrait as one of the indispensable public figures who keep an alternative version of history alive. He devoted his life to that greatest secular idea of all-liberty of conscience belonging to the religious and nonreligious alike.