Enlightenment

About: Enlightenment is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6845 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116832 citations.

The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

Abstract: Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is often regarded as the beleaguered, neglected genius of pre-Enlightenment Naples. His work - though known to Herder, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and Michelet - widely and deeply appreciated only during the twentieth century. Although Vico may be best known for the use James Joyce made of his theories in Finnegans Wake, Croce's insightful analysis of Vico's ideas played a large role in alerting readers to his unique voice. Croce's volume preceded Joyce's creation of "Mr. John Baptister Vickar" by a quarter century. During the last 25 years Vico's ideas about history, language, anti-Cartesian epistemology, and rhetoric have begun to receive the recognition their admirers have long claimed they deserve. Increasing numbers of publications appear annually which bear the stamp of Vico's thinking. Even if he is not yet so renowned as some of his contemporaries, such as Locke. Voltaire, or Montesquieu, there are good reasons to believe that in the future he will be equally honored as a cultural theorist. As a theorist of historical process and its language, there is no more innovative voice than his until the twentieth century - which explains in part why such figures as Joyce and R.G. Collingwood freely drew on Vico's work, particularly his New Science, while creating their own. If Vico was Naples' most brilliant, if uncelebrated, citizen prior to the Enlightenment taking hold in Southern Italy, then Croce (1866-1952) is surely the city's most important thinker of modern times, and the single indispensable Italian philosopher since Vico's death. When a genius of Croce's interpretative prowess, evaluates the work of another, it is inevitable that an explosive mixture will result. A great virtue of this book is its fusion of Croce's unique brand of idealism and aesthetic philosophy with Vico's epistemological, ethical, and historical theories. If Vico's theory of cyclical changes in history remains fruitful, it might be argued that Croce's evaluation of his countryman' ideas represented the next turn of the philosophical wheel toward enlightenment.

Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment

Abstract: Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment By Nick Nesbitt Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008 ISBN 978-0-8139-2803-6 260 pp $2250 paperback In the second half of the twentieth century, revisionist versions of the legacy of the Enlightenment moved from plumbing the depths of the philosophies of the chosen few from France, England and, a little later, Germany, to examining the positive and negative effects of the eighteenthcentury sea changes in technology, cross-cultural contact, and revolutions on modern society To be sure, Enlightenment ideas and theories created new subjects and new aspirations, but the first twentieth-century revisionist schools concentrated primarily on the damage done by the Enlightenment In the 1970s, as a graduate student of the eighteenth-century, I studied the first round of critics who dethroned the Enlightenment's proud legacy of individual rights and freedom to pursue happiness and personal expression and who blamed the Terror and the Holocaust on the inherent bankruptcy of these theories which allowed the emerging bourgeoisie and capitalists to usurp authority for their own purposes Postmodernist critics honed these critiques while extending their sights to another failure of the Enlightenment: its inability to produce an effective critique of the expanding slave trade, an institution that most certainly contradicted all of its ideals Postmodernism's commitment to turn literary critiques into principled statements on contemporary political and economic conditions has created a new Enlightenment site, that of its racism, which they analyze alongside postcolonial critics Eighteenth-century conjectural discourses on the origins of the human race, such as those anthologized by Emmanuel Eze (1997), shows how the great minds, intent on categorizing all the cultural differences in the human race they claimed to be equal and universal, could do little more than establish hierarchies for the differences they found in non-Europeans These hierarchies, based in concepts of cultural and scientific progress placed the white race and European cultures clearly on top Enlightenment philosophers pragmatically compromised and betrayed their own ideals by adjusting them to the economic, political and social realities of their time Postmodernism is undergirded by the theories of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida Most central is Foucault's conceptualization of the Enlightenment as the creator of new types of repressive authority The Enlightenment's faith in the dialectic of history rather than religious dogma and divine right to resolve the problems scientific and economic progress created engendered new ways of linking knowledge to power that postmodernism's skepticism and refusal of metanarratives claims to demystify Nonetheless, as Daniel Gordon argues, postmodernist historiography, popular in American and Australia, is often a victim of its own unvoiced presuppositions: its desire to critique Europe and deny their legacy to us and their own version of political mystique inspired by Foucault's Discipline and Punish (2001) Foucault did not totally dismiss the Enlightenment by refusing to idealize it Instead he proposes a new dialectic that would radicalize the Enlightenment by pushing its pursuit of freedom, which he calls "the art of not being governed," and would continue Kant's legacy of daring to know and call to overthrow submission to blind authority1 In Universal Emancipation Nesbitt enters the critical debates in how to salvage what is positive and relevant in the Enlightenment (on several occasions he announces his intent to analyze the relation between the Haitian Revolution and the predicaments of our present age (229, nl) as he defends the Haitian revolutionary ideals as a concretization of the Enlightenment's most radical ideas proposed by Spinoza and his followers The slaves and their "leaders were active participants in "a single, variegated transnational public sphere, not a mere segregated "counterpublic" (219, n …

Reforming Reformed Religion: J. S. Mill's Critique of the Enlightenment's Natural Religion

Abstract: John Stuart Mill's writings on religion, a neglected topic in the secondary literature, deserve careful examination because they challenge the long-standing view that liberalism opposes conceptions of the best life. Mill himself considers religion responsible for perfecting the individual and a crucial dimension of his moral theory. In his view, developing a conception of the best life will be difficult in England because it requires broaching a sensitive issue that the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment did not comprehend: namely, that the Enlightenment's reformed Christianity is too great a compromise with traditional or revealed Christianity. If English liberalism is to generate a comprehensive morality for the future, argues Mill, reformed Christianity must be further reformed to create a culture that fosters human flourishing. A comparison of Mill's views of Christianity with those of Kant and Hegel provides a window for viewing their different visions of the morality of the future. The contrast provides further evidence that liberalism, in Mill's view, is not nearly as narrow a moral outlook as many commentators on liberalism, whether admirers or critics, believe.

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.