Enlightenment

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

Enlightenment and Revolution

Abstract: It has never been easy to know how to deal with the question of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The two terms have usually been joined together in recurrent cycles of retrospective polemic, trapping the history of eighteenth-century political thought within the grand metanarratives of nineteenthand twentieth-century philosophies of history, from idealism and positivism to Marxism and postmodernism. From time to time, however, new information at odds with received ideas has emerged, offering the prospect of a way out of the vicious circularity involved in generating conceptions of the Enlightenment out of assessments of the nature and origins of the French Revolution. The revival of interest in Jansenism over the past fifteen years is a case in point. As knowledge of the eighteenth-century ramifications of a seventeenth-century Catholic heresy has grown, familiar postrevolutionary evaluations of Enlightenment political thought have begun to dissolve in the light of discrepancies between new knowledge and received ideas, opening up new possibilities for the study of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century and its bearing on the politics of the French Revolution. Finding out what lies behind such discrepancies may be one way of moving away

A metahistory of the clash of civilisations : us and them beyond Orientalism

Abstract: Beginning with the wars of ancient Persia and Greece, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam searches for the theoretical underpinnings of the "clash of civilizations" that has determined so much of our political and cultural discourse He revisits the Crusades, colonialism, the Enlightenment, and our contemporary war on terror, and he engages with both eastern and western thinkers, such as Adorno, Derrida, Farabi, Foucault, Hegel, Khayyam, Marcuse, Marx, Said, Ibn Sina, and Weber Adib-Moghaddam's investigation explains the conceptual genesis of the clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in western ideas, especially during the Enlightenment Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities

How Religious were the Ancient Egyptians

Abstract: Ancient Egyptian culture was permeated by statements, symbolic and direct, which defined a world of deities and divine power. They amounted to a form of knowledge that was largely divorced from general personal behaviour and which afforded little recognition of individual experience. Furthermore, although practical provision for survival after death was important, life seems not to have offered a quest for enlightenment through enhanced knowledge of the divine. The exemplary life was a career pursued in what was basically a secular society. Our use of the term ‘religion’ for ancient Egypt, whilst justifiable as a convenience, clearly covers a relationship between belief and behaviour which is distinctive for its place and time. In this article, several kinds of evidence for religious behaviour in ancient Egypt are examined in an attempt to assess the nature and strength of the commitment that they represent. The question of whether the populace at large lived by reference to a world of superstitious gesture which has left little evidence behind is only briefly touched upon.

The "World" of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, Sovereignty)

Abstract: Taking as its point of departure Edmund Husserl's 1935-36 text The Crisis of European Sciences, this essay attempts to develop a new conception of reason by means of a thoroughgoing critique of some ideas often used to support and define it. Because the notion of "enlightenment" has been tied since the time of Kant to a certain coming of age of reason or rationality, the "enlightenment" to come must at once draw upon the resources of this reason and open reason to some of the aporias it has traditionally rejected. Reducible neither to a simple irrationalism nor to a mere mode of calculative thought, such reason must ultimately challenge, it is argued, not only the sovereignty and identity of the (human) subject but the very concepts of sovereignty and identity. Only such a renewed thinking of reason or of what is reasonable, the essay suggests, can help us diagnose, analyze, and help treat some of the aporias posed by a whole host of contemporary issues, from cloning to the erosion of the nation-state to globalization and terrorism. Only in this way can we at once "save the honor of reason" - to use a phrase that runs throughout the essay - and help reorient the reason of politics, of the sciences, and, indeed, of philosophy along the lines of a more fundamental and urgent ethical imperative.