Enlightenment

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

A history of social psychology: From the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the Second World War.

Abstract: Preface Part I. Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment Precursors: 1. France. A short-lived dawn of empirical social science 2. Britain. Interpersonal relations and cultural differences Part II. Nineteenth Century: The Gestation of Social Psychology in Europe: 3. Germany. Herbart's and his followers' societal psychology 4. France and Belgium. Adventurous blueprints for a new social science 5. Britain. Logic, evolution, and the social in mind 6. France. Crowd, public, and collective mentalities 7. Germany. In the shadow of Wundt 8. America. Darwinian social psychology crosses the Atlantic Part III. Twentieth Century: Towards Maturity in America: 9. Was 1908 a crucial date? 10. Social psychology becomes empirical: groups (social facilitation) and attitudes 11. The wider panorama of social psychology by the mid-thirties 12. Highlights of the inter-war years Concluding reflections.

The study of chinese civilization

Abstract: When Westerners in the late XVIIIth and early XIXth centuries first turned to the serious study of Chinese civilization, they were influenced by a well-developed image of the object of their study. The Jesuits had, for their own reasons, given European man a peculiarly colored picture of that distant land, and the men of the Enlightenment had, in turn, put that picture to their own uses.' Objects from the hands of Chinese artists and artisans had been brought to Europe and proved to have an immediate appeal to the taste of the European upper classes. Western scholars were persuaded that they were contemplating the oldest continuous socio-political order on earth with a record of that continuity so vast, detailed, and complex as to reduce any researcher to despair. They drew from the writings of the Jesuits and the Enlightenment the impression that Chinese civilization had an order, a stability, a symmetry, a " rationality " in strong contrast to the divided, uneasy, strife-ridden world of the West. This complex of impressions, together with the aesthetic appeal of Chinese objects of art, set the tone of the early European study of China. If it is true, as Max Scheler suggested, that the aficionado is the forerunner of the researcher, it would be correct to say that the sinophile is the forerunner, if not the father of the sinologue. As Europeans,2 influenced by this sort of sinophilia, began their arduous progress toward some understanding of this remote cultural entity, they were guided in their choice of subject and in their methods and interpretations by the traditions of Chinese scholarship. After all, who could speak with more authority than those Chinese scholars who, as officials, had built and maintained that vast socio-political edifice and who, as writers, had celebrated its values, recorded its history, and organized its literary heritage? Thus the Europeans, in their early studies, were in a sense the captives of the tradition they studied and of the self-image of Chinese civilization which the perpetuators of that tradition had developed over the millenia. From another vantage point, Japanese scholars continued, as they had for some thirteen centuries, to contemplate with awe the great * This essay was first presented on the kind invitation of Professor Milton Singer and the late Robert Redfield to the Seminar on the Comparative Study of Civilizations held at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during the Spring months of 1958. 1 Cf. Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France (Paris, 1932).

Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800

Abstract: It is often said that all history writing is political. This book, the first major study of Irish antiquarian and historical writing during the turbulent second half of the eighteenth century, demonstrates the truth of this maxim. It charts the ways in which contemporary politics, notably the Catholic question, legislative independence and the gathering agrarian and political crises from the late 1780s, shaped articulations of the remote and recent past. Historical and antiquarian disputes mirrored political debate, so that Catholic and liberal Protestant interpretations of the past were pitted against conservative Protestant reiterations of earlier colonialist analyses. This study sets Irish writing in a broad European focus, examining the influence of key cultural developments, such as orientalism, primitivism and the vogue for Ossian. The intention is to show the complex ways in which Irish cultural politics in this period was open to, and interacted with, British imperial and wider European Enlightenment trends. Throughout the book, Scotland forms a particular point of comparison, since antiquaries there drew on the same Gaelic heritage in much of their work.Leaman criticizes the influence of Sufism on Islamic aesthetics and contends that it is generally misleading regarding both the nature of Islam and artistic expression. He discusses issues arising in painting, calligraphy, architecture, gardens, literature, films, and music and pays close attention to the teachings of the Qur'an. In particular he asks what it would mean for the Qur'an to be a miraculous literary creation, and he analyzes two passages in the Qur'an-those of Yusuf and Zulaykha (Joseph and Zuleika) and King Sullayman (Solomon) and the Queen of Sheba. His arguments draw on examples from history, art, philosophy, theology, and the artefacts of the Islamic world, and raise a large number of difficulties in the accepted paradigms for analyzing Islamic art.

A rival Enlightenment? Critical international theory in historical mode

Abstract: This article proposes an understanding of critical international theory (CIT) as an historical rather than philosophical mode of knowledge. To excavate this historical mode of theorizing it offers an alternative account of CIT’s intellectual sources. While most accounts of critical international theory tend to focus on inheritances from Kant, Marx and Gramsci, or allude in general terms to debts to the Frankfurt School and the Enlightenment, this is not always the case. Robert Cox, for example, has repeatedly professed intellectual debts to realism and historicism. The argument advanced here builds on Cox by situating CIT in a longer intellectual heritage that extends from Renaissance humanism and passes through Absolutist historiography before reaching Enlightenment civil histories, including Vico’s history of civil institutions. The critical element in this intellectual heritage was the formation of a secular political historicism critically disposed to metaphysical claims based on moral philosophies. By recovering this neglected inheritance of criticism, we can articulate not only a critical theory to rival problem-solving theories, but propose a conception of theory as a historical mode of knowledge that rivals philosophical modes yet remains critical by questioning prevailing intellectual assumptions in International Relations theory.