Enlightenment

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

Modern approaches to early Islamic history

Abstract: Western writing on Islam, including early Islamic history, has roots reaching back to the medieval period. As far as early Islamic history is concerned, Western scholars of the Enlightenment began to consult key texts of the Islamic tradition itself in search of information. Contemporary scholars examines Islam's origins in depth mainly tend to follow the source-critical or tradition-critical school in their handling of the Islamic sources. Scholars of early Islamic history have shown increased interest in developing new approaches and methods, and in looking at such things as social history, gender relations, identity formation and economic history. Beyond the thorny problems posed by the heritage of the polemical tradition and by the deficiencies of the sources for early Islamic history, there exist other problems of perception and conceptualisation, as well as practical obstacles, that have affected Western approaches to early Islamic history.

A Peircean Panentheist Scientific Mysticism

Abstract: Peirce’s philosophy can be interpreted as an integration of mysticism and science. In Peirce’s philosophy mind is feeling on the inside and on the outside, spontaneity, chance and chaos with a tendency to take habits. Peirce’s philosophy has an emptiness beyond the three worlds of reality (his Categories), which is the source from where the categories spring. He emphasizes that God cannot be conscious in the way humans are, because there is no content in his “mind.” Since there is a transcendental3 nothingness behind and before the categories, it seems that Peirce had a mystical view on reality with a transcendental Godhead. Thus Peirce seems to be a panentheist.4 It seems fair to characterize him as a mystic whose path to enlightenment is science as a social activity.

The French Enlightenment and its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences

Abstract: Philosophy in the Seraglio The Wisdom of the East The New World and the Noble Savage The Last Frontiers The Varieties of Man An Indelible Stain The Apotheosis of Europe

Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity

Abstract: Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Our Judeo-Christian tradition refers to this inherent dignity of man in the Biblical term “the image of God.” Martin Luther King Jr. RIGHTS AND ENLIGHTENMENT Imagine, if you would, an Enlightenment that takes place in a Europe where there had never been a Constantine: no fiery sign in the sky, no Battle at the Milvian Bridge, no Nicaea. Imagine a thoroughgoing intellectual revolution, in which men “dared to know,” casting off half-believed myths of Zeus, demystifying all sacral kingships, seeking to understand the place of humanity in a mechanistic nature without superstition. Would such an Enlightenment have issued in the thunderous proclamations of the American and French Revolutions? The liberal revolutions of the late eighteenth century were the political offspring of the Enlightenment. The pronouncements of the inalienable rights of man were the avant-garde of modern ideology, and they now have triumphed as fundamental international norms. But would an Enlightenment without Constantine also have given birth to Enlightenment liberalism? Could we have had a Kant without a Constantine? If you have indulged this lavish thought experiment so far, consider the answer of the Enlightenment's most acute critic, Friedrich Nietzsche: no. Proclamations of rights and human dignity were not a necessary political derivative of Enlightenment rationalism; rather, they were a relic, a secular myth born of weakness. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the needy products of slavedom hiding from itself…. Now the slave must vainly scrape through from one day to another with transparent lies recognizable to every one of deeper insight, such as the alleged ‘equal rights of all’ or the so-called ‘fundamental rights of man,’ of man as such, or the ‘dignity of labour.’” For Nietzsche, humanity bore no inherent dignity: “‘Man in himself,’ the absolute man possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties.” Only through culture, through art, could humans create beauty and meaning and thus come to possess dignity. Certainly this view set the illiberal Nietzsche apart from his age.