Enlightenment

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

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

Abstract: PREFACE xi CHAPTER 1: Religious Toleration:The Historical Problem 1 CHAPTER 2: The Christian Theory of Religious Persecution 14 CHAPTER 3: The Advent of Protestantism and the Toleration Problem 46 CHAPTER 4: The First Champion of Religious Toleration: Sebastian Castellio 93 CHAPTER 5: The Toleration Controversy in the Netherlands 145 CHAPTER 6: The Great English Toleration Controversy, 1640-1660 188 CHAPTER 7: John Locke and Pierre Bayle 240 CHAPTER 8: Conclusion:The Idea of Religious Toleration in the Enlightenment and After 289 NOTES 313 INDEX 367

The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments

Abstract: Gertrude Himmelfarb's elegant and wonderfully readable work, The Roads to Modernity, reclaims the Enlightenment from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and in America. Himmerlfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic - humane, compassionate and realistic - that still resonates strongly today.

Utopia and reform in the Enlightenment

Abstract: In this detailed study of the republican tradition in the development of the Enlightenment, the central problem of utopia and reform is crystallized in a discussion of the right to punish. Describing the political situation in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author shows how the old republics in Italy, Poland and Holland stagnated and were unable to survive in the age of absolutism. The Philosophes discussed the ideal of republicanism against this background. They were particularly influenced by the political and religious radicalism of John Toland, which had survived the English Restoration and was then reaching Europe. Professor Venturi traces the debate on the penal laws and the attempt to relate utopian ideas of society to the practical problem of dealing with man in society, which culminated in the assertion by many Philosophes that an unjust social system necessitated harsh penal laws, thereby rejecting the possibility of reform.

The Ecology of Order and Chaos

Abstract: The science of ecology has had a popular impact unlike that of any other academic field of research. Consider the extraordinary ubiquity of the word itself: it has appeared in the most everyday places and the most astonishing, on day-glo T-shirts, in corporate advertising, and on bridge abutments. It has changed the language of politics and philosophy-springing up in a number of countries are political groups that are self-identified as "Ecology Parties." Yet who ever proposed forming a political party named after comparative linguistics or advanced paleontology? On several continents we have a philosophical movement termed "Deep Ecology," but nowhere has anyone announced a movement for "Deep Entomology" or "Deep Polish Literature." Why has this funny little word, ecology, coined by an obscure 19th-century German scientist, acquired so powerful a cultural resonance, so widespread a following? Behind the persistent enthusiasm for ecology, I believe, lies the hope that this science can offer a great deal more than a pile of data. It is supposed to offer a pathway to a kind of moral enlightenment that we can call, for the purposes of simplicity, "conservation." The expectation did not originate with the public but first appeared among eminent scientists within the field. For instance, in his 1935 book Deserts on the March, the noted University of Oklahoma, and later Yale, botanist Paul Sears urged Americans to take ecology seriously, promoting it in their universities and making it part of their governing process. "In Great Britain," he pointed out,