Enlightenment

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

The Evolution-Creation Struggle

Abstract: Creation versus evolution: What seems like a cultural crisis of our day, played out in courtrooms and classrooms across the county, is in fact part of a larger story reaching back through the centuries. The views of both evolutionists and creationists originated as inventions of the Enlightenment - two opposed but closely related responses to a loss of religious faith in the Western world. In his latest book, Michael Ruse, a preeminent authority on Darwinian evolutionary thought and a leading participant in the ongoing debate, uncovers surprising similarities between evolutionist and creationist thinking. Exploring the underlying philosophical commitments of evolutionists, he reveals that those most hostile to religion are just as evangelical as their fundamentalist opponents. But more crucially, and reaching beyond the biblical issues at stake, he demonstrates that these two diametrically opposed ideologies have, since the Enlightenment, engaged in a struggle for the privilege of defining human origins, moral values, and the nature of reality. Highlighting modern-day partisans as divergent as Richard Dawkins and Left Behind authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Ruse's bracing book takes on the assumptions of controversialists of every stripe and belief and offers to all a new and productive way of understanding this unifying, if often bitter, quest.

The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France

Abstract: The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. "The Shock of the Ancient" turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature - rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition - celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. "The Shock of the Ancient" surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and pave the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.

The Enlightenment: A Genealogy

Abstract: What was the Enlightenment? Though many scholars have attempted to solve this riddle, none has made as much use of contemporary answers as Dan Edelstein does here. In seeking to recover where, when, and how the concept of 'the Enlightenment' first emerged, Edelstein departs from genealogies that trace it back to political and philosophical developments in England and the Dutch Republic. According to Edelstein, by the 1720s scholars and authors in France were already employing a constellation of terms - such as l'esprit philosophique - to describe what we would today call the Enlightenment. But Edelstein argues that it was within the French Academies, and in the context of the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns", that the key definition, concepts, and historical narratives of the Enlightenment were crafted. A necessary corrective to many of our contemporary ideas about the Enlightenment, Edelstein's book turns conventional thinking about the period on its head. Concise, clear, and contrarian, "The Enlightenment" will be welcomed by all teachers and students of the period.