Enlightenment

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

The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

Abstract: The dark writers of the bourgeoisie such as Machiavelli, Hobbes and Mandeville had always appealed to Horkheimer, who was himself influenced by Schopenhauer. Clearly, from their works there still remained ties to Marx's social theory. These connections were broken by the really nihilistic dark writers of the bourgeoisie, foremost among them the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche. It is to them that Horkheimer and Adorno turn in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, their blackest, most nihilistic book, in order to conceptualize the self-destructive process of Enlightenment. Although they no longer placed hope on its liberating power, inspired by Benjamin's ironic "hope of those without hope," they nonetheless refused to abandon the now paradoxical labor of analysis. We no longer share this attitude. However, under the sign of a Nietzsche restored by some post-structuralist writers such as Derrida and the recent Foucault, attitudes are being disseminated today which appear as the spitting image of those of Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is the confusion of the two attitudes that I want to prevent. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a strange book. A substantial part of the work was composed from notes taken by Gretel Adorno during discussions between Horkheimer and Teddy in Santa Monica. The text was completed in 1944 and published three years later by the Querido Press in Amsterdam. Copies of this first edition were available for almost twenty years. The impact which Horkheimer and Adorno made with this book on the intellectual scene of the Federal Republic of Germany especially during the first two decades after its publication, stands in curious contrast to the number of its purchasers. The composition of the book is equally unusual; it consists of an essay of

The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman's Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism

Abstract: In my second essay in Res (Pietz 1987), I traced the origin of the term \"Fetisso.\"1 I argued that it came to express a novel idea whose fundamental problematic lay outside the theoretical horizon of Christian theology despite its linguistic derivation from Christian juristic discourse as the Spanish and Portuguese word for \"witchcraft.\" In that essay, the formation of the fetish idea in sixteenth-century Afro-European discourse was explored in terms of a shift in core concepts: the key Christian ideas about witchcraft were \"manufactured resemblance\" and \"voluntary verbal pact,\" whereas the central concepts of the Fetisso were \"personification of material objects\" and \"fixed belief in an object's supernatural power arising in the chance or arbitrary conjunctions.\" Indeed, I argued that what was most marginal and conceptually obscure for the Christian theory of witchcraft?\"vain observances\" and \"veneficia\"?became central in the notion of the Fetisso. In the present essay I look more closely at the complex idea of the fetish found in the travelogues written by northern European merchants and clerics visiting black Africa, texts that were read and appropriated by radical intellectuals of what might be called the anti-Leibnitzian moiety among champions of the Enlightenment (a category broad enough to include figures as theoretically diverse as Hume, Voltaire, de Brosses, and Kant). In the first two sections, I reconsider the original idea of the Fetisso, not in order to contrast it with feudal Christian thought as in my previous essay, but in order to grasp its practical and ideological significance for the commerce-minded Europeans who authored the travel accounts. In particular I focus on the 1703 text of the Dutch merchant Willem Bosman and on accounts of the serpent worship at the slave port of Ouidah, for these were, respectively, the great authority on black Africa and the paradigmatic example of a fetish cult for eighteenth-century Europe.2 For merchants like Bosman, as for the clerics who accompanied them, such as the French priest Loyer who first asserted the nontheistic status of African

Contemporary Chinese Philosophy

Abstract: Notes on Contributors. Preface: Chung--ying Cheng. Introduction: Nicholas Bunnin. Part I: Pioneering New Thought from the West:. 1. Liang Qichaoa s Political and Social Philosophy: Yang Xiao. 2. Wang Guowei: Philosophy of Aesthetic Criticism: Keping Wang. 3. Zhang Dongsun: Pluralist Epistemology and Chinese Philosophy: Xinyan Jiang. 4. Hu Shia s Enlightenment Philosophy: Hu Xinhe. 5. Jin Yuelina s Theory of Dao : Hu Jun. Part II: Philosophizing in the Neo--Confucian Spirit:. 6. Xiong Shilia s Metaphysics of Virtue: Jiyuan Yu. 7. Liang Shuming: Easten and Western Cultures and Confucianism: Yanming An. 8. Feng Youlana s New Principle Learning and His Histories of Chinese Philosophy: Lauren Pfister. 9. He Lina s Sinification of Idealism: Jiwei Ci. Part III: Ideological Exposure to Dialectical Materialism:. 10. Feng Qia s Ameliorism: Between Relativism and Absolutism: Huang Yong. 11. Zhang Dainian: Creative Synthesis and Chinese Philosophy: Cheng Lian. 12. Li Zehou: Chinese Aesthetics from a Post--Marxist and Confucian Perspective: John Zijiang Ding. Part IV: Later Development of New Neo--Confucianism:. 13. Fang Dongmei: Philosophy of Life, Creativity, and Inclusiveness: Chengyang Li. 14. Practical Humanism of Xu Fuguan: Peimin Ni. 15. Tang Junyi: Moral Idealism and Chinese Culture: Sin Yee Chan. 16. Mou Zongsan on Intellectual Intuition: Refeng Tang. Afterwords. Recent Trends in Chinese Philosophy in China and the West: Chung--ying Cheng. An Onto--Hermeneutic Interpretation of Twentieth--Century Chinese Philosophy: Identity and Vision: Chung--ying Cheng. Glossary. Index.

The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society

Abstract: Acknowledgements A note on the text Introduction and agenda 1. The foundations of a project 2. Self-love and the civilizing process 3. Performance principles of the public sphere 4. A world of goods 5. Imposing closure - Adam Smith's problem Epilogue: The Fable's modern fate Bibliography Index.