Enlightenment

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

Toward a Geography of “Religion”: Mapping the Distribution of an Unstable Signifier

Abstract: Recent religious studies scholarship has examined the historical and cultural variability by which “religion” and “the sacred” have been constructed by scholars and by the public. This article argues that geographers of religion must take these deconstructive arguments to heart. Rather than assuming there is a universal feature of human life called “religion,” the author argues that the religious and the sacred should be studied by geographers as ways of distributing particular kinds of significance across geographic spaces. Rooted in modern distinctions of religious/secular and sacred/profane and in the Enlightenment urge to classify, constructs of religion are efforts to demarcate, purify, and territorialize. Postmodernization exacerbates the individualization of religion but also destabilizes the boundary between the sacred and the profane. If religion is, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, a “recent invention” that, with a shift in structural relations, might “be erased, like a face drawn in sand...

The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today

Abstract: Although known as "the age of reason," the eighteenth century was actually an era in which many leading moral and political philosophers placed equal emphasis on feeling. While Enlightenment rationalists such as Immanuel Kant separated reflective reason from the unreflective mental faculties which must obey its commands, their sentimentalist contemporaries such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and J. G. Herder did not. Instead, they saw moral and political reflection as the proper work of the mind as a whole. Without emotion, imagination and the imaginative sharing of emotion then known as "sympathy," we would be incapable of developing the reflectively-refined moral sentiments which are the basis of our commitment to justice and virtue. This book seeks to reclaim the sentimentalist theory of reflection as a resource for enriching social science, normative theory, and political practice today.