Enlightenment

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

On crimes and punishments : fifth edition

Abstract: Becarria's influential "Treatise On Crimes and Punishments" is considered a foundation work in the modern field of criminology. As Newman and Marongiu note in their introduction to the work, three master themes of the Enlightenment run through the Treatise: the idea of the social contract, the idea of science, and the belief in progress. The idea of the social contact forms the moral and political basis of the work's reformist zeal. The idea of science supports a dispassionate and reasoned appeal for reforms. The belief in progress is inextricably bound to the idea of science. All three provide the necessary foundation for accepting Beccaria's proposals. It is virtually impossible to ascertain which of several versions of the Treatise that appeared during his lifetime best reflected Becccaria's own thought. His use of many ideas of Enlightenment thinkers also makes it difficult to interpret what he has written. While Enlightenment thinkers wanted to break the chains of religion and advocated free men and free minds, there was considerable disagreement as to how this might be achieved, except in the most general terms. The editors have based this translation on the "Francioni" (1984) text, by far the most exhaustive critical Italian edition of "Dei delitti e delle pene". This edition is undoubtedly the last that Beccaria personally oversaw and revised. This new translation, which includes an outstanding opening essay by the editors, is a welcome introduction to Beccaria and to the modern beginnings of criminology.

A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War

Abstract: That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

Enthusiasm : the antiself of enlightenment

Abstract: TW A Te are moving toward a reassessment of Enlightenment, in which there will no longer be "The Enlightenment,"a unitary and universal phenomenon with a single history to be either celebrated or condemned, but instead a family of discourses arising about the same time in a number of European cultures, Protestant as well as Catholic, insular as well as peninsular, and certainly not all occasioned by the Parisian intellectual hegemony that sought to establish itself among them. This view reasserts the diversity of cultures, some of them national and some of them built by states, in a Europe presenting itself at the end of the twentieth century as a cultural homogenization bent on the destruction of both states and nations; in resisting this aggression, the study of Enlightenment discourses seeks to maintain the open society by articulating the diversity of voices within it. Within a family of Enlightenments, furthermore, there is room for the recognition of family quarrels, some of them bitter and terrible in their conduct; and in escaping the false unity of "The Enlightenment," we escape the error of regarding "it" as culminating in "The Enlightenment Project," a construct invented by both left and right in order that they many denounce it (thus imposing on the open society the poverty of historicism). This enterprise, however malevolent, focuses on a problem others may wish to discuss: how it was that Enlightenment, very often at its beginnings a program of persuading the human mind to recognize its limitations, in certain cases became a program of revolutionary triumphalism. This did sometimes happen; the historicist error is that of supposing that all roads led to this conclusion. By first pluralizing the Enlightenments, and then by focusing upon the concept of enthusiasm-one of the key words in the Enlightened lexicon-this essay attempts to show that the Enlightenments from their outset recognized the possibility of an intellectual fanaticism arising within as well as without the enterprises in which they were engaged.

Moses Mendelssohn and the religious enlightenment

Abstract: Through a close study of Mendelssohn's Hebrew and German writings, David Sorkin argues that Mendelssohn's two spheres of endeavor were entirely consistent. Mendelssohn attempted to rearticulate the medieval Jewish rationalist tradition in the terms of eighteenth-century philosophy, thereby showing his essential similarity to the Protestant and Catholic thinkers of the religious Enlightenment who attempted to use the new science and philosophy to renew faith. Sorkin restores Mendelssohn to his eighteenth-century milieu and in so doing shows that Mendelssohn, by being turned into a symbol, has been fundamentally misunderstood.

Empiricism and geographical thought : from Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt

Abstract: 1. Foundations of modern empiricism 2. Science and geography: the seventeenth-century encounter 3. Geography in decline: the age of Newton 4. Eighteenth-century empiricism: Locke, Berkley and Hume 5. On the margins of science: eighteenth-century geography texts 6. Science and philosophy: enlightenment conflicts in Europe 7. Geography revived: the age of Humboldt 8. Epilogue: the way ahead.