Enlightenment

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

Towards a New Manifesto

Abstract: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of "critical theory," Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism. Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work - theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom - in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency. A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.

The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition

Abstract: Li Zezhou (b. 1930) has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s. Before moving to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Li published works on Kant and traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy. The present volume, a translation of his "Huaxia meixue" (1989), is considered among Li's most significant works. Apart from its value as an introduction to the philosophy of one of contemporary China's foremost intellectuals, "The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition" fills an important gap in the literature of Chinese aesthetics in English. It presents Li's synthesis of the entire trajectory of Chinese aesthetic thought, from ancient times to the early modern period, incorporating pre-Confucian and Confucian ideas, Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and the influence of Western philosophy during the late-imperial period. As one of China's major contemporary philosophers and preeminent authority on Kant, Li is uniquely positioned to observe this trajectory and make it intelligible to today's readers. "The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition" touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the 'art of living'. Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to Li this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi's artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, to Chan Buddhist - inspired notions that nature and words can come together to yield insight and enlightenment. In this enduring and stimulating work, Li demonstrates conclusively the fundamental role of aesthetics in the development of the cultural and psychological structures in Chinese culture that define 'humanity'.

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

Abstract: To use “magisterial” and “compendious” about this book may understate the case. Vermeulen’s monograph on the “genesis” of ethnography and ethnology will sit as a large and imposing bookend on any history of anthropology shelf for many years to come. It is hard to give any kind of effective summary of a work involving such a vast cast of intellectuals and such wide historical and geographical range. The outline points, though, are as follows. Modern cultural anthropology (Vermeulen calls it sociocultural anthropology; I don’t have space here to show why I think this is mistaken), inherits its core themes from two approaches developed in the enlightenment: ethnography and ethnology. Gottfried Leibniz (particularly his relationship with Russian emperor Peter the Great) turns out to be a cornerstone, not only in the story of how ethnography became its own type of study, but also how and where it was studied. It was Leibniz who began the program of research in Russia and who emphasized the study of language as definitive in understanding ethnos. Language was crucial for Leibniz as a revealer of reality, hence the varieties of language were crucial revealers of the variants of reality. This is a theme that has never gone away in cultural anthropology.

Political Science and the Enlightenment of Enthusiasm

Abstract: I provide a narrative of the emergence of an expressly articulated “political science” in the Scottish Enlightenment. Political science was designed by Hume, Smith, and others to advance both a Newtonian method for the study of politics and a politics of moderation whose tasks included a critique of enthusiasm. In this way, political science, moderation, and (anti)enthusiasm were conceptually connected. The emergence of political science, understood in this way, required a number of conceptual changes in a structure of argument shaped largely by Locke. These conceptual changes, in turn, fixed a rhetorical framework for persistent debates over the methodological and political identity of political science, even as ideology literally replaced enthusiasm. These persistent debates reveal the relevance of the history of political science as a forum for remembrance, reflection, and critique.

On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism

Abstract: Given that Enlightenment rationality developed in Europe as European nations aggressively claimed other parts of the world for their own enrichment, scholars have made rationality the subject of postcolonial critique, questioning its universality and objectivity. In On Reason , the late philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze demonstrates that rationality, and by extension philosophy, need not be renounced as manifestations or tools of Western imperialism. Examining reason in connection to the politics of difference—the cluster of issues known variously as cultural diversity, political correctness, the culture wars, and identity politics—Eze expounds a rigorous argument that reason is produced through and because of difference. In so doing, he preserves reason as a human property while at the same time showing that it cannot be thought outside the realities of cultural diversity. Advocating rationality in a multicultural world, he proposes new ways of affirming both identity and difference. Eze draws on an extraordinary command of Western philosophical thought and a deep knowledge of African philosophy and cultural traditions. He explores models of rationality in the thought of philosophers from Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes to Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jacques Derrida, and he considers portrayals of reason in the work of the African thinkers and novelists Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka. Eze reflects on contemporary thought about genetics, race, and postcolonial historiography as well as on the interplay between reason and unreason in the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He contends that while rationality may have a foundational formality, any understanding of its foundation and form is dynamic, always based in historical and cultural circumstances.