Enlightenment

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

Consciousness Raising: The Critique, Agenda, and Inherent Precariousness of Contemporary Anglophone Atheism

Abstract: Atheism, as a subject in its own right, has received comparatively little scholarly attention in the past. This study begins by unpacking the term ‘atheism’, specifying an appropriate timescale and limiting the scope of the investigation to the work of four key authors. Their critiques of religion are considered and common themes under the appellation ‘dangerous religion’ are discerned. The author then pursues a closer reading of the texts, discerning what agenda is promoted in opposition to the heavily criticised ‘religion’, and discussing contemporary atheism in relation to Enlightenment values. Finally, the author examines why contemporary atheism fails to state its agenda more explicitly. The main players are shown to be individuals, with different foci that cannot be encapsulated by labels such as ‘Enlightenment’. Indications emerge of a ‘consciousness raising’ agenda, resulting from various factors that make contemporary unbelief a particularly organisationally ‘precarious’ phenomenon – a precariousness enhanced by an implicit ambivalent attitude to certain aspects of Christianity, and a correlation with Enlightenment, Romantic and New Age concerns.

Feminists Versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain

Abstract: Mary Wollstonecraft’s status as an Enlightenment philosophe earns her divided notices. For admirers of Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft’s identification with what she described, significantly, as the ‘masculine and improved sentiments of an enlightened philosophy’ wins her kudos.3 By contrast, those who condemn Enlightenment as sectarian — a ‘conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s satiric formulation4 — criticise her complicity in it. The judgements, until recently, have been more polemical than substantively historical, with little detailed attention to Wollstonecraft’s place in the constellation of writers, ideas, and intellectual practices retrospectively labelled Enlightenment.5 Probably for this reason, both sides in the argument tend to exaggerate her Enlightenment allegiances, and to underestimate the complexities of her intellectual position. Far from an uncritical spokeswoman for a monolithic ‘Enlightenment’, Wollstonecraft elaborated her philosophical stance against the grain of mainstream enlightened opinion. This was particularly evident in her major feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) where, far from echoing Enlightenment perspectives, she mounted a systematic assault on ‘modern’ writings on women which, in her view, portrayed women ‘as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species’.6 If the Rights of Woman is a work of Enlightenment philosophy, in other words, it is one that highlights important tensions in Enlightenment thought, particularly in enlightened thinking on gender issues.7

Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions

Abstract: A republic of letters in any age is a community of discourse and in discourse. The Republic of Letters of the French Enlightenment was a highly developed community of discourse based on a network of intellectual exchanges centered in the salons of Paris. In the 1760s, the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters that went back as far as the Respublica Litterarum of Erasmus and his contemporaries was taking shape in Paris as a community of discourse that took itself seriously in new ways. For the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, both the political and the literary dimensions of their citizenship in this republic were crucial to their self-conception. This new sense of community and of collective purpose was shaped by the collective experience of making an Encyclopedia whose purpose, according to its editor, was "to change the common way of thinking."' The success of the Enlightenment as a project to change the common way of thinking depended upon the expansion of the Republic of Letters beyond a small elite. It required a more permanent institutional base than the Encyclopedia, as a single project, could afford, one that would continue to promote and sup-

Reason, ridicule, and religion: The age of enlightenment in England, 1660-1750

Abstract: This study, with its examination of the lives and works of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, George Berkley, John Locke and other Enlightenment scholars, rejects the idea that the early modern period was marked by a triumph of reason or that it should be seen as a simple battle between science and religion. The more far-reaching debate is focused on one great theme: the questioning of God's place and significance in the cosmos - and the threats that this doubt appeared to pose for the whole of society.

Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford English Dictionary

Abstract: Collecting the PrejudicesFor over a century the Oxford English Dictionary has defined "enlightenment" as follows:1. The action of enlightening; the state of being enlightened ... [I]mparting or receiving mental or spiritual light.2. Sometimes used [after Ger. Aufklarung, Aufklarerei] to designate the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c., or of others whom it is intended to associate with them in the implied charge of shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority, etc.1The second definition has, understandably, not sat well with historians of the period. More than four decades ago, Peter Gay began a dissection of the persistence of various "stubborn misreadings" of the Enlightenment by noting that the virtually identical definition in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary had the dubious distinction of "collecting most current prejudices in one convenient spot."2The OED provided three examples of the second usage. The first two came from James Hutchison Stirling's Secret of Hegel (1865): 1) "Deism, Atheism, Pantheism, and all manner of isms due to Enlightenment" and 2) "Shallow Enlightenment, supported on such semi-information, on such weak personal vanity, etc." The third came from Edward Caird's Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1889): 3) "The individualistic tendencies of the age of Enlightenment." The OED's choice of examples has also raised some hackles among dix-huitiemistes. John Lough observed, "What these examples have to do with French thought it is difficult to see; the first source is a book on Hegel and the second one on Kant."3A glance at the context from which the Caird quotation was taken would have been enough to ease Lough's confusion. While Caird's book may have been about Kant, the passage quoted was part of a general characterization of eighteenth-century philosophy:The individualistic tendencies of the age of Enlightenment, which separated each man from the unity of the social organism to which he belonged, separated him also from the past out of which his intellectual life had grown. Hence to the writers of that time the independence of philosophical thought seemed to involve that each thinker must begin the work of speculation de novo: and to admit the possibility or necessity of a mediation of truth to the individual by the communis sensus of humanity was in their eyes the same thing as to accept the dictation of an external authority.4While there is much here that might be criticized, such a characterization of the Enlightenment still enjoys support in some quarters today.A closer look at the examples from The Secret of Hegel, however, yields a few surprises. For in the first extract the OED misquoted Stirling and in the second it misrepresented how he employed the phrase "shallow enlightenment." Both examples are taken from a passage in the book's Preface which launches a diatribe against Henry Thomas Buckle, whose materialist approach to history particularly incensed Stirling. At issue in the first is the question of whether Buckle--who conveyed to Stirling "the air of a man who is speaking by anticipation, and who only counts on verifying the same"--truly understood Kant's work. The passage runs as follows (the portion extracted, and misquoted, by the OED has been italicized):He had a theory, had Mr Buckle, or, rather, a theory had him-a theory, it is true, small rather, but still a theory that to him loomed huge as the universe, at the same time that it was the single drop of vitality in his whole soul.-Now, that such redoubted thinkers as Kant and Hegel, who, in especial, had been suspected or accused of Deism, Atheism, Pantheism, and all manner of isms dear to Enlightenment, but hateful to Prejudice-(or vice versa)-that these should be found not to fit into his theory-such doubt never for a moment crossed even the most casual dream of Buckle!5In the passage misquoted in the OED Stirling speaks not of "isms due to Enlightenment" but rather of "isms dear to Enlightenment. …