Download or read book Dilemmas of Enlightenment written by Oscar Kenshur and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory. While striving to resolve "dilemmas" occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls "intellectual co-optation." In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.
Download or read book Tragedy and Enlightenment written by Christopher Rocco and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
Download or read book Challenges to the Enlightenment written by Academy of Humanism and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which began in seventeenth-century Europe and espoused an optimistic project: an end to human ignorance and the slavish adherence to ancient texts and dogma; the application of scientific principles to solving the world's problems; the elimination of inequality between the sexes; and the advocacy of political rights for all citizens. Modern western society, with its democratic institutions and its reliance on science as the basis of technology and industry, is largely an outgrowth of Enlightenment ideals. Yet today the entire Enlightenment agenda is being challenged, not only by members of the religious orthodoxy but also by a group of academics loosely described under the label of "postmodernism". Whereas the Enlightenment project has always been at odds with religious orthodoxy, which has traditionally been suspicious of efforts to achieve human progress without supernatural support, today it must deal with a very different type of attack from postmodernist intellectuals. Critics of this school question the very ability of human reason to grasp objective reality, and they raise serious objections to the reliability and efficiency of the scientific method and the "tyranny of democratic elites". Is the Enlightenment project still worth pursuing? The distinguished members of the Academy of Humanism who have contributed to this important collection of essays are united in their conviction that the ideals of the Enlightenment must be preserved. Editors Paul Kurtz and Timothy J. Madigan have grouped the diverse perspectives represented in this volume into three major sections dealing with philosophical issues, scientific issues, and socialissues. These cogently argued and vigorous responses to traditional and postmodernist criticisms of the Enlightenment make it clear that reason, science, and the political and social ideals of the Enlightenment are indispensable for the welfare and future of our planet.
Download or read book The Twilight of the American Enlightenment written by George Marsden and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular, liberal elites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course. Their failure lost them the faith of their constituents, paving the way for a Christian revival that offered America a firm new moral vision -- one rooted in the Protestant values of the founders. A groundbreaking reappraisal of the country's spiritual reawakening, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment shows how America found new purpose at the dawn of the Cold War.
Download or read book Into Print written by George Charles Walton and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of essays examining how print culture shaped the legacy of the Enlightenment. Explores the challenges, contradictions, and dilemmas modern European societies have encountered since the eighteenth century in trying to define, spread, and realize Enlightenment ideas and values"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Kantian Courage Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory written by Nicholas Tampio and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Advancing the Enlightenment draws upon John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan to present a vision for progressive politics. Rather than defend Kant's ideas, heirs of the Enlightenment should create concepts such as overlapping consensus, rhizome, and space of testimony to facilitate alliances across religious and philosophical differences"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism written by Karl Ameriks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive and incisive, with three new chapters, this updated edition sees world-renowned scholars explore a rich and complex philosophical movement.
Download or read book Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment written by Peter H. Reill and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-06-06 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life.
Download or read book Enlightenment and Secularism written by Christopher Nadon and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment and Secularism is a collection of twenty eight essays that seek to understand the connection between the European Enlightenment and the emergence of secular societies, as well as the character or nature of those societies. The contributors are drawn from a variety of disciplines including History, Sociology, Political Science, and Literature. Most of the essays focus on a single text from the Enlightenment, borrowing or secularizing the format of a sermon on a text, and are designed to be of particular use to those teaching and studying the history of the Enlightenment within a liberal arts curriculum.
Download or read book Into Print written by George Charles Walton and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of essays examining how print culture shaped the legacy of the Enlightenment. Explores the challenges, contradictions, and dilemmas modern European societies have encountered since the eighteenth century in trying to define, spread, and realize Enlightenment ideas and values"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Moral Foundations of Politics written by Ian Shapiro and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the social contract. Next he turns to the anti-Enlightenment tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke to contemporary post-modernists. In the last part of the book Shapiro examines partisans and critics of democracy from Plato’s time until our own. He concludes with an assessment of democracy’s strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Ritchie Robertson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.
Download or read book Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity written by Mark Hulliung and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume seeks to capture Jean-Jacques Rousseau's astonishing contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas of modernity. For the contributors to this book Rousseau is present as well as past, because he was so modern and yet so ambivalent about modernity, a position with which we are quite familiar. Highlighted in this volume is the contention that Rousseau set the stage for many discussions of the good and bad of modernity.Previous efforts to deal with Rousseau and modernity have suffered from myopia. In the nineteenth century the Romantics claimed Rousseau as one of their own, pulling him out of his historical context, ignoring his full scale immersion in the debates of the French Enlightenment. In the twentieth century commentators have read into Rousseau the ahistorical and present-minded Cold War theme of "Rousseau the totalitarian."In this volume Rousseau is treated as a person of his age but also as someone who speaks to us today. The topics covered range from feminism, music, science, and political theory, to updating the classics, and to the search for and limitations to the quest for self-knowledge. Few if any figures can compete with Rousseau when it comes to forcing us to face up to the price we pay for "progress."
Download or read book The Dream of Reason A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance New Edition written by Anthony Gottlieb and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "His book...supplant[s] all others, even the immensely successful History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell."—A. C. Grayling Already a classic, this landmark study of early Western thought now appears in a new edition with expanded coverage of the Middle Ages. This landmark study of Western thought takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions many pieces of conventional wisdom. The book invites comparison with Bertrand Russell's monumental History of Western Philosophy, "but Gottlieb's book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship" (Colin McGinn, Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2001.
Download or read book Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy written by Leon Chai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-23 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Edwards has most often been considered in the context of the Puritanism of New England. In many ways, however, he was closer to the thinkers of the European Enlightenment. In this book. Leon Chai explores that connection, analyzing Edwards' thought in light of a number of the issues that preoccupied such Enlightenment figures as Locke, Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. The book comprises three parts, each of which begins with a detailed analysis of a crucial passage from a classic Enlightenment text, and then turns to a major theological work of Jonathan Edwards' in which the same issue is explored.
Download or read book What is Enlightenment The Dialectic of Enlightenment written by Kristian Klett and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the Present, grade: Pass, University of Melbourne, course: Introduction to Critical Theory, language: English, abstract: While we live in a post-modern World - having the age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth century, far in our rear view mirror - the concept of Enlightenment is still a basic philosophical task. Its origin, its constitution and its goal are wildly disputed, unknown or undefined, whatever point of view might here be adequate. Still, Enlightenment is seen to be a determining part of human nature, of "what we are, what we think, what we do." (Foucault, p.32) We still live (and an interesting question here would be: will we always live?) within the 'shadow' of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, even though the new era of modernity or post-modernity has been introduced. Since Enlightenment "dissolve[d] the injustice of the old inequality" (Adorno, p.12) of church, nobility, Bourgeoisie and the people, of mastery and serfdom with reason as its mediator, we face the problem of its side effects and its results, and - most importantly - its limits. Must man define his border to experience freedom (which is still within limits though they are not consciously felt, if these limits are wide enough), or can he overcome a reasonable reason in some way? Alternatively has institutionalised knowledge (with the help of religion) established a "building" of ideologies1 that is of eternal character? This leads to the question of possible "exits" from Enlightenment which already happens to have been a "way out" (Foucault, p.34) from immaturity, but is now mutilated to a new "prison" of human beings in post-modernity. Is the human mind ever to reach a state of "nirvana" or its secular utopia, a never available dream world; liberty of universals, the ultimate freedom? Will man ever be able to come back to paradise, now that he has eaten from the "tree of knowledge"? (Kantos, p.239) This essay tri
Download or read book Desolation and Enlightenment written by Ira Katznelson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During and especially after World War II, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war’s devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology, and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West’s moral bearing. In light of their epoch’s calamities, these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. Confronting dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity but also which Enlightenment we should wish to have.
