Download or read book Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration written by Alan Levine and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays by the nation's leading political theorists examines the origins of modernity, and considers the question of tolerance as a product of early modern religious skepticism. Rather than approaching the problem with a purely historical lens, the authors actively demonstrate the significance of these issues to contemporary debates in political philosophy and public policy. The contributors to Early Modern Skepticism raise and address questions of the utmost significance: Is religious faith necessary for ethical behavior? Is skepticism a fruitful ground from which to argue for toleration? This book will be of interest to historians, philosophers, religious scholars, and political theorists -- anyone concerned about the tensions between private beliefs and public behavior.
Download or read book John Locke Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture written by John Marshall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-30 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern Enlightenment Europe.
Download or read book The Social History of Skepticism written by Brendan Maurice Dooley and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result was a powerful current of skepticism with extraordinary consequences. Combined with late-seventeenth-century developments in other areas of thought and writing, it produced skepticism about the possibility of gaining any historical knowledge at all." "Joining the history of ideas to the history of journalism and publishing, Dooley sets out to discover when early modern people believed their political informants and when they did not."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Difference and Dissent written by Cary J. Nederman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1996 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection points to the need for a reevaluation of the origins of toleration theory. Philosophers, intellectual historians, and political theorists have assumed that the development of the theory of toleration has been a product of the modern world, and John Locke is usually regarded as the first theorist of toleration. The contributors to Difference and Dissent, however, discuss a range of conceptual positions that were employed by medieval and early modern thinkers to support a theory of toleration, and question the claim that Locke's theory of toleration was as original or philosophically adequate as his adherents have asserted.
Download or read book Conscience and Community written by Andrew R. Murphy and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious toleration appears near the top of any short list of core liberal democratic values. Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls emphasize important interconnections between the principles of toleration, constitutional government, and the rule of law. Conscience and Community revisits the historical emergence of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition, looking deeper than the traditional emergence of toleration to find not a series of self-evident or logically connected expansions but instead a far more complex evolution. Murphy argues that contemporary liberal theorists have misunderstood and misconstrued the actual historical development of toleration in theory and practice. Murphy approaches the concept through three "myths" about religious toleration: that it was opposed only by ignorant, narrow-minded persecutors; that it was achieved by skeptical Enlightenment rationalists; and that tolerationist arguments generalize easily from religion to issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing a basis for identity politics.
Download or read book Beyond the Persecuting Society written by John Christian Laursen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a myth—easily shattered—that Western societies since the Enlightenment have been dedicated to the ideal of protecting the differences between individuals and groups, and another—too readily accepted—that before the rise of secularism in the modern period, intolerance and persecution held sway throughout Europe. In Beyond the Persecuting Society John Christian Laursen, Cary J. Nederman, and nine other scholars dismantle this second generalization. If intolerance and religious persecution have been at the root of some of the greatest suffering in human history, it is nevertheless the case that toleration was practiced and theorized in medieval and early modern Europe on a scale few have realized: Christians and Jews, the English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Italians, and Spanish had their proponents of and experiments with tolerance well before John Locke penned his famous Letter Concerning Toleration. Moving from Abelard to Aphra Behn, from the apology for the gentiles of the fourteenth-century Talmudic scholar, Menahem ben Solomon Ha-MeIiri, to the rejection of intolerance in the "New Israel" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Beyond the Persecuting Society offers a detailed and decisive correction to a vision of the past as any less complex in its embrace and abhorrence of diversity than the present.
Download or read book Skepticism and Belief in Early Modern England written by Melissa M. Caldwell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central thesis of this book is that skepticism was instrumental to the defense of orthodox religion and the development of the identity of the Church of England. Examining the presence of skepticism in non-fiction prose literature at four transitional moments in English Protestant history during which orthodoxy was challenged and revised, Melissa Caldwell argues that a skeptical mode of thinking is embedded in the literary and rhetorical choices made by English writers who straddle the project of reform and the maintenance of orthodoxy after the Reformation in England. Far from being a radical belief simply indicative of an emerging secularism, she demonstrates the varied and complex appropriations of skeptical thought in early modern England. By examining a selection of various kinds of literature-including religious polemic, dialogue, pamphlets, sermons, and treatises-produced at key moments in early modern England’s religious history, Caldwell shows how the writers under consideration capitalized on the unscripted moral space that emerged in the wake of the Reformation. The result was a new kind of discourse--and a new form of orthodoxy--that sought both to exploit and to contain the skepticism unearthed by the Reformation.
Download or read book Skepticism in the Modern Age written by José Raimundo Maia Neto and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of the first edition of Richard Popkin s classic The History of Scepticism in 1960, skepticism has been increasingly recognized as a major force in the development of early modern philosophy. This book provides a review of current scholarship and significant updated research on some of the main thinkers and issues related to the reappraisal of ancient skepticism in the modern age. Special attention is given to the nature, importance, and relation to religion of Montaigne s and Hume s skepticisms; to the various skeptical and non-skeptical sources of Cartesian doubt; to the skeptical and anti-skeptical impact of Cartesianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and to philosophers who dealt with skeptical issues in the development of their own various intellectual interests.
Download or read book Toleration and Identity written by Ingrid Creppell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, there has been a notable rise in interest in the idea of "toleration", a rise that Ingrid Creppell argues comes more from distressing political developments than positive ones, and almost all of them are related to issues of identity: rampant genocide in the 20th Century, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism around the world; and ethnic-religious wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In Toleration and Identity, Creppell argues that a contemporary ethic of toleration must include recognition of identity issues, and that the traditional liberal ideal of toleration is not sufficiently understood if we define it strictly as one of individual rights and freedom beliefs. Moving back and forth between contemporary debates and the foundational writings of Bodin, Montaigne, Lock, and Defoe, Toleration and Identity provides a fresh perspective on two key ideas deeply connected to current philosophical debates and political issues.
Download or read book The History of Scepticism written by Richard H. Popkin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-20 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a thoroughly revised and expanded edition of Richard Popkin's classic The History of Scepticism, first published in 1960, revised in 1979, and since translated into numerous foreign languages. This authoritative work of historical scholarship has been revised throughout, including new material on: the introduction of ancient skepticism into Renaissance Europe; the role of Savonarola and his disciples in bringing Sextus Empiricus to the attention of European thinkers; and new material on Henry More, Blaise Pascal, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, G.W. Leibniz, Simon Foucher and Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Pierre Bayle. The bibliography has also been updated.
Download or read book How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West written by Perez Zagorin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. Perez Zagorin takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy. This position had its roots in certain intellectual and religious traditions, which Zagorin traces before showing how out of the same traditions came the beginnings of pluralism in the West. Here we see how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers--writing from religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives--contributed far more than did political expediency or the growth of religious skepticism to advance the cause of toleration. Reading these thinkers--from Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to John Milton and John Locke, among others--Zagorin brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern for the spiritual welfare of religion itself weighed more in the defense of toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments. His book--which ranges from England through the Netherlands, the post-1685 Huguenot Diaspora, and the American Colonies--also exposes a close connection between toleration and religious freedom. A far-reaching and incisive discussion of the major writers, thinkers, and controversies responsible for the emergence of religious tolerance in Western society--from the Enlightenment through the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights--this original and richly nuanced work constitutes an essential chapter in the intellectual history of the modern world.
Download or read book The History of Scepticism written by Richard Henry Popkin and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Skepticism in Renaissance and Post Renaissance Thought written by José Raimundo Maia Neto and published by Humanities Press International. This book was released on 2004 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume in the Journal of the History of Philosophy book series (JHP Books) is devoted to the resurgence of skepticism in the Renaissance and after. It contains eight original essays by historians of early modern philosophy from Europe and North and South America, with concluding remarks by Richard H. Popkin, who reviews fifty years of scholarship on the history of early modern skepticism and evaluates its present stage. The essays uncover new material relevant to the history of skepticism in the period and propose new interpretations of the nature, role, and influence of skepticism from Montaigne to Berkeley. The contributors discuss such important figures as Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Bayle, Henry More, René Descartes, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Pierre Gassendi, and George Berkeley. By indicating a number of new problems brought about by the early modern philosophers’ engagement with and reaction to skepticism, the authors of the important essays in this volume make a major contribution to our understanding of ancient and modern skepticism.
Download or read book Satisfying Skepticism written by Ellen Spolsky and published by Ashgate Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on early modern Europe, Spolsky (English, Bar-Ilan U., Israel) considers the structure and detail of the local cultural world in which the brain constructs itself and how the individual negotiates the demands of that world. She argues against the inevitability of a tragic interpretation of the conditions of human knowing, suggesting instead that evidence of complex cultural texts demonstrates that the benefits derived from human creativity more than adequately compensates for any satisfaction an idealize knowing might provide. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book Divided by Faith written by Benjamin J. Kaplan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As religious violence flares around the world, we are confronted with an acute dilemma: Can people coexist in peace when their basic beliefs are irreconcilable? Benjamin Kaplan responds by taking us back to early modern Europe, when the issue of religious toleration was no less pressing than it is today. Divided by Faith begins in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, when the unity of western Christendom was shattered, and takes us on a panoramic tour of Europe's religious landscape--and its deep fault lines--over the next three centuries. Kaplan's grand canvas reveals the patterns of conflict and toleration among Christians, Jews, and Muslims across the continent, from the British Isles to Poland. It lays bare the complex realities of day-to-day interactions and calls into question the received wisdom that toleration underwent an evolutionary rise as Europe grew more "enlightened." We are given vivid examples of the improvised arrangements that made peaceful coexistence possible, and shown how common folk contributed to toleration as significantly as did intellectuals and rulers. Bloodshed was prevented not by the high ideals of tolerance and individual rights upheld today, but by the pragmatism, charity, and social ties that continued to bind people divided by faith. Divided by Faith is both history from the bottom up and a much-needed challenge to our belief in the triumph of reason over faith. This compelling story reveals that toleration has taken many guises in the past and suggests that it may well do the same in the future.
Download or read book Histories of Heresy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries written by J. Laursen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toleration of differing religious ideas exists in parts of the contemporary world, but it is still not clear how this came about. Recent work has uncovered the enormous importance one branch of historiography has had in bringing about such tolerance as we have: histories of heresy. This book brings together experts in this field in order to attempt to map out the contours and features of the influence of these histories on early modern and modern conceptions of toleration. Perhaps by showing heretics and heresies to be more benign than once thought, these histories could tease tolerance from the intolerant. The essays in this book attempt to piece together the intentions and effects of key works from this literature in the promotion or rejection of toleration in theory and practice.
Download or read book The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment written by Anton M. Matytsin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment confidence in the power of human reason was earned by grappling with the challenge of philosophical skepticism. The ancient Greek philosophy of Pyrrhonian skepticism spread across a wide spectrum of disciplines in the 1600s, casting a shadow over the European learned world. The early modern skeptics expressed doubt concerning the existence of an objective reality independent of human perception. They also questioned long-standing philosophical assumptions and, at times, undermined the foundations of political, moral, and religious authorities. How did eighteenth-century scholars overcome this skeptical crisis of confidence to usher in the so-called Age of Reason? In The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, Anton Matytsin describes how skeptical rhetoric forced philosophers to formulate the principles and assumptions that they found to be certain or, at the very least, highly probable. In attempting to answer the deep challenge of philosophical skepticism, these thinkers explicitly articulated the rules for attaining true and certain knowledge and defined the boundaries beyond which human understanding could not venture. Matytsin explains the dialectical outcome of the philosophical disputes between the skeptics and their various opponents in France, the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, and Prussia. He shows that these exchanges transformed skepticism by mitigating its arguments while broadening the learned world’s confidence in the capacities of reason by moderating its aspirations. Ultimately, the debates about the powers and limits of human understanding led to the making of a new conception of rationality that privileged practicable reason over speculative reason. Matytsin also complicates common narratives about the Enlightenment by demonstrating that most of the thinkers who defended reason from skeptical critiques were religiously devout. By attempting either to preserve or to reconstruct the foundations of their worldviews and systems of thought, they became important agents of intellectual change and formulated new criteria of doubt and certainty. This complex and engaging book offers a powerful new explanation of how Enlightenment thinkers came to understand the purposes and the boundaries of rational inquiry.
