Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Download or read book Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason written by John C. McCarthy and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Alan Charles Kors / Just and Arbitrary Authority in Enlightenment Thought -- 2. Richard Kennington / Bacon's Reform of Nature -- 3. Pamela Kraus / Method and Metaphysics: The Foundation of Philosophy in the Discourse on Method -- 4. Robert P. Kraynak / Hobbes and the Dogmatism of the Enlightenment -- 5. John C. Mccarthy / Pascal on Certainty and Utility -- 6. Paul J. Bagley / Spinoza, Biblical Criticism, and the Enlightenment -- 7. Philippe Raynaud / Leibniz, Reason -- and Evil -- 8. F.J. Crosson / Hume's Unnatural Religion (Some Humean Footnotes) -- 9. Terence E. Marshall / Poetry and Praxis in Rousseau's Emile: Human Rights and the Sentiment of Humanity -- 10. Kenneth L. Schmitz / Lessing at God's Left Hand -- 11. John R. Silber / Kant and the Mythic Roots of Morality -- 12. Nicholas Capaldi / The Enlightenment Project in Twentieth-Century Philosophy -- Contributors -- Bibliography -- Index
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Patrice Sherman and published by Teacher Created Materials. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the universe work? How did the human mind learn? What kind of government was best? These are some of the questions that people asked during the Age of Ideas, or the Enlightenment. Readers will learn about some of the most important aspects, ideas, and people of this time, including John Locke, David Hume, Voltaire, Copernicus, and Romanticism. Through intriguing facts and engaging sidebars, readers will also discover the incredible outcomes of the Scientific Revolution and how scientists like Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Johannes Keplar changed the way people see the world! The colorful images and supportive text work together to help readers understand the major impact the French Revolution had on the French people, as well as the influence it had on the American Revolution.
Download or read book Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals written by Immanuel Kant and published by . This book was released on 1949 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Enlightened Reasoning written by Elize Lemieux and published by Author House. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightened Reasoning Between the covers of this book, the reader will be taken along on one womans journey, from poverty through crisis, to loss and rebirth of her faith. Elize Lemieux has gained the courage to share with us the many hills and valleys of her life. These include the loss of a newborn and the estrangement of her daughters. Integral to all of her stories is her recovery from the ills of alcoholism and bipolar disorder. Perhaps the most poignantly is the love and learning she has shared with her son with Autism. These pages illustrate in bright colors the metamorphosis of an underprivileged young girl from Northern Ontario, who through determination and resilience became a successful woman now living life joyfully. She writes, Where once I could only see darkness, pain, suffering and fear, I now see a vastness of light. Of course no one accomplishes such a transition alone. In her prose, she gives thanks and profound gratitude too many her beloved mother and loving sisters, her dear friends and spiritual guides and of course, the lilacs. Here are stories of tragedy, magic, compassion and everything else one experiences on the path to wisdom and acceptance.
Download or read book An Enlightened Philosophy written by Geoff Crocker and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2011-03-25 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even an atheist world needs human values – religion interpreted as myth offers a classic contribution.
Download or read book The Reasoning of Unreason written by John Roberts and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason.
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 Enlightened Spirituality written by Roger Haight and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents reflections on the nature of Christian spirituality in the light of Immanuel Kant’s work Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. It also contains two short comments on Kant’s work: Paul Tillich directly engages Kant’s moral philosophy, and Reinhold Niebuhr indirectly addresses him with his reflections on the role of conscience in religious experience. The whole volume rests on the constituent role that morality, and hence ethics, plays in a comprehensive understanding of Christian spirituality. Kant adds to that discussion by introducing the voice of the Enlightenment into the conversation. His work serves as a bridge between the spirituality displayed in the Medieval and Reformation periods and what may be called modern Western culture. Christians who are socialized into twenty-first century Western intellectual culture may be relatively unfamiliar with the cultures that spawned the characteristic accents of the spiritual languages that are learned in the churches today. When they move into the world of higher education, they will learn a whole series of ideas from science and critical modern thought that directly challenge the ordinary spiritual conceptions of church traditions. The critical discussion between intellectual culture and Christianity during the period of the Enlightenment was deep and serious, and it helps to explain how the churches in the West relate to present-day intellectual culture. Kant’s text on the metaphysics of morals presents in an exemplary way the deep questions that Christian spirituality faces today with almost laboratory precision. The two commentators neatly draw the conversation into contexts that are closer to life in the world of our time.
Download or read book Compassionate Reasoning written by Marc Gopin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many people across the planet who work every day for the sake of others but who are ensconced in exhausting work with dangerous and difficult situations of conflict. These people are often heroic bridge-builders and creators of peaceful societies, and they have a common set of cultivated moral character traits and psychosocial skills. They tend to be kinder, more reasonable, more self-controlled, and more goal-oriented to peace. They are united by a particular set of moral values and the emotional skills to put those values into practice. The aim of this book is to articulate the best combination of those values and skills that lead to personal and communal sustainability, not burnout and self-destruction. The book pivots on the observable difference in the mind-and proven in neuroscience imaging experiments-between destructive empathic distress, on the one hand, and, on the other, joyful, constructive, compassionate care. .
Download or read book The Enlightenment Vision written by Stuart Jordan and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thought-provoking analysis evaluates the progress that global society has made since the Enlightenment. The author begins by pointing out features of present-day society that are the direct descendants of the Enlightenment's discoveries and advances: our technology, modern medicine, science-based worldview, democratic political institutions, and concepts of human rights are all an outgrowth of the pioneering efforts of Enlightenment reformers. But along with these benefits, the author notes that we are also the inheritors of some significant problems produced in the wake of these advances; overpopulation, nuclear proliferation, and global climate change are just some of the recent developments that seem to threaten the whole Enlightenment project. Other great concerns include the continuing economic disparity between prosperous and impoverished nations, the persistence of widespread ignorance, and destructive reactionary forces bent on provoking new conflicts. Despite these and other daunting challenges of the twenty-first century, the author concludes on a cautiously optimistic note, predicting that the Enlightenment vision of prosperity, security, justice, and good health for all will eventually be achieved.
Download or read book The Faith of Reason written by Charles Frankel and published by . This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Wisdom of the Enlightenment written by Michael K. Kellogg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment—Aufklärung in German, Lumières in French—is more an idea than a period. But it is an idea that took hold in a particular historical context of revolutionary scientific advances, increasing economic and social freedom, rising literacy and prosperity, and a greater willingness to challenge the authoritarianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In The Wisdom of the Enlightenment, author Michael K. Kellogg points to 1637, the year that gave us Rene Descartes’ landmark inquiry into truth, as the beginning of a period that radically changed individual human thought and collective societal action. From Descartes’ assertion of “I think, therefore I am,” to the philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers like Moliere, Spinoza, Voltaire, Hume, and Kant, this book charts the new and revolutionary philosophies at a time when progress seemed possible across the whole range of human knowledge and endeavor. In sweeping aside tired superstitions and applying a new scientific methodology, the Enlightenment ideas of progress through free exercise of reason ushered us into the modern world. This engaging and comprehensive survey of Enlightenment thoughts and thinkers is a celebration of the faith that all problems are solvable by human reason. ,
Download or read book Enlightened War written by Elisabeth Krimmer and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2011 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays exploring the relationship between warfare and Enlightenment thought both historically and in the present. Enlightened War investigates the multiple and complex interactions between warfare and Enlightenment thought. Although the Enlightenment is traditionally identified with the ideals of progress, eternal peace, reason, and self-determination, Enlightenment discourse unfolded during a period of prolonged European warfare from the Seven Years' War to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe. The essays in this volume explore the palpable influence of war on eighteenth-century thought and argue for an ideological affinity among war, Enlightenment thought, and its legacy. The essays are interdisciplinary, engaging with history, art history, philosophy, military theory, gender studies, and literature and with historical events and cultural contexts from the early Enlightenment through German Classicism and Romanticism. The volume enriches our understanding of warfare in the eighteenth century and shows how theories and practices of war impacted concepts of subjectivity, national identity, gender, and art. It also sheds light on the contemporary discussion of the legitimacy of violence by juxtaposing theories of war, concepts of revolution, and human rights discourses. Contributors: Johannes Birgfeld, David Colclasure, Sara Eigen Figal, Ute Frevert, Wolf Kittler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Waltraud Maierhofer, Arndt Niebisch, Felix Saure, Galili Shahar, Patricia Anne Simpson, Inge Stephan. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, and Patricia Anne Simpson is Associate Professor of German Studies at Montana State University.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Anthony Pagden and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world. Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of thought and expression. Belief in reason and progress. The value of scientific inquiry. These are just some of the ideas that were conceived and developed during the Enlightenment, and which changed forever the intellectual landscape of the Western world. Spanning hundreds of years of history, Anthony Pagden traces the origins of this seminal movement, showing how Enlightenment concepts directly influenced modern culture, making possible a secular, tolerant, and, above all, cosmopolitan world. Everyone can agree on its impact. But in the end, just what was Enlightenment? A cohesive philosophical project? A discrete time period in the life of the mind when the superstitions of the past were overthrown and reason and equality came to the fore? Or an open-ended intellectual process, a way of looking at the world and the human condition, that continued long after the eighteenth century ended? To address these questions, Pagden introduces us to some of the unforgettable characters who defined the Enlightenment, including David Hume, the Scottish skeptic who advanced the idea of a universal “science of man”; François-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, the acerbic novelist and social critic who challenged the authority of the Catholic Church; and Immanuel Kant, the reclusive German philosopher for whom the triumph of a cosmopolitan world represented the final stage in mankind’s evolution. Comprehensive in his analysis of this heterogeneous group of scholars and their lasting impact on the world, Pagden argues that Enlightenment ideas go beyond the “empire of reason” to involve the full recognition of the emotional ties that bind all human beings together. The “human science” developed by these eminent thinkers led to a universalizing vision of humanity, a bid to dissolve the barriers past generations had attempted to erect between the different cultures of the world. A clear and compelling explanation of the philosophical underpinnings of the modern world, The Enlightenment is a scintillating portrait of a period, a critical moment in history, and a revolution in thought that continues to this day. Praise for The Enlightenment “Sweeping . . . Like being guided through a vast ballroom of rotating strangers by a confiding insider.”—The Washington Post “Fascinating.”—The Telegraph (London) “A political tract for our time.”—The Wall Street Journal “For those who recognize the names Hegel, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Voltaire, and Diderot but are unfamiliar with their thought, [Anthony] Padgen provides a fantastic introduction, explaining the driving philosophies of the period and placing their proponents in context. . . . Padgen’s belief that the Enlightenment ‘made it possible for us to think . . . beyond the narrow worlds into which we are born’ is clearly and cogently presented.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The Enlightenment really does still matter, and with a combination of gripping storytelling about colorful characters and lucid explanation of profound ideas, Anthony Pagden shows why.”—Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Blank Slate
Download or read book Let There Be Enlightenment written by Anton M. Matytsin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-09-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the triumphalist narrative of Enlightenment secularism. According to most scholars, the Enlightenment was a rational awakening, a radical break from a past dominated by religion and superstition. But in Let There Be Enlightenment, Anton M. Matytsin, Dan Edelstein, and the contributors they have assembled deftly undermine this simplistic narrative. Emphasizing the ways in which religious beliefs and motivations shaped philosophical perspectives, essays in this book highlight figures and topics often overlooked in standard genealogies of the Enlightenment. The volume underscores the prominent role that religious discourses continued to play in major aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought. The essays probe a wide range of subjects, from reformer Jan Amos Comenius’s quest for universal enlightenment to the changing meanings of the light metaphor, Quaker influences on Baruch Spinoza’s theology, and the unexpected persistence of Aristotle in the Enlightenment. Exploring the emergence of historical consciousness among Enlightenment thinkers while examining their repeated insistence on living in an enlightened age, the collection also investigates the origins and the long-term dynamics of the relationship between faith and reason. Providing an overview of the rich spectrum of eighteenth-century culture, the authors demonstrate that religion was central to Enlightenment thought. The term “enlightenment” itself had a deeply religious connotation. Rather than revisiting the celebrated breaks between the eighteenth century and the period that preceded it, Let There Be Enlightenment reveals the unacknowledged continuities that connect the Enlightenment to its various antecedents. Contributors: Philippe Buc, William J. Bulman, Jeffrey D. Burson, Charly Coleman, Dan Edelstein, Matthew T. Gaetano, Howard Hotson, Anton M. Matytsin, Darrin M. McMahon, James Schmidt, Céline Spector, Jo Van Cauter
Download or read book Return to Reason written by Kelly James Clark and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1990-03-22 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clark provides a penetrating critique of the Enlightenment assumption of evidentialism--that belief in God requires the support of evidence or arguments to be rational. His assertion is that this demand for evidence is itself both irrelevant and irrational. His work bridges the gap between technical philosopher and educated layperson.
