Download or read book History and Nature in the Enlightenment written by Mr Nathaniel Wolloch and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mastery of nature was viewed by eighteenth-century historians as an important measure of the progress of civilization. Modern scholarship has hitherto taken insufficient notice of this important idea. This book discusses the topic in connection with the mainstream religious, political, and philosophical elements of Enlightenment culture. It considers works by Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Herder, Vico, Raynal, Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and a wide range of lesser- and better-known figures. It also discusses many classical, medieval, and early modern sources which influenced Enlightenment historiography, as well as eighteenth-century attitudes toward nature in general.
Download or read book History and Nature in the Enlightenment written by Nathaniel Wolloch and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The maestry of nature was viewed by eighteenth-century historians as an important measure of the progress of civilization. Modern scholarship has hitherto taken insufficient notice of this important idea. This book discusses the topic in connection with the mainstream religious, political, and philosophical elements of the Enlightenment culture. It considers workd by Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Herder, Vico, Raynal, Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and a wide range of lesse- and better-know figures. It also discusses many classical, medieval, and early modern sources which influenced Enlightenment historiography, as well as eighteen-century attitudes toward nature in general".
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 Anecdotes of Enlightenment written by James Robert Wood and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume is both a formal study of the anecdote's properties and possibilities and an inquiry into the anecdote's intellectual function in Enlightenment culture. The author contends that anecdotes acted in Enlightenment writing as mediators between the incidents of human life and the laws of human nature, connecting the abstractions of philosophical reflection with lived experience. Successive chapters take a specific genre (the essay), a single writer (David Hume), a historical event (the Endeavour voyage), and a literary project (the Lyrical Ballads) as nets for collecting anecdotes. Each chapter is committed to the particularities of individual anecdotes and the specificities of the uses to which these anecdotes were put. However, the book also outlines a larger historical narrative in which the anecdote moves from a central place in the science of human nature to holding a particular place in poetry, even as the anecdote began to lose its currency in the emerging human sciences"--
Download or read book The Moral Authority of Nature written by Lorraine Daston and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-08-15 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal
Download or read book Human Nature and the French Revolution written by Xavier Martin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2003-12 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What view of man did the French Revolutionaries hold? Anyone who purports to be interested in the "Rights of Man" could be expected to see this question as crucial and yet, surprisingly, it is rarely raised. Through his work as a legal historian, Xavier Martin came to realize that there is no unified view of man and that, alongside the "official" revolutionary discourse, very divergent views can be traced in a variety of sources from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Code. Michelet's phrases, "Know men in order to act upon them" sums up the problem that Martin's study constantly seeks to elucidate and illustrate: it reveals the prevailing tendency to see men as passive, giving legislators and medical people alike free rein to manipulate them at will. His analysis impels the reader to revaluate the Enlightenment concept of humanism. By drawing on a variety of sources, the author shows how the anthropology of Enlightenment and revolutionary France often conflicts with concurrent discourses.
Download or read book Age of Enlightenment written by Hourly History and published by Hourly History. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed that progress and the betterment of the human condition was inevitable. Inside you will read about… ✓ The Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment ✓ Engaging With Religion ✓ Morality in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Society in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Science and Political Economy ✓ The Enlightenment and the Public ✓ Print Culture and the Press Philosophies of the Enlightenment gave birth to the disciplines of political science, economic theory, sociology and anthropology, the disciplines that still form the basis of how we understand life in the 21st century. A bold attack on the Church, the State and the Monarchy, the Age of Enlightenment was a direct challenge to the status quo that sought freedom for all.
Download or read book Seeking Nature s Logic written by David B. Wilson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Studies the path of natural philosophy (i.e., physics) from Isaac Newton through Scotland into the nineteenth-century background to the modern revolution in physics. Examines how the history of science has been influenced by John Robison and other notable intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment"--Provided by publisher.
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 Human Nature Cultural Diversity and the French Enlightenment written by Henry Vyverberg and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Henry Vyverberg traces the evolution and consequences of a crucial idea in French Enlightenment thought--the idea of human nature. Human nature was commonly seen as a broadly universal, unchanging entity, though perhaps modifiable by geographical, social, and historical factors. Enlightenment empiricism suggested a degree of cultural diversity that has often been underestimated in studies of the age. Evidence here is drawn from Diderot's celebrated Encyclopedia and from a vast range of writing by such Enlightenment notables as Voltaire, Rousseau, and d'Holbach. Vyverberg explains not only the age's undoubted fascination with uniformity in human nature, but also its acknowledgment of significant limitations on that uniformity. He shows that although the Enlightenment's historical sense was often blinkered by its notions of a uniform human nature, there were also cracks in this concept that developed during the Enlightenment itself.
Download or read book Subjugated Animals written by Nathaniel Wolloch and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of attitudes toward animals in early modern Western culture. Emphasizing the influence of anthropocentrism on attitudes toward animals, historian Nathaniel Wolloch traces the various ways in which animals were viewed, from predominantly anti-animal thinking to increasingly pro-animal sentiments and viewpoints. Wolloch devotes a chapter each to six major themes: early modern philosophical perspectives on animals till the end of the seventeenth century, pro-animal opinions in the eighteenth-century, the connection between attitudes toward animals and the early modern debate about the existence of extraterrestrial life, scientific modes of discussing animals, the role of animals in early modern anthropomorphic literature, and depictions of animals in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. He concludes his broad, interdisciplinary study by linking these historical trends to the modern discussion of animal rights and ecological issues.
Download or read book Enlightenment s Frontier written by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVEnlightenment’s Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith’s famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism./div
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 Nature and Culture written by Lester G. Crocker and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1963. Perhaps the most generative ethical question of eighteenth-century France was how to live a virtuous and happy life at the same time. During the Age of Enlightenment, Christianity fell out of vogue as the dominant and authoritative moral code. In place of Christianity's emphasis on sin and redemption in light of a supposed afterlife, present happiness became recognized as an appropriate end goal among French Enlightenment thinkers. French intellectuals struggled to find equilibrium between nature (a person's individual goals and needs) and culture (the political, economic, and social organization of humans for a collective good). Enlightenment discourse generated a unique cultural moment in which thinkers addressed the problems of humans' moral coexistence through the dichotomy of nature and culture. Lester Crocker addresses these questions in an overview of ethical thought in eighteenth-century France.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by John Robertson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Dorinda Outram and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debate over the meaning of 'Enlightenment' began in the eighteenth century and has continued unabated until our own times. This period saw the opening of arguments on the nature of man, truth, on the place of God, and the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. Did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans? In the second edition of her book, Dorinda Outram addresses these, and other questions about the Enlightenment. She studies it as a global phenomenon, setting the period against broader social changes. This new edition offers a fresh introduction, a new chapter on slavery, and new material on the Enlightenment as a global phenomenon. The bibliography and short biographies have been extended. This accessible synthesis of scholarship will prove invaluable reading to students of eighteenth-century history, philosophy, and the history of ideas.
Download or read book The Time of Enlightenment written by William Max Nelson and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. The Time of Enlightenment argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.
