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: 8. A Matter of Debate: Conceptions of Material Substance in the Scientific Revolution -- 9. War of the Worlds: Cartesian Vortices and Newtonian Gravitation in Eighteenth-Century Astronomy -- 10. Historical Pyrrhonism and Its Discontents -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Download or read book The Skeptical Enlightenment written by Jeffrey D. Burson and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Althoughmany historical narratives often describe the eighteenth century as an unalloyed'Age of Reason', Enlightenment thinkers continued to grapple with thechallenges posed by the revival and spread of philosophical skepticism. Theimperative to overcome doubt and uncertainty informed some of the mostinnovative characteristics of eighteenth-century intellectual culture,including not only debates about epistemology and metaphysics but also mattersof jurisprudence, theology, history, moral philosophy, and politics. Thinkersof this period debated about, established, and productively worked for progresswithin the parameters of the increasingly circumscribed boundaries of humanreason. No longer considered innate and consistently perfect, reason insteadbecame conceived as a faculty that was inherently fallible, limited by personalexperiences, and in need of improvement throughout the course of anyindividual's life. In its depictionof a complicated, variegated, and diverse Enlightenment culture, this volume examines the process by whichphilosophical skepticism was challenged and gradually tamed to bring about ananxious confidence in the powers of human understanding. The variouscontributions collectively demonstrate that philosophical skepticism, andnot simply unshakable confidence in the powers of reason or the optimisticassumption about inevitable human improvement, was, in fact, the crucible ofthe Enlightenment process itself.

Download or read book Hume s Sceptical Enlightenment written by Ryu Susato and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates the uniqueness of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker, illustrating how his 'spirit of scepticism' often leads him into seemingly paradoxical positions. This book will be of interest to Hume scholars, intellectual historians of 17th- to 19th-century Europe and those interested in the Enlightenment more widely.

Download or read book Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment Lumi res Aufkl rung written by Sébastien Charles and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of Enlightenment has often been portrayed as a dogmatic period on account of the veritable worship of reason and progress that characterized Eighteenth Century thinkers. Even today the philosophes are considered to have been completely dominated in their thinking by an optimism that leads to dogmatism and ultimately rationalism. However, on closer inspection, such a conception seems untenable, not only after careful study of the impact of scepticism on numerous intellectual domains in the period, but also as a result of a better understanding of the character of the Enlightenment. As Giorgio Tonelli has rightly observed: “the Enlightenment was indeed the Age of Reason but one of the main tasks assigned to reason in that age was to set its own boundaries.” Thus, given the growing number of works devoted to the scepticism of Enlightenment thinkers, historians of philosophy have become increasingly aware of the role played by scepticism in the Eighteenth Century, even in those places once thought to be most given to dogmatism, especially Germany. Nevertheless, the deficiencies of current studies of Enlightenment scepticism are undeniable. In taking up this question in particular, the present volume, which is entirely devoted to the scepticism of the Enlightenment in both its historical and geographical dimensions, seeks to provide readers with a revaluation of the alleged decline of scepticism. At the same time it attempts to resituate the Pyrrhonian heritage within its larger context and to recapture the fundamental issues at stake. The aim is to construct an alternative conception of Enlightenment philosophy, by means of philosophical modernity itself, whose initial stages can be found herein. ​

Download or read book The Dialectic of Counter Enlightenment written by Christian Thorne and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging, ambitious, and engaging study, Christian Thorne confronts the history and enduring legacy of anti-foundationalist thought. Anti-foundationalism--the skeptical line of thought that contends our beliefs cannot be authoritatively grounded and that most of what passes for knowledge is a sham--has become one of the dominant positions in contemporary criticism. Thorne argues that despite its ascendance, anti-foundationalism is wrong. In The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment, he uses deft readings of a range of texts to offer new perspectives on the ongoing clash between philosophy and comprehensive doubt. The problem with anti-foundationalism is not, as is often thought, that it radiates uncertainty or will unglue the university, but instead that it is a system of thought--with set habits that generate unearned certainties. The shelves are full of histories of modern philosophy, but the history of the resistance to philosophical thought remains to be told. At its heart, The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is a plea not to take doubt at its word--a plea for the return of a vanished philosophical intelligence and for the retirement of an anti-Enlightenment thinking that commits, over and over again, the very crimes that it lays at Enlightenment's door.

Download or read book Scepticism in the Enlightenment written by R.H. Popkin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with Richard Popkin's essay of 1963, `Scepticism in the Enlightenment', a new investigation into philosophical scepticism of the period was launched. The late Giorgio Tonelli and the late Ezequiel de Olaso examined in great detail the kinds of scepticism developed during the Enlightenment, and the kind of answer to scepticism that was developed by Leibniz. Their original researches and interpretations are of great value and importance. As a result of their work Popkin modified his original claims, as shown in the last two articles in this volume. The book contains an introduction by Popkin and 10 essays, two of which have never been published before. This collection should be of interest to students and scholars of 18th century thought in England, France and Germany.

Download or read book Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries written by John Christian Laursen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection, thirteen distinguished contributors examine the influence of the ancient skeptical philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus on early modern political thought. Classical skepticism argues that in the absence of certainty one must either suspend judgment and live by habit or act on the basis of probability rather than certainty. In either case, one must reject dogmatic confidence in politics and philosophy. Surveying the use of skepticism in works by Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Smith, and Kant, among others, the essays in Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries demonstrate the pervasive impact of skepticism on the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. This volume is not just an authoritative account of skepticism’s importance from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, it is also the basis for understanding skepticism’s continuing political implications.

Download or read book Enlightenment Shadows written by Genevieve Lloyd and published by . This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genevieve Lloyd presents a new study of the place of Enlightenment thought in intellectual history and of its continued relevance. She offers original readings of a range of key texts, which highlight the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers enacted in their writing—and reflected on—the interplay of intellect, imagination, and emotion.

Download or read book The Dark Side of the Enlightenment Wizards Alchemists and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason written by John V. Fleming and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-07-22 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the darker pursuits that took place during the Age of Reason, including explorations of magic, alchemy, and the occult as well as the dual-role of secret societies including the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians.

Download or read book Exorcism and Enlightenment written by H. C. Erik Midelfort and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late eighteenth century, Catholic priest Johann Joseph Gassner (1727-1779) discovered that he had extraordinary powers of exorcism. Deciding that demons were responsible for most human ailments, he healed thousands, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic. In this book H.C. Erik Midelfort delves deeply into records of the time to explore Gassner's remarkable exorcising campaign, chronicle the official efforts to curb him, and reconstruct the sufferings of the afflicted. Gassner's activities triggered a Catholic religious revival as well as a noisy skeptical reaction. In response to those who doubted that he was really casting out demons, Gassner marshaled hundreds of eyewitness reports that seemed to prove his exorcisms really worked. Midelfort describes the enormous public controversy that resulted, and he demonstrates that the Gassner episode yields important insights into the German Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, the limitations of eighteenth-century debate, and the ongoing role of magic and belief in an age of scientific enlightenment.

Download or read book Styles of Enlightenment written by Elena Russo and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-01-19 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Ends of Enlightenment written by John Bender and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.

Download or read book Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment written by Laurence Brockliss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was recognized as Britain's most distinguished historian of ideas. Many of his essays discussed thinkers of what this book calls the 'long Enlightenment' (from Vico in the eighteenth century to Marx and Mill in the nineteenth, with Machiavelli as a precursor). Yet he is particularly associated with the concept of the 'Counter-Enlightenment', comprising those thinkers (Herder, Hamann, and even Kant) who in Berlin's view reacted against the Enlightenment's naïve rationalism, scientism and progressivism, its assumption that human beings were basically homogeneous and could be rendered happy by the remorseless application of scientific reason. Berlin's 'Counter-Enlightenment' has received critical attention, but no-one has yet analysed the understanding of the Enlightenment on which it rests. Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment explores the development of Berlin's conception of the Enlightenment, noting its curious narrowness, its ambivalence, and its indebtedness to a specific German intellectual tradition. Contributors to the book examine his comments on individual writers, showing how they were inflected by his questionable assumptions, and arguing that some of the writers he assigned to the 'Counter-Enlightenment' have closer affinities to the Enlightenment than he recognized. By locating Berlin in the history of Enlightenment studies, this book also makes a contribution to defining the historical place of his work and to evaluating his intellectual legacy.

Download or read book Explaining Postmodernism written by Stephen R. C. Hicks and published by Scholargy Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800 written by J. van der Zande and published by . This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Dan Edelstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this concise, bold, and innovative book, Dan Edelstein offers us an original account of the Enlightenment. It convincingly argues that the Enlightenment is above all a narrative about social and cultural changes and that its origins can be found in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Therefore, by reconsidering the importance of the French esprit philosophique in the Euroean Enlightenment, this book will be of considerable importance for every scholar and student interested in this period.