The Practices of the Enlightenment

The Practices of the Enlightenment
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 321
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780231539333
ISBN-13 : 0231539339
Rating : 4/5 (33 Downloads)

Synopsis The Practices of the Enlightenment by : Dorothea E. von Mücke

Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century Pietist traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, The Practices of Enlightenment unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, this book revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. By engaging with three critical categories—aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere—The Practices of Enlightenment illuminates the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, this critical engagement also extends to France through Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Goethe, Lessing, and Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the "sensible" individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 169
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199591787
ISBN-13 : 0199591784
Rating : 4/5 (87 Downloads)

Synopsis The Enlightenment by : John Robertson

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.

The Religious Enlightenment

The Religious Enlightenment
Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Total Pages : 358
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780691188188
ISBN-13 : 0691188181
Rating : 4/5 (88 Downloads)

Synopsis The Religious Enlightenment by : David Sorkin

In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature. Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but three such movements, were influential participants in the eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new ideal of church-state relations. Sorkin shows how they pioneered a religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety. This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the same way.

Placing the Enlightenment

Placing the Enlightenment
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 358
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226904078
ISBN-13 : 0226904075
Rating : 4/5 (78 Downloads)

Synopsis Placing the Enlightenment by : Charles W. J. Withers

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

Artisanal Enlightenment

Artisanal Enlightenment
Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
Total Pages : 313
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780300231625
ISBN-13 : 0300231628
Rating : 4/5 (25 Downloads)

Synopsis Artisanal Enlightenment by : Paola Bertucci

A groundbreaking work that places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, Paola Bertucci places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France’s colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. Artisanal Enlightenment provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, Bertucci provides a groundbreaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment
Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages : 414
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781683931621
ISBN-13 : 1683931629
Rating : 4/5 (21 Downloads)

Synopsis New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment by : Brett C. McInelly

The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

The Enlightenment and the Book

The Enlightenment and the Book
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 842
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226752549
ISBN-13 : 0226752542
Rating : 4/5 (49 Downloads)

Synopsis The Enlightenment and the Book by : Richard B. Sher

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment

The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment
Author :
Publisher : Penn State University Press
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0271062088
ISBN-13 : 9780271062082
Rating : 4/5 (88 Downloads)

Synopsis The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment by : Christopher M. S. Johns

Investigates the response of the Roman Catholic Church to European Enlightenment critiques of revealed religion and clerical governance through the lens of its art, architecture, urbanism, and material culture.

Journal of My Life

Journal of My Life
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 394
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0231061293
ISBN-13 : 9780231061292
Rating : 4/5 (93 Downloads)

Synopsis Journal of My Life by : Jacques-Louis Ménétra

Jaques-Louis Menetra's journal reads like a historian's dream come true. It conveys his understanding of what it meant to grow up in Paris, where he was born in 1738; to tramp around provincial shops on a journeyman's tour de France; to settle down as a Parisian master with a shop and family of his own; and to live through the great events of the Revolution as a militant in his local Section.

John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture

John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 700
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780521651141
ISBN-13 : 052165114X
Rating : 4/5 (41 Downloads)

Synopsis John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture by : John Marshall

Major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern Enlightenment Europe.