Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "englightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academics and boisterous clubs, plans for violent wars and for universal peace, are all relocated in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors show how changing forms of discipline, machinery, and instrumentation affected the emergence of new kinds of knowledge; consider how institutions of public rate taste and conversation helped (...) provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe. Covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, both in the principal European countries and in areas peripheral to Europe, the book also includes ample illustrations and an extensive bibliography. Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment. -- from back cover. (shrink)

The doctrine of materialism is one of the most controversial in the history of ideas. For much of its history it has been aligned with toleration and englightened thinking, but it has also aroused strong, often violent, passions among both its opponents and proponents. This book explores the deelopment of materialism in an engaging and thought-provoking way and defends the form it takes in the twenty-first century.

The introduction by Merold Westphal sets the scene: "Two books, two visions of philosophy, two friends and sometimes colleagues...". Modernity and Its Discontents is a debate between Caputo and Marsh in which each upheld their opposing philosphical positions by critical modernism and post-modernism. The book opens with a critique of each debater of the other's previous work. With its passionate point-counterpoint form, the book recalls the philosphical dialogues of classical times, but the writing style remains lucid and uncluttered. Taking the (...) failure of Englightenment ideals as their common ground, the debaters challenge each other's ideas on the nature of post-foundationalist critique. At the core of the argument lies the timely question of the role that each person can play in creating a truly humane society. (shrink)

Environmentalism has been a part of the ideological landscape of liberal societies for nearly three decades. Classical liberals have not yet succeeded, however, in articulating a coherent response that would be relevant to politically active environmentalists, as well as to liberals receptive to postmodern ideas. Robert C. Paehlke argues that, conservative liberals being in fact hostile to environmental thinking, moderate progressivism and environmentalism should enter into a close alliance. This paper challenges both assertions. Admittedly, not all currents within contemporary conservative (...) liberalism could play a part in the development of a neoliberal environmentalist movement. One current, however, the skeptical tradition, whose origin can be traced back to the Scottish Englightenment, is remarkably well suited to this task. Progressivism, on the other hand, could end up smothering the environmental movement under the weight of its own certainties. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an extended debate about Enlightenment thought. Though many scholars have concluded that there were several 'Enlightenments,' some continue to make generalizations about the Englightenment and some speak about 'the Enlightment agenda.' After discussing the cult of the deathbed scene in eighteenth-century Britain and France, the author looks at three currents of Enlightment thought implicit in the deathbed 'projects' of David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Paul Marat. Although Hume and Johnson hold profoundly different (...) views of religion, their political thinking has much in common. Their reformist thought differs radically from what might be called the transformist thought of Marat, who hoped the French would become disinterested citizens whose civil religion was patriotism. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of the analogies between the physical and the political body during the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth centuries. Focusing on a meaningful pattern of medical, legal and political treatises, this study aims to outline the deep roots of an organic image of the human society widespread until the Englightenment and the crisis of the Old Regime.

Washington eludes us, even in the city named for him. Other leaders are accessible there—Lincoln brooding in square-toed rectitude at his monument, a Mathew Brady image frozen in white, throned yet approachable; Jefferson democratically exposed in John Pope’s aristocratic birdcage. Majestic, each, but graspable.Washington’s faceless monument tapers off from us however we come at it—visible everywhere, and perfect; but impersonal, uncompelling. Yet we should remember that this monument, unlike the other two, was launched by private efforts. When government energies were (...) stalled, in the 1830s, subscriptions kept the project alive. Even when Congress took over the project, stones were added by the citizenry, those memorial blocks one can study while descending the long inner stairway. The classical control of the exterior hides a varied and spontaneous interior—an image of the puzzle that faces us, the early popularity of someone lifted so high above the populace. The man we can hardly find was the icon our ancestors turned to most easily and often. We are distanced from him by their generosity, their willingness to see in him something more than human.The larger they made Washington, the less they left us to admire—until, in Horatio Greenough’s George Washington, he becomes invisible by sheer vastness. Greenough took for his model what the neoclassical period believed was the greatest statue ever created, by the greatest sculptor who ever lived—the Elean Zeus of Phidias. Since that chryselephantine wonder was no longer extant, artists had to rely on the description given by Pausanias in the Description of Greece, and on coins of Elis that celebrated the work. Here is what Pausanias had to say.The seated god is himself fashioned from gold and ivory; the garland on his head appears to be real olive shoots. In his right hand he holds a Victory, also of gold and ivory, offering a ribbon, a garland on her head. In the god’s left hand there is a scepter, encrusted with every kind of metal, and the bird on the tip is an eagle.1 1. Pausanias Description of Greece 5. 11. Garry Wills, a prize-winning author and journalist, is Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University. Among his many books are Nixon Agonistes , Inventing America , and The Kennedy Imprisonment . His forthcoming book, Cincinnatus: George Washington in the Englightenment, will appear in June 1984. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Inquiry in Clausewitz”. (shrink)

The author dwells on the concept of hospitality which has been replaced in our era by that of tolerance. The author introduces us to contemporary attitudes to the latter and points to its problematic nature, the counterpoint to which is the former. A description of changes in the understanding of hospitality is provided, ranging from antiquity, via the Englightenment, to modern times, with references to Kant and Derrida. Besides this, he compares the differences and similarities between the concepts of (...) tolerance and hospitality, suggesting that it is the latter which is useful when describing a globalised and cosmopolitical world, as well as positing that the concept of hospitality can be translated into the practices of human life. (shrink)

A central project of Enlightenment thought is to ground claims to natural freedom and equality. This project is the foundation of Suchon’s view of freedom. But it is not the whole story. For, Suchon’s focus is not just natural freedom, but also the necessary and sufficient conditions for oppressed members of society, women, to avail themselves of this freedom. In this paper I, first, treat Suchon’s normative argument for women’s right to develop their rational minds. In Section 2, I consider (...) Suchon’s three necessary and sufficient conditions for freedom, and the manners in which women are blocked from meeting them. The normative argument together with the obstacles to women meeting the conditions for freedom raises the question of how to get women into a position where they can enjoy the freedom to which they are entitled. In Section 3, I outline Suchon’s answer: women must live a life without attachment. I argue this answer situates Suchon both chronologically and theoretically between the Béguines, a medieval women’s spiritual movement, and 20th century feminist separatism. I conclude that Suchon’s view of freedom is radical, both for its time and ours, and deserves greater attention from historians of philosophy and of feminist thought. (shrink)

Feminist explorations of the sublime and the beautiful have developed in markedly different directions. This is not surprising given the different histories of the two terms. Whereas the nature of the beautiful had been of key importance to Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, it was only during the Englightenment period that a strong contrast was established between the beautiful and the sublime. But this was also the time when there was a decisive shift away from (...) regarding the well-honed male body as best exemplifying the ideal of the beautiful, and beauty itself was domesticated and downgraded. As Mary Wollstonecraft registered in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792])--one of the earliest European feminist texts--to associate women with the duties of being beautiful in this newly demoted mode was, in effect, to give them the status of subordinate beings. Instead, Wollstonecraft aspired to the newly emergent category of the sublime, which was all too frequently being denied to ideally "feminine" women. (shrink)

When in 1801, after the assassination of Paul I., the more liberal Alexander I. became Czar, he began to reorganize the educational system in Russia. He founded a Ministry for People’s Englightenment , re-opened the University of Dorpat (in 1802), planned to restore the University of Wilna and made preparations for the foundation of new universities in Kazan, Charkov, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Tobol’sk, and Ustiug-Velikii. One of the mediating personalities involved in the negotiations about German professors for Russia was (...) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Proposed by Goethe, the chemist Ludwig Schnaubert and the philosopher Johann Baptist Schad were appointed professors at the University of Charkov in 1804. Based on documents from the Goethe-Schiller-archives in Weimar, Goethe’s efforts concerning German academic personnal for Russia are described. (shrink)

This paper was presented at the conference ‘The Marrano Phenomenon: Jewish Hidden Tradition and Modernity’, Warsaw, 16–19 September 2019. It considers the case of Marcus Ehrenpreis, chief rabbi of Stockholm. Ehrenpreis followed in the tradition from Antiquity of Philo of Alexandria, who expressed his Jewish philosophy in Greek, and Moses Mendelssohn, who attempted to bring the principles of the Englightenment to German Jews and to promote an understanding of Judaism among non­Jews. Ehrenpreis sought to follow a similar path among (...) the Swedes, not least in making Swedish his preferred language of writing. Although the Marrano phenomenon relates primarily to the concept of ‘borderline’ Jewishness, of which Ehrenpreis was not an exponent, it nonetheless proves fruitful to consider him from a Marrano perspective in order to extend our understanding of him as an innovative figure who sought to achieve greater understanding across the religious and cultural boundaries between Judaism and non­-Judaism. (shrink)

Given Leibniz’ admiration for Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, which he called “le plus beau des dictionnaires” in the Nouveaux essais, and given that Bayle’s skeptical worries provided the occasion for the writing of the Theodicée, it is appropriate to consider in the The Leibniz Review the first English-language version of those articles from Bayle’s Dictionnaire which are most important for political and moral philosophy. For it is a superb version, edited by the most knowledgeable Bayle-scholar in the Anglophone world; (...) it will justly shape early-Englightenment studies in coming decades. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:480 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY categories can be applied to the objects of moral distinctions. Nor, on the other hand, can moral distinctions be derived from causal reasoning, although naturally we can make causal inferences about moral distinctions. In the Humean account, moral distinctions must be impressions derived from a moral sense existing independently of any consideration of divine sanction. Hume, in effect, separates ethics from religion, though he admits (...) that the idea of a divine pattern of reward and punishment may reinforce moral behavior. I have tried to give a brief summary of the book's main points, and I will now turn to what is necessarily a rather random and selective criticism of the many features and arguments Capaldi pursues. My first and main criticism is that Capaldi has been too ambitious in trying to cover the whole range of Hume's thought in a fairly small book. He would be the last to deny the extent and profundity of Hume's thought, and his reader is therefore left rather breathless as he is led on a gallop from one mountain top to another. Secondly, while fully accepting the importance of Newton as an influence on Hume, I see no reason to insist on its exclusiveness. Brief mention is made of Bayle, but Hutcheson is cast aside while lesser but influential figures like Mandeville are scarcely mentioned. The reader should be warned as well that there is a scholarly view that considers Hume to have been deluded about the extent of his own Newtonianism" and plenty of respectable support for putting him in the sensationalist tradtion of Locke and Berkeley.s No doubt Newton is, above all others, the leading influence on Hume, but in ideas, as in affairs, fruitfulness often results from a plurality of relationships. Other faults in the book seem to result from taking everything Hume said as gospel. Thus Capaldi says if Hume is mistaken, he is only mistaken about facts because Hume claimed to be concerned only with them. This is bad question begging. Nor when Hume firmly commits himself to psychologism, is there any reason why we need not point out that giving psychological explanations for moral behavior, though considerably advanced by Hume, need not be the end nor even the beginning of our questions about ethics. A passing tribute might have been made to Kant and to other externalists who rejected Hume's approach. Smaller points can be made about particular passages: thus, in a rather muddled paragraph Hume emerges as the Copernicus rather than the Newton of the social sciences (a term that I think, despite Hume's pretensions, we should be careful of using in the context of eighteenth-century studies). I would not like to leave the reader with the impression that these remarks mean that I did not enjoy Capaldi's book. He has given us plenty to think about in his analysis, and he surely demonstrates that the old, rigidified exegesis of textbook Hume is dead and buried and that we are now in a much more exciting.world of Hume scholarship. MALCOLM JACK London Franr Hemsterhuis. By Heinz Moenkemeyer. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. Pp. 206. $9.95) This little-known eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher (1721-1790) wrote all his philosophical works, many of them dialogues, in French. No doubt he was hoping that the language 4See, for example, an opinion that Newton's influence was minimal in L. L. Laudan, "Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological Thought," in The Methodological Heritage of Newton (Oxford, 1970), p. 105. See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London, 1961), p. 634, for the connection with Berkeley. On the influence of Hutcheson see T. E. Jessop, "The Misunderstood Hume," in Hume and the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 11. For a viewof Mandeville's influence on Hume see F. A. Hayek, "Dr. Bernard Mandeville," Proceedings of the British Academy LII (1966) : 139. BOOK REVIEWS 481 of Voltaire would help him reach a wider, more cultivated audience; but his use of French is also a sign that his works had been composed with the philosophical currents of the French Englightenment very much in mind, and that he wanted... (shrink)