Enlightenment and Utility

Enlightenment and Utility PDF Author: Emmanuelle de Champs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110709867X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
A major new study of Jeremy Bentham's engagement with contemporary French culture, from the Enlightenment through to the post-Revolutionary era.

Enlightenment and Utility

Enlightenment and Utility PDF Author: Emmanuelle de Champs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110709867X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
A major new study of Jeremy Bentham's engagement with contemporary French culture, from the Enlightenment through to the post-Revolutionary era.

Happiness and Utility

Happiness and Utility PDF Author: Georgios Varouxakis
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787350487
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Happiness and Utility brings together experts on utilitarianism to explore the concept of happiness within the utilitarian tradition, situating it in earlier eighteenth-century thinkers and working through some of its developments at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of philosophical and historical approaches to the study of the central idea of utilitarianism, the chapters provide a rich set of insights into a founding component of ethics and modern political and economic thought, as well as political and economic practice. In doing so, the chapters examine the multiple dimensions of utilitarianism and the contested interpretations of this standard for judgement in morality and public policy.

Artisanal Enlightenment

Artisanal Enlightenment PDF Author: Paola Bertucci
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300231628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
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.

Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment

Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Niall O'Flaherty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Studies the influential tradition of 'theological utilitarianism' in the eighteenth century through the lens of William Paley's life and thought.

Androids in the Enlightenment

Androids in the Enlightenment PDF Author: Adelheid Voskuhl
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603402X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized. In Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders PDF Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
"The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.

God in the Enlightenment

God in the Enlightenment PDF Author: William J. Bulman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190267097
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.

Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment

Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment PDF Author: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754663706
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
The essays in this volume consider the interplay of science and spectacle in eighteenth-century Europe, describing the variety of public demonstrations of science in sites ranging from academies and laboratories to shops and streets.

The Virtues of Abandon

The Virtues of Abandon PDF Author: Charly Coleman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080479121X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
France in the eighteenth century glittered, but also seethed, with new goods and new ideas. In the halls of Versailles, the streets of Paris, and the soul of the Enlightenment itself, a vitriolic struggle was being waged over the question of ownership—of property, of position, even of personhood. Those who championed man's possession of material, spiritual, and existential goods faced the successive assaults of radical Christian mystics, philosophical materialists, and political revolutionaries. The Virtues of Abandon traces the aims and activities of these three seemingly disparate groups, and the current of anti-individualism that permeated theology, philosophy, and politics throughout the period. Fired by the desire to abandon the self, men and women sought new ways to relate to God, nature, and nation. They joined illicit mystic cults that engaged in rituals of physical mortification and sexual license, committed suicides in the throes of materialist fatalism, drank potions to induce consciousness-altering dreams, railed against the degrading effects of unfettered consumption, and ultimately renounced the feudal privileges that had for centuries defined their social existence. The explosive denouement was the French Revolution, during which God and king were toppled from their thrones.

The Tyranny of Utility

The Tyranny of Utility PDF Author: Gilles Saint-Paul
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691128170
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Political organization and the conception of man -- The challenge to the unitary individual in Western thought -- Economics: the last bastion of rationality -- Economics goes behavioral -- From utility to happiness -- Post-utilitarianism : searching for a collective soul in the behavioral era -- The policy prescriptions of behavioral economics -- The modern paternalistic state -- Responsibility transfer -- The role of science -- Markets in a paternalistic world -- Where to go?