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Author: Ernst Cassirer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069114334X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
In this classic work of intellectual history, Ernst Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment. Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved. In a new foreword, Peter Gay considers The Philosophy of the Enlightenment in the context in which it was written--Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. He also argues that Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century.
Author: Ernst Cassirer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069114334X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
In this classic work of intellectual history, Ernst Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment. Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved. In a new foreword, Peter Gay considers The Philosophy of the Enlightenment in the context in which it was written--Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. He also argues that Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century.
Author: Lucien Goldmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136989633
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 73
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Book Description
In this reissue, originally published in English in 1973, French philosopher Lucien Goldmann turns his attention to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the great age of liberalism and individualism and analyses the ‘mental structures’ of the outlook of the philosophes, who showed that the ancien regime and the privileges of the Church were irrational anachronisms. In assessing the strengths and limitations of individualism, Goldmann considers the achievements and limitations of the Enlightenment. He discusses the views of Hegel and Marx and examines the relation between liberal scepticism and traditional Christianity to point the way to the possible reconciliation of the two seemingly incompatible ‘world visions’ of East and West today.
Author: John Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199591784
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jane O'Grady
Publisher: Knowledge in a Nutshell
ISBN: 9781788283724
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
"...there is nothing elementary about O'Grady's primer. She pulls off the feat of writing a reliable and accessible introduction to modern philosophy that is also a meaningful contribution to the subject." - London Times Literary Supplement From Descartes' famous line 'I think therefore I am' to Kant's fascinating discussions of morality, the thinkers of the Enlightenment have helped to shape the modern world. Addressing such important subjects as the foundations of knowledge and the role of ethics, the theories of these philosophers continue to have great relevance to our lives. Ranging across Enlightenment thinking from Berkeley to Rousseau, Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell explains important ideas such as Locke's ideas of primary and secondary qualities, Kant's moral rationalism, and Hume's inductive reasoning. Filled with helpful diagrams and simple summaries of complex theories, this essential introduction brings the great ideas of the past to everyone.
Author: Anthony Gottlieb
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 163149208X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Anthony Gottlieb’s landmark The Dream of Reason and its sequel challenge Bertrand Russell’s classic as the definitive history of Western philosophy. Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb documented the first burst, which came in the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Now, in his sequel, The Dream of Enlightenment, Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short period—from the early 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution—Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and that of the birth of modern philosophy. As Gottlieb explains, all these men were amateurs: none had much to do with any university. They tried to fathom the implications of the new science and of religious upheaval, which led them to question traditional teachings and attitudes. What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and for our ideas of God? How should a government deal with religious diversity—and what, actually, is government for? Such questions remain our questions, which is why Descartes, Hobbes, and the others are still pondered today. Yet it is because we still want to hear them that we can easily get these philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think they speak our language and live in our world; but to understand them properly, we must step back into their shoes. Gottlieb puts readers in the minds of these frequently misinterpreted figures, elucidating the history of their times and the development of scientific ideas while engagingly explaining their arguments and assessing their legacy in lively prose. With chapters focusing on Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, and Voltaire—and many walk-on parts—The Dream of Enlightenment creates a sweeping account of what the Enlightenment amounted to, and why we are still in its debt.
Author: Peter Gilmour
Publisher: Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
This is the first clear and comprehensive introduction to the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Nine contemporary specialists lead the student gently through Enlightenment thought by looking at the lives and writings of individual philosophers, such as Liebniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Kant, Voltaire and Fourier. This is an introduction to a complex subject which should become recommended reading for students of philosophy from school to university level, as well as anyone interested in Enlightenment thought.
Author: Ritchie Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1008
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jason Porterfield
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 9781404204232
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
Presents the life of the French philosopher, discussing his literary and philosophical writings, his tumultuous relationships with some of the rulers and thinkers of his day, and his lasting influence on French culture.
Author: Michael Prince
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521550628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.
Author: Jonathan Irvine Israel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198206089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 848
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Book Description
Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophyand the philosophes, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In this revolutionary process which effectively overthrew all justicfication for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery, substitutingthe modern principles of equality, democracy, and universality, the Radical Enlightenment played a crucially important part. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have been astonishingly little studieddoubtless largely because of its very wide international sweep and the obvious difficulty of fitting in into the restrictive conventions of 'national history' which until recently tended to dominate all historiography. The greatest obstacle to the Radical Enlightenment finding its proper place inmodern historical writing is simply that it was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents, particular stress is placed on the pivotal roleof Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism.
