Author: Abraham Anderson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0585229910
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181
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Book Description
Including the first English edition of the Treatise of the Three Impostors since 1904, this book examines the treatise in its literary, political, and philosophical context.
Author: Spinoza
Publisher: Max Milo
ISBN: 2315010993
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 99
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Book Description
The Treatise on the Three Impostors was first published in 1712 under the title L'esprit de M. Benoît de Spinosa, preceded by a biography entitled La Vie de M. Benoît de Spinosa. These two works, of very dissimilar contents, have been brought together only by their common reference to Spinoza. Who is the author? This question has lost none of its relevance in three centuries. First of all, let us rule out the participation of Spinoza himself for chronological reasons, La vie de M. Benoît de Spinosa refers to events after the philosopher's death in 1677, such as the presence of the Prince of Condé in Utrecht, "at the beginning of the last wars" in 1678. In his Dictionnaire Historique, published in The Hague in 1758, Prosper Marchand concluded that the author of L'esprit de M. Benoît de Spinosa was a certain Jan Vroesen. Marchand was a scholar, editor, bibliographer, bookseller and writer, and one of the most knowledgeable figures on the movement of ideas and authors in Northern Europe. If we confine ourselves to this information, however, we might be embarrassed. Indeed, if he is indeed the complete and only author of L'esprit de M. Benoît de Spinosa, Vroesen must have been a very precocious man, since around 1687, Vroesen was only fifteen or sixteen years old. Until the French Revolution, literate Europe was full of memoirs, hypotheses and questions about the real author of the Treatise of the Three Impostors. People even came to suspect Frederick II of Prussia, a notorious anticleric, of being its author. The only problem is that Frederick was born the same year that the Rotterdam edition was published. And Spinoza? This bibliographical and philosophical enigma of a book does not allow us to forget that it is a tribute to the great philosopher. His spirit floats, indeed, through these vigorous pages. Some authors even tend to believe today that the author of the Ethics is also the one who wrote this mysterious book. Certainly, several passages testify to a careful reading of Spinoza, such as the sixth chapter “On the Spirits called Demons,” which comes straight out of the Short Treatise, or the first two chapters on the popular conception of God, which are borrowed from the same work. Specialists will be happy to find other borrowings. But the virulent disdain for the Old and New Testaments, for example, which is evident in many passages of the Treatise, does not fit Spinoza's ideas or tone at all, nor does the irreverent atheism. Could it be that Levier, the first editor of the Treatise, and the mysterious Vroesen extracted from the Spinozian archives in Holland, "probably from the Rieuwerts collection," notes the critical edition of the Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, a selection of texts that they transformed to their liking? This is, in the end, the hypothesis that seems most plausible. For despite the mysteries and manipulations, if not the forgeries, the shadow of Spinoza hangs over the enterprise and the text clearly comes from Holland. The hypothesis is reinforced by the publisher's brilliant desire to pay homage to Spinoza by publishing in the same volume The Life and Mind of M. Benoît de Spinosa. It is undoubtedly an exaggerated homage to the philosopher, awkwardly reinforced by the borrowings from Pierre Charron and Gabriel Naudé. It evokes those Rubens whose studio notebooks we know that the great painter only added a few touches here and there, but which he nevertheless signed. The result is that the Treatise of the Three Impostors appears as a collective anthology of the resistance to religion in the Europe of the Enlightenment. Spinoza is only the emblem, but he is nevertheless omnipresent.
Author: Catarina Belo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317176804
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Comparing Averroes’ and Hegel’s positions on the relation between philosophy and religion, this book explores the theme of the authorities of faith and reason, and the origin of truth, in a medieval Islamic and a modern Christian context respectively. Through an in-depth analysis of Averroes’ and Hegel’s parallel views on the nature of philosophical and religious discourse, Belo presents new insights into their perspectives on the relation between philosophical knowledge and religious knowledge, and the differences between philosophy and religion. In addition, Belo explores particular works which have not yet been studied by modern scholarship.
Author: Riccarda Suitner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004465030
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Starting from the little reliable information available, Riccarda Suitner conducts an exciting investigation of the authors, production, illustrations, circulation and plagiarism of a series of anonymous "dialogues of the dead" in the intellectual world of the early eighteenth century, proposing a new image of the German Enlightenment.
Author: John Tolan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186111
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Heretic and impostor or reformer and statesman? The contradictory Western visions of Muhammad In European culture, Muhammad has been vilified as a heretic, an impostor, and a pagan idol. But these aren’t the only images of the Prophet of Islam that emerge from Western history. Commentators have also portrayed Muhammad as a visionary reformer and an inspirational leader, statesman, and lawgiver. In Faces of Muhammad, John Tolan provides a comprehensive history of these changing, complex, and contradictory visions. Starting from the earliest calls to the faithful to join the Crusades against the “Saracens,” he traces the evolution of Western conceptions of Muhammad through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and up to the present day. Faces of Muhammad reveals a lengthy tradition of positive portrayals of Muhammad that many will find surprising. To Reformation polemicists, the spread of Islam attested to the corruption of the established Church, and prompted them to depict Muhammad as a champion of reform. In revolutionary England, writers on both sides of the conflict drew parallels between Muhammad and Oliver Cromwell, asking whether the prophet was a rebel against legitimate authority or the bringer of a new and just order. Voltaire first saw Muhammad as an archetypal religious fanatic but later claimed him as an enemy of superstition. To Napoleon, he was simply a role model: a brilliant general, orator, and leader. The book shows that Muhammad wears so many faces in the West because he has always acted as a mirror for its writers, their portrayals revealing more about their own concerns than the historical realities of the founder of Islam.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004402837
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1025
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Book Description
Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History Volume 13 (CMR 13) is a history of all works written on relations in the period 1700-1800 in Western Europe. Its detailed entries contain descriptions, assessments and comprehensive bibliographical details about individual works from this time.
Author: Gianni Paganini
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487530552
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
Clandestine philosophical manuscripts, made up of forbidden works including erotic texts, political pamphlets, satires of court life, forbidden religious texts, and books about the occult, had an avid readership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming objects of historical research by the twentieth century. The purveyors of the clandestine could be found in the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and not least in Paris or London. Despite the heavy risks, including prison, the circulation of these manuscripts was a prosperous venture. After Ira Wade’s pioneering contribution (1938), Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment. Topics from philosophy, political and religious thought, and moral and sexual behaviour are addressed by contemporary authors working in both America and Europe. These manuscripts shed light on the birth of pornography and provide an important avenue for investigating philosophical, religious, political, and social critique.
Author: Lynn Hunt
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 089236968X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
In an era of intense religious conflict in Europe and ongoing exploration of the lands beyond Europe, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-37) set a new agenda for thinking about faith and provided a lasting visual template for representing the world's religions. In the work's seven massive volumes, Jean Frederic Bernard and the renowned engraver Bernard Picart invited readers to view religions and their institutions as cultural practices. Bernard Picart and The First Global Vision of Religion approaches this much-cited but little-studied work from a variety of angles. Its fifteen scholarly essays examine Bernard and Picart's authorial and artistic strategies, the handling of religious difference in Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses, and the cultural context that fostered the creation of one of the most influential works of comparative religion ever published.
Author: Riccarda Suitner
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647500194
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
The Republic of Venice was the only Catholic territory in which an Anabaptist community formed in the 16th century. The history of Venetian Anabaptism, hitherto little known in Reformation Studies, is the focus of this book. Using a large quantity of archival material and rare printed sources Riccarda Suitner reconstructs the lives of the Republic's Anabaptists and the inquisitorial repression they suffered, and analyses the doctrinal specificities of the Radical Reformation in this area. This story represents a fundamental stage in the relations between German, central-European and Italian culture in the early modern period. Events in Venice are presented within a broader comparative framework, paying particular attention to the German states, Switzerland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, Moravia, Tyrol, and the Kingdom of Naples. It will emerge that its Venetian history cannot be ignored if we are to gain a true understanding of the European Reformation.
Author: Craig Koslofsky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521896436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
This illuminating guide to the night opens up an entirely new vista on early modern Europe. Using diaries, letters, legal records and representations of the night in early modern religion, literature and art, Craig Koslofsky explores the myriad ways in which early modern people understood, experienced and transformed the night.
