Author: John Nicholas Pappas Publisher: ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.
Author: Jack Censer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134861591 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
First Published in 2004. The ideas of the Enlightenment and belligerent royal officials critically influenced the French Revolution, but how did an entire generation learn about such ideas prior to the Revolution? Jack R. Censer’s achievement in this volume is to marshal a vast literature in order to provide a coherent and original interpretation of the role of the French Press in the dissemination of social and political ideas in the years leading up to the Revolution. Censer also explores the relationship between journalists and government officials and unearths a range of sophisticated censorship techniques employed by the government to keep Bad News off the front pages. In a field dominated by specialized studies but few generalizations, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment provides a bold synthesis regarding the periodical press from mid-century to the Revolution.
Author: Kathleen Anne Wellman Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
Julien Offray de la Mettrie, best known as the author of L'Homme machine, appears as a minor character in most accounts of the Enlightenment. But in this intellectual biography by Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie--physician-philosophe--emerges as a central figure whose medical approach to philosophical and moral issues had a profound influence on the period and its legacy. Wellman's study presents La Mettrie as an advocate of progressive medical theory and practice who consistently applied his medical concerns to the reform of philosophy, morals, and society. By examining his training with the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave, his satires lampooning the ignorance and venality of the medical profession, and his medical treatises on subjects ranging from vertigo to veneral disease, Wellman illuminates the medical roots of La Mettrie's philosophy. She shows how medicine encouraged La Mettrie to undertake an impiricist critique of the philosophical tradition and provided the foundation for a medical materialism that both shaped his understanding of the possibilities of moral and social reform and led him to espouse the cause of the philosophers. Elucidating the medical view of nature, human beings, and society that the Enlightenment and La Mettrie in particular bequethed to the modern world, La Mettrie makes an important contribution to our understanding of both that period and our own.
Author: J.Q.C. Mackrell Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135031983 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 227
Book Description
First published in 2006. Feudalism is normally associated with eighteenth-century France only in its more bizarre survivals, as in The Marriage of Figaro, when his seigneur claims the rights to spend the first night with the bride. If feudalism menat no more in the eighteenth century than a few quaint customs that could tickle an audence at the Comedie Francaise, why did French writers attack it so furiously? The author suggests that contemporary writers saw remnants of the feudal regime as important less in themselves, than as symbols of an attitude of mind which the 'enlightened' among them would no longer tolerate. Instead of representing the ideas of the eighteenth century through the eyes of a few outstanding writers, Dr Mackrell has tried to reconstitute the intellectual climate of the ancien regime from the works of largely unknown historians, jurists, economists and others. In this way he illuminates the rich texture of eighteenth-century French thought, without which the ideas of Voltaire, Montesquieu and even Rousseau lose much of their meaning. This study breathes life into the fierce controversies that shook the Age of Reason long before the outbreak of Revolution.
Author: Peter Gay Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 030783137X Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 702
Book Description
The eighteenth century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.
Author: James A. Steintrager Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 9780253343673 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Cruel Investigation investigates the fascination with joyful malice in 18th-century Europe and how this obsession helped inform the very meaning of humanity. James A. Steintrager reveals how the understanding of cruelty moved from an inexplicable, apparently paradoxical "inhuman" pleasure in the misfortune of others to an eminently human trait stemming from will and freedom
Author: Ines G. Zupanov Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190924985 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 1153
Book Description
Through its missionary, pedagogical, and scientific accomplishments, the Society of Jesus-known as the Jesuits-became one of the first institutions with a truly "global" reach, in practice and intention. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits offers a critical assessment of the Order, helping to chart new directions for research at a time when there is renewed interest in Jesuit studies. In particular, the Handbook examines their resilient dynamism and innovative spirit, grounded in Catholic theology and Christian spirituality, but also profoundly rooted in society and cultural institutions. It also explores Jesuit contributions to education, the arts, politics, and theology, among others. The volume is organized in seven major sections, totaling forty articles, on the Order's foundation and administration, the theological underpinnings of its activities, the Jesuit involvement with secular culture, missiology, the Order's contributions to the arts and sciences, the suppression the Order endured in the 18th century, and finally, the restoration. The volume also looks at the way the Jesuit Order is changing, including becoming more non-European and ethnically diverse, with its members increasingly interested in engaging society in addition to traditional pastoral duties.
Author: Peter Prange Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451617887 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
In 1747 Paris, Sophie falls in love with married philosopher Denis Diderot, who is collaborating with authors to create an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, a project that threatens to undermine both the monarchy and the church--as well as Sophie?s right to freedom, love, and happiness.
Author: J.B. Shank Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226749479 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 590
Book Description
Nothing is considered more natural than the connection between Isaac Newton’s science and the modernity that came into being during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Terms like “Newtonianism” are routinely taken as synonyms for “Enlightenment” and “modern” thought, yet the particular conjunction of these terms has a history full of accidents and contingencies. Modern physics, for example, was not the determined result of the rational unfolding of Newton’s scientific work in the eighteenth century, nor was the Enlightenment the natural and inevitable consequence of Newton’s eighteenth-century reception. Each of these outcomes, in fact, was a contingent event produced by the particular historical developments of the early eighteenth century. A comprehensive study of public culture, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment digsbelow the surface of the commonplace narratives that link Newton with Enlightenment thought to examine the actual historical changes that brought them together in eighteenth-century time and space. Drawing on the full range of early modern scientific sources, from studied scientific treatises and academic papers to book reviews, commentaries, and private correspondence, J. B. Shank challenges the widely accepted claim that Isaac Newton’s solitary genius is the reason for his iconic status as the father of modern physics and the philosophemovement.
Author: William J. Bulman Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190602104 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 337
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.
Author: John Nicholas Pappas
Author: Jack Censer
Author: Kathleen Anne Wellman
Author: J.Q.C. Mackrell
Author: Peter Gay
Author: James A. Steintrager
Author: Ines G. Zupanov
Author: Peter Prange
Author: J.B. Shank
Author: William J. Bulman