ABSTRACTThis article examines a translation of the Scottish historian William Robertson’s probably most famous text in the journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the 1830s, as a case study on continuity between the Enlightenment and the era of liberal reform in Central Europe. It underlines the benefits of the comparative study of Scotland in Robertson’s time and Hungary in the Reform Age as partners in composite polities at the opposite ends of Europe, where patriotic projects of (...) overcoming limitations of political sovereignty via cultural and economic improvement were pursued. The belated reception of Robertson in Hungary took place within a larger initiative of progress and refinement, associated with the liberal Count István Széchenyi, in an environment where many potential sympathizers with his programme were ambivalent about the values of cosmopolitanism and commerce promoted by Robertson, indebted as they remained to more archaic modes of patriotism. In view of the peculiarities of translation, and selection the Hungarian rendering of the View of the Progress was attuned to the sentiments of this constituency, and may be interpreted as a set of discursive gestures aimed at conquering it for the cause of ‘liberalism as refinement.’. (shrink)

This article investigates the translations of radical texts in Hungary in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It offers a survey of French political texts rendered into Latin and Hungarian, and follows the historic exploration through discussing the work of three Hungarian Jacobins put to trial for their participation in the Hungarian Jacobin movement: János Laczkovics, Ferenc Szentmarjay, and Ferenc Verseghy. It argues that their work as translators went hand in hand with their political activism. Through mapping out (...) the use of the local vernacular and the political language of Latin in the process, it calls for developing new trends in research in historical transnationalism and multilingualism in the field of textual production. (shrink)

Nurse Timea Faludi was taken into custody in Hungary in 2001, after confessing to administering lethal doses of drugs to seriously ill elderly patients between May 2000 and February 2001. On 2 December 2002, the Court of First Instance found the nurse guilty on several counts of attempted homicide and of wilfully endangering four persons’ lives in her professional capacity. This article discusses unethical and illegal acts in Hungary.

The paper presents the state of the art of business ethics teaching, research, and training in Hungary. It reviews the most important publications by Hungarian authors on business ethics issues since 2011. It identifies the most striking business ethics related problems in Hungary. It maps the important activities, topics and issues in business ethics teaching and research in Hungary and reports on the themes in training on business ethics. Also, the paper reflects on the main business ethics (...) related issues that Hungary faces in the future including restoring democratic institutions and the rule of law, reforming the tax system, managing the energy transition, and financing sustainability transformations. The paper concludes that business ethics can be considered as a well-developed discipline in Hungary. However, the impact of business ethics on the current economic, social and political affairs in Hungary should be increased which requires using creative strategies in knowledge dissemination and knowledge creation. (shrink)

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the complete demolition of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. The Radical Enlightenment played a part in this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions (...) of the eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have received limited scholarly attention. The greatest obstacle to the movement finding its proper place in modern historical writing is its international scope: the Racial Enlightenment was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this wide-ranging volume, Jonathan Israel offers a novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents. Particular emphasis is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

That the Enlightenment shaped modernity is uncontested. Yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel now does. In Democratic Enlightenment , Israel demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. The American Revolution and its concerns certainly acted as a major factor in the intellectual ferment (...) that shaped the wider upheaval that followed, but the radical philosophes were no less critical than enthusiastic about the American model. From 1789, the General Revolution's impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires , men such as Mirabeau, Sieyes, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and Brissot. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National assembly, they nonetheless forged " la philosophie moderne "--in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas--into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America, Canada and eastern Europe as well as France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. In addition, Israel argues that while all French revolutionary journals powerfully affirmed that la philosophie moderne was the main cause of the French Revolution, the main stream of historical thought has failed to grasp what this implies. Israel sets the record straight, demonstrating the true nature of the engine that drove the Revolution, and the intimate links between the radical wing of the Enlightenment and the anti-Robespierriste "Revolution of reason." Acclaim for earlier volumes in the trilogy: "His vast--and vastly impressive--book sets out to redefine the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. Magnificent and magisterialwill undoubtedly be one of the truly great historical works of the decade." -- Sunday Telegraph "The scholarship is breathtaking. Israel has read everything, absorbed every nuance, followed up every byway." -- New Statesman "An enormously impressive piece of scholarship. The breadth and depth of the author's reading are breathtaking and Enlightenment Contested is set to become the definitive work for philosophers as well as historians on this extraordinary period." -- Tribune. (shrink)

Kant believed that true enlightenment is the use of reason freely in public. This book systematicaaly traces the philosophical origins and development of the idea that the improvement of human understanding requires public activity. Michael Losonsky focuses on seventeenth-century discussions of the problem of irresolution and the closely connected theme of the role of volition in human belief formation. This involves a discussion of the work of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz. Challenging the traditional views of seventeenth-century philosophy (...) and written in a lucid, non-technical language, this book will be eagerly sought out by historians of philosophy and students of the history of ideas. (shrink)

This article examines and compares Adam Ferguson's and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's analyses of modern commercial states by reconstructing their accounts of the history and politics of the Dutch Republic. For both writers, the Dutch case stood as a clear instance of the political dangers implicit in a particular type of commercial polity, and both sought to apply its lessons to an understanding of the future of their own states. Although Ferguson's and Raynal's arguments about the decline of the Dutch trading state (...) overlapped, their analyses reflected different evaluations of the relationship between modern states and modern economic institutions (trading companies and public debts). The broader purpose of the article is to shed light on the distinctive theories of commerce and models of European development that informed the major works of Enlightenment historiography and political thought produced by Ferguson and Raynal in the 1760s and 1770s. (shrink)

There are two approaches to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956: to view it as a national or as a social affair; a fight for national independence or for a revolutionary transformation of society. The two approaches can be collapsed into a comprehensive one in the name of autonomy, and this is what Feher and Heller did, remaining mindful, however, of the two major and irreducible aspects of the actual events and their motivating forces. Their main argument is threefold. The people (...) in revolt wanted to establish a “dual system” of a socialist economy and a political pluralism; they wanted a renegotiation of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements; and in the course of the revolution they achieved a national consensus that could actively negotiate a compromise implied by both major aims. (shrink)

The central thesis defended here is that modernity can best be understood as a struggle between two main traditions of thought: the Radical or “True” Enlightenment celebrating the world and life as creative and promoting the freedom of people to control their own destinies, and the Moderate or “Fake” Enlightenment which developed to oppose the democratic republicanism and nature enthusiasm of the Radical Enlightenment. While the Radical Enlightenment has promoted democracy, the central concern of the Moderate (...) Enlightenment has been to promote “possessive individualism” and the control of nature and people by discovering their laws of behaviour. While it has on occasion promoted religious tolerance and freedom of expression, the greater concern of the Moderate Enlightenment has always been defence of property rights and the power of those with property. It is argued here that process philosophy is the highest development of the philosophy of the Radical Enlightenment and needs to be appreciated as such if the Radical Enlightenment is to be revived and process philosophy advanced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions in (...) Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

Hungarian-born Stefan Lorant's work as a visual and literary editor allowed him to pioneer and develop the genré of picture-based journalism at a period that saw the emergence of modern mass communications. Lorant became a guiding force on an international scale, disseminating his ideas and political knowledge throughout Europe in the late-twenties and thirties by working in Hungary, Germany, and England. His innovative layouts, his "exclusive" interviews and his thirst for knowledge became a familiar part of millions of everyday (...) lives, largely through the pages of his own creations and in particular the legendary Picture Post. Eventually his sphere of influence spread to America where he introduced the concept of the pictorial biography. His vision of photography as a documentary medium inspired Life and Look magazines and paved the way for the eventual emergence of the television documentary. For this he has become recognized as "the godfather" of photojournalism. Lorant's work enlightened the world - yet his own world was shrouded with darkness. His secret past, hidden throughout his lifetime, reveals the changing attitude of sexual politics as it evolved throughout the century. His serial womanizing and scandalous love affairs provide insight into the unhappy alliance between his sexual fulfillment and intellectual frustration, his searching in others for what he could not find within himself. Michael Hallett first interviewed Stefan Lorant in late 1990 and spent the following years researching and interviewing his subject. Hallett examines Lorant's public image, his huge ego, his manipulative nature, and his devious love of subterfuge and confusion. Hallett also reveals Lorant's warmth, his generosity, his callousness, his passions and his extraordinary humanity. This biography encompasses the 20th century, while focusing on the emergence of modern mass communications throughout Europe and the United States. Additionally there is a small but key section that highlights Lorant's pl. (shrink)

In this magisterial survey of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel returns to the primary texts to offer a major new reinterpretation of the nature and development of the important currents in philosophical thinking, arguing that supposed national enlightenments are of less significance than the rift between conservative and radical thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:482 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY disorder was reLigious men's tendency to find in the Scriptures and their consciences justifications for rebelling against their sovereign. The last half of Leviathan is designed to refute these claims in detail, and this refutation is not merely tacked onto the first parts but is a logical extension of them. The argument for escaping the state of nature is that only through obedience to a (...) common power can man escape the likelihood of an early death. Once that common power is established, and so long as it can carry out its protective function, obedience to it is obligatory. When a man enters civil society, the only right he retains is to defend himself against physical death, and consequently, the only time he is entitled to disobey the sovereign is when the sovereign directly threatens him. Thus excuses for rebellion are reduced to an absolute minimum. In McNeiily's formalization however, the concept of a man's death must be replaced by the formal concept of the frustration of all one's desires. And so "whatevvr [a man] regards as the complete frustration of all his desires... he will be entitled to resist, even if such resistance puts him at war with others, including lawful authority" (p. 193). Now the incredible range of things men have believed essential to avoiding the frustration of all their desires is amply testified to in the history of religious warfare. And clearly, under this formalized interpretation, men would be entitled to rebel over the form of baptism, church government, ministerial costume, prayer, or anything else if they are convinced it is essential to their salvation. It takes little knowledge of history to see that Hobbes's espousing of a theory with such consequences has a low degree of probability indeed. Hobbes complains in Leviathan of Scriptural exegetes who "by casting atoms of Scripture, as dust before men's eyes, make everything more obscure than it is." Rather, he claims, it is "not bare words, but the scope of the writer, that giveth the true light by which any writing is to be interpreted; and they that insist upon single texts, without considering the main design, can derive nothing from them clearly'" (E. W., III, 602). This last would be too harsh to apply to McNeiity's work generally, for his "atoms" are for the most part of considerable worth in themselves. But with regard to our understanding of Hobbes's Leviathan he raises a lot of dust. PAUL J. JOHNSON CalifornM State College, San Bernardino The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. By Peter Gay. VoL I, The Rise ol Modern Paganism. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. Pp. xviii+SSS+xv); VoL II, The Science ot Freedom. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Pp. xx+70S+xviii) Le grand int~rSt port~ aux ~tudcs du xvm* si~cle au cours des deux derni~res d6cades et la remise en question des principes critiques encore en vigueur it y a une dizaine d'ann~,s ont fray~ la voie h de nouveaux efforts de synth~se dent la derni~re en date, et non la moins int~ressante, est celle de Peter Gay. Ses deux substantiels volumes sent destines ~ servir de guides ~ une nouvelle g~n~ration d'~tudiants et de chercheurs, ne ffit-ce que pour la bibliographie tr~s d6taill~e et accompagn~ d'obserrations personneUes qui forme un supplement tr~s pr6cieux ~ la Bibliographie de D. C. Cabeen de 1951 et de 1968. Lo travail de Peter Gay inspire confianc~ par BOOK REVIEWS 483 Fampleur des lectures auxquelles il s'est astreint et. (shrink)

The Enlightenment is commonly held accountable for the rise of both racial classification and modern scientific racism. Yet this argument sits uneasily alongside the birth of a modern rights language and strong anticolonial perspectives within the same intellectual movement. This article seeks to make sense of this paradox by arguing that one of the contexts in which we can best understand eighteenth-century race concepts is humanity’s place in a transformed history of nature that brought together novel understandings of deep (...) time and a materialist view of reproduction. Analysing the thought of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and Denis Diderot, the article demonstrates that the waning of both the authority of biblical genealogies and ancient environmentalist explanations of human physical diversity left a lacuna in the eighteenth-century human sciences. Buffon and Diderot’s “races” of humanity are not fixed entities, but rather exist in the flux of time. New understandings of heredity and reproduction combined with a time revolution led these Enlightenment thinkers to reconceive humanity’s place in the natural world. The article suggests that while “race” is a biologically incoherent concept, two elements of these Enlightenment thinkers’ anthropology – a materialist understanding of reproduction and humanity’s place in deep time – remain central to how we understand human diversity. (shrink)

All humanities, sociology included, are meeting places of stories told about stories. This circumstance casts humanities in a situation radically and irretrievably different from that of `hard sciences', which cast their objects as nature. Through most of its history sociology was oriented towards collectively produced and maintained order: its task was to enlighten the legislators and supervisors of order. With the substitution of life-politics for Politics with a capital `P', deregulation and privatization of ordering activity, enlightenment of autonomous subjects (...) moves to the centre of sociological vocation. (shrink)

What is the Enlightenment? A period rich with debates on the nature of man, truth and the place of God, with the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. But did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans? In this fourth edition of her acclaimed book, Dorinda Outram addresses these and other questions about the Enlightenment and its place at the foundation of modernity. Studied as a global (...) phenomenon, Outram sets the period against broader social changes, touching on how historical interpretations of the Enlightenment continue to transform in response to contemporary socio-economic trends. Supported by a wide-ranging selection of documents online, this new edition provides an up-to-date overview of the main themes of the period and benefits from an expanded treatment of political economy and imperialism, making it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century history and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper provides a defense of the ethical/political dimensions of Kant’s liberalism by gauging the strength of the critique of one of its most acerbic contemporary critics, Richard Rorty. Rorty’s dissatisfaction with Kant’s position can be traced back to a narrative of the coming to age of our culture, which bears surprising similarities to Kant’s account of the Enlightenment. Yet, in Rorty’s version of the story, Kant’s philosophy is mistakenly assimilated to a form of “Platonism.” This is due, I (...) argue, to the fact that Rorty confuses the “transcendental” with the “transcendent” in Kant. To set the score straight, I present a “de-Platonized” reading of Kant’s 1784 Enlightenment essay, whose goal is to protect the achievements of liberalism against Rorty’s poetic excesses. (shrink)

“Enlightenment and the Practice of Meditative Reading” examines the practices of reading and the critiques of reading that were common in the first few centuries of Chinese Chan Buddhist monasticism. Although interpreters frequently conclude that reading ceased to be a central practice in the institutions of Chan, classical texts show that, reading and writing were just as central to Chan practice as they had been in earlier forms of Chinese Buddhism. Because China’s culture of literacy inevitably extended into Chan (...) practice, a highly unusual and sophisticated theory of reading developed, while practices of reading aimed at enlightenment thrived. This historical realization raises questions about the relation between practices of meditation and reading, suggesting that our own practice of reading might be developed and deepened by learning to conceive of it as a form of meditative practice. (shrink)

The subject of the paper is the crisis of the concept of enlightenment examined at three levels: polemic-rhetorical, historical-descriptive, and philosophical-normative. The author argues that the inconsistency of substantive definitions of enlightenment does not necessarily result in rejection of this concept but rather in its continuous transformation. By way of conclusion, the author stresses that the normative revival of the concept of enlightenment may be rendered more viable by making a distinction between Enlightenment, as a particular (...) historical period and intellectual legacy, and enlightenment, as a continuous process. He argues that the former is not the only possible form of the latter, but just one of its historical manifestations and one among many agents in the complex and uncertain history of modern process of enlightening. (shrink)

Interpreting the Enlightenment: on methods -- A map of the Enlightenment: whither France? -- The spirit of the moderns: from the new science to the Enlightenment -- Society, the subject of the modern story -- Quarrel in the Academy: the ancients strike back -- Humanism and Enlightenment: the classical style of the philosophes -- The philosophical spirit of the laws: politics and antiquity -- An ancient god: pagans and philosophers -- Post tenebras lux: Begriffsgeschichte or regime (...) d'historicité? -- Ancients and the Orient: translatio imperii -- Enlightened institutions (i): the royal academies versus the Republic of Letters -- Enlightened institutions (ii): universities, censorship, and public instruction -- Worldliness, politeness, and the importance of not being too radical -- From Enlightenment to Revolution: a shared history? -- France and the European Enlightenment -- Modern myths. (shrink)

This article opens a cycle of articles devoted to the ontological aspects of the phenomenon of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is treated as an internal mechanism of civilization designed to manipulate being (establishment in being – deprivation or attenuation of being). Comparing autochthonous and borrowed Enlightenments, the author tries to trace some patterns of interactions of ontologizing mechanisms of the enlightenmental type and to compare them with the similar mechanisms of different types. In the first article the author analyses (...) the ideas of autochthonous European Enlightenment from Antiquity to Post-Modern. (shrink)

This article examines the emerging pattern of 19th-century warfare against the backdrop of Modernity’s expressed optimism regarding social and economic progress. The author argues that in the modern period western countries have been insufficiently conscious of the consequences of weapons of mass destruction and of their own involvement in acts of mass violence. The article identifies a modernist culture radically different from that articulated by Enlightenment narratives.

The Enlightenment is generally painted as a movement of ideas and society lasting from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, but this book argues that the Enlightenment is an essential component of modernity itself and in fact can be seen to have lasted from the late sixteenth century to the present day. In the course of the study, Martin Davies offers an original world-view and a critique of some recent interpretations of the Enlightenment.

Rethinking the Enlightenment connects new work in intellectual history with fresh understandings of Continental philosophy and political theory. The collection bridges the disciplinary divides between the Enlightenment as understood in history, philosophy, and politics and moves towards a critical self-understanding of the present.

Issues relating to diversity and pluralism continue to permeate both social and political discourse. Of particular contemporary importance and relevance are those issues raised when the demands associated with forms of pluralism clash with those of the liberal state. These forms of pluralism can be divided into two subcategories: thin and thick pluralism. Thin pluralism refers to forms of pluralism that can be accommodated by the existing liberal framework, whereas thick pluralism challenges this liberal framework. -/- This thesis is an (...) examination of four forms of political association that may be able to accommodate and support the demands of pluralism. These four models are Rawls’ political liberalism, Crowder’s value pluralism, Rorty’s post-foundational liberalism, and Mouffe’s radical democratic project. What unites these four forms of political association is their capacity to avoid the exclusionary effects of a form of liberalism that I, following Gaus, refer to as Enlightenment liberalism. As the name suggests, this conception of liberalism is anchored in the Enlightenment, and in particular with what may be considered as the Enlightenment view of reason. As such, therefore, Enlightenment liberalism is both universal and perfectionist. In this context, I argue that Enlightenment liberalism is a species of what Berlin refers to as ‘moral monism’. -/- These four forms of political association are ordered in such a way as to chart an intellectual trajectory. Rawls and Crowder are both situated firmly within the liberal tradition, whereas Rorty and Mouffe move beyond this, and embrace a form of post-foundational politics. It is in this trajectory that the second theme of this thesis emerges. This is centred on a paradox: in order to avoid the exclusionary effect of Enlightenment liberalism and embrace a form of political association that meets the demands of pluralism and diversity, the models examined still promote autonomy as the dominant virtue. (shrink)

This article argues that the figure of Oedipus lies at the heart of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Oedipus is the prototypical Aufklärer as no one can rival him in his courageous attempt to employ his own autonomous reason `without direction from another'; yet self-knowledge remains beyond his grasp. Indeed, Oedipus' obsessive drive to bring the truth to light ultimately leads him to put out his own eyes because he is unable to bear the sight of the catastrophe (...) that this drive engenders. Oedipus' demise represents in allegorical form the self-destruction of enlightenment itself. Enlightenment is similarly driven to illuminate the world in its totality by reducing it to philosophical concepts. In the process, however, it becomes blind to the question of its dependence upon that which it purports to possess. In its attempt at total illumination, therefore, enlightenment does not effectuate an exit or Ausgang from the opacity of myth, as Kant had held, but rather is blinded, paradoxically, by the radiance of its own projections. Reading the dialectic of enlightenment through the tragedy of Oedipus leads back to the enigmatic question of art as the means by which the rationalization and disenchantment of the world can be reflected upon critically. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: From Modernity to Enlightenment: The Historical Emergence of Liberalism A Genealogy of Race and its Intersections with Early Expressions of Liberalism Contemporary Egalitarian Liberalism and the Marginalization of Race The New Enlightenment: Race Consciousness in the Service of Social Justice Notes Bibliography.

An important reassessment of the afterlife of the Enlightenment and its continuing relevance in twenty-first century France.

For different reasons, and with different political goals at stake, the fundamental principles advocated by the Enlightenment are being challenged by both the left and the right. This entry sets out to clear a critical space for examining what is at stake in the present in interrogating its legacy as discourse for imagining alternative transmodern and transcolonial futures. A re-evaluation of the Enlightenment by reference to concepts of equality, liberty, emancipation, justice and becoming(s) is central to that task.

Introduction to the American edition -- Prologue : the political meaning of the Enlightenment -- The long road to Enlightenment -- The formation of modern Greek historical consciousness -- The geography of civilization : from adulation to revolution -- Enlightened absolutism as a path to change -- Ancients and moderns : cultural criticism and the origins of republicanism -- The revolution in France: the glow and the shadow -- The Enlightenment's political alternative -- The Enlightenment as (...) social criticism -- The republican synthesis : a matrix for nationalism -- The fate of the enlightenment -- Epilogue : the conditions of liberal politics. (shrink)

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 philosophy and 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, substituting the 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 studied doubtless 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 in modern 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 role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

To date no comprehensive treatment of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism has yet appeared. However, we are beginning to see the regular publication of more specialised studies, and Frederick Whelan’s interesting book is a noteworthy entry in this genre.

“Enlightenment and the Experience of Karma” analyzes this traditional Indian and Buddhist moral/ethical concept in order to assess the role that it might play in a contemporary culture of enlightenment. Elucidating five dimensions of this moral principle where questions can be raised by means of critical inquiry, the chapter strives to articulate a naturalized conception of karma that could conceivably play an important role in future global society. In order to do that, it reflects on the traditional connection (...) between karma as a moral principle and rebirth as a religious concept and asks what it might mean to develop a karma-based morality without a necessary link to any traditional understanding of afterlife. The chapter aspires to develop elements implicit in the traditional Indian idea of karma that could provide a basic structure for the human moral practice that is essential to any society and any quest for enlightenment. (shrink)

This chapter examines the consequences of Nietzsche's campaign against morality for the pursuit of knowledge in philosophy, and specifically, on values and methods of the German Enlightenment. In Dawn, Nietzsche explores how an experimental approach to knowing and to knowledge involves us in adopting different ways of being toward things in the world, as well as toward ourselves and our experiences, and in using associated diverse methods of inquiry. Nietzsche's free‐spirit writings, including Dawn, are works of a particular kind (...) of enlightenment project that works against all expressions of fanaticism, especially religious and moral, and in an effort to temper emotional and mental excess. Nietzsche's primary commitment in Dawn is to experimentation in which the love of, or passion for, knowledge gives humanity back its right to engage in self‐experimentation. (shrink)

Popper first developed his theory of scientific method – falsificationism – in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, then generalized it to form critical rationalism, which he subsequently applied to social and political problems in The Open Society and Its Enemies. All this can be regarded as constituting a major development of the 18th century Enlightenment programme of learning from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards a better world. Falsificationism is, however, defective. It misrepresents the real, problematic (...) aims of science. We need a new conception of scientific method, a meta-methodology which provides a framework for the improvement of the aims and methods of science as scientific knowledge improves. This aim-oriented empiricist idea can be generalized to form a conception of rationality – aim-oriented rationality – which helps us improve problematic aims and methods whatever we may be doing. In this way, Popper’s version of the Enlightenment programme can be much improved, indeed transformed. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to describe how far democracy has developed in Hungary since 1989. It takes an inventory of those factors that have been described by political scientists as essential criteria for a working democracy and considers how far these criteria have been satisfied in Hungary up to now. It concludes that every democracy in the world must struggle with deficiencies, every society must incessantly work to solve the emerging problems and to rearrange the pieces of (...) the 'democratic puzzle'. This is especially true of those East Central European countries that have emerged from 40 years of authoritarian rule. (shrink)

The West has long had an ambivalent attitude toward the philosophical traditions of the East. Voltaire claimed that the East is the civilization "to which the West owes everything", yet C.S. Peirce was contemptuous of the "monstrous mysticism of the East". And despite the current trend toward globalizations, there is still a reluctance to take seriously the intellectual inheritance of South and East Asia. Oriental Enlightenment challenges this Eurocentric prejudice. J. J. Clarke examines the role played by the ideas (...) of Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism in the intellectual life of the West and how these ideas, far more than exotic distractions, or even instruments of colonial domination, have been the means towards serious self-questioning and self-renewal, used to dispute and even to undermine Western orthodoxies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Central to the United Nations Framework setting out the human rights responsibilities of corporations proposed by John Ruggie is the principle that corporations have a responsibility to respect human rights in their operations whether or not doing so is required by law and whether or not human rights laws are actively enforced. Ruggie proposes that corporations should respect this principle in their strategic management and day-to-day operations for reasons of corporate (enlightened) self-interest. This paper identifies this as a serious weakness (...) and argues that identifying the responsibility to respect human rights as an explicitly ethical obligation to be respected for that reason would provide a much stronger justificatory foundation for respecting the principle seen from a corporate perspective, given that corporations are accountable to their shareholders for their deployment of the firm’s financial resources. (shrink)

What was the Enlightenment? This question has been endlessly debated. In this book, historian Matthew Kadane advances the bold claim that Enlightenment is best defined through what it set out to accomplish, which was nothing short of rethinking the meaning of human nature. Kadane argues that this project centered around the doctrine of original sin and, ultimately, its rejection, signaling the radical notion that an inherently flawed nature can be overcome by human means. Kadane explores these ambitious, wide-ranging (...) themes through the story of the largely unknown Pentecost Barker, an eighteenth-century "purser" and wine merchant. Examining Barker's diary and correspondence with a Unitarian minister, Kadane tracks the transformation of Barker's consciousness from a Puritan to an Enlightenment outlook. In one man's conversion, Kadane tracks large-scale shifts in self-understanding whose philosophical reverberations would (and have continued to) shape debates on human nature for centuries to come. (shrink)