Dilemmas of Enlightenment

Dilemmas of Enlightenment
Author: Oscar Kenshur
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0520913469

Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory. While striving to resolve "dilemmas" occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls "intellectual co-optation." In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.

Dilemmas of Enlightenment

Dilemmas of Enlightenment
Author: Oscar Kenshur
Publisher: University of California Presson Demand
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1993
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780520081550

"A subtly telling blow to the old-timey distinction between philosophy and literature, a distinction that still persists in practice, despite many overly ideological campaigns to revise it. He, too, talks a lot about theory and ideology, but he shows in practice the wonderful complexities of the interplay of rhetoric and philosophy. Furthermore, he shows how this interplay helped to fabricate the many textures of eighteenth-century life. Kenshur's is the first comprehensive 'cultural history' that actually takes pleasure in the rich, interdisciplinary exchanges of the era."--Kevin L. Cope, author of "Criteria of Certainty" "This is an important book. It is provocative at many turns regarding the individual texts studied, and sees them in not simply untraditional but counter-traditional, yet quite well-substantiated, ways. The book may be still more important on account of its strong, reasoned, poised challenge to theoretical orthodoxies ranging from Foucault to New Historicism to Stanley Fish's idea of interpretive communities."--Frederick M. Keener, author of "The Chain of Becoming"

Tragedy and Enlightenment

Tragedy and Enlightenment
Author: Christopher Rocco
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0520331362

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment
Author: George Marsden
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014-02-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465069770

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular, liberal elites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course. Their failure lost them the faith of their constituents, paving the way for a Christian revival that offered America a firm new moral vision -- one rooted in the Protestant values of the founders. A groundbreaking reappraisal of the country's spiritual reawakening, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment shows how America found new purpose at the dawn of the Cold War.

Into Print

Into Print
Author: Charles Walton
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271050721

The famous clash between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine over the Enlightenment&’s &“evil&” or &“liberating&” potential in the French Revolution finds present-day parallels in the battle between those who see the Enlightenment at the origins of modernity&’s many ills, such as imperialism, racism, misogyny, and totalitarianism, and those who see it as having forged an age of democracy, human rights, and freedom. The essays collected by Charles Walton in Into Print paint a more complicated picture. By focusing on print culture&—the production, circulation, and reception of Enlightenment thought&—they show how the Enlightenment was shaped through practice and reshaped over time. These essays expand upon an approach to the study of the Enlightenment pioneered four decades ago: the social history of ideas. The contributors to Into Print examine how writers, printers, booksellers, regulators, police, readers, rumormongers, policy makers, diplomats, and sovereigns all struggled over that broad range of ideas and values that we now associate with the Enlightenment. They reveal the financial and fiscal stakes of the Enlightenment print industry and, in turn, how Enlightenment ideas shaped that industry during an age of expanding readership. They probe the limits of Enlightenment universalism, showing how demands for religious tolerance clashed with the demands of science and nationalism. They examine the transnational flow of Enlightenment ideas and opinions, exploring its domestic and diplomatic implications. Finally, they show how the culture of the Enlightenment figured in the outbreak and course of the French Revolution. Aside from the editor, the contributors are David A. Bell, Roger Chartier, Tabetha Ewing, Jeffrey Freedman, Carla Hesse, Thomas M. Luckett, Sarah Maza, Renato Pasta, Thierry Rigogne, Leonard N. Rosenband, Shanti Singham, and Will Slauter.

The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism

The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism
Author: Karl Ameriks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107147840

Comprehensive and incisive, with three new chapters, this updated edition sees world-renowned scholars explore a rich and complex philosophical movement.

Dilemmas and Connections

Dilemmas and Connections
Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2011-02-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780674055322

In these essays Charles Taylor turns to those things not fully imagined or avenues not wholly explored in his epochal A Secular Age.

Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment

Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment
Author: Peter H. Reill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2005-06-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0520931009

This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life.

God in the Enlightenment

God in the Enlightenment
Author: William J. Bulman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-04-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190267097

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.

Ideological Dilemmas

Ideological Dilemmas
Author: Michael Billig
Publisher: Sage Publications (CA)
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1988
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780803980969

A major contribution to the social scientific understanding of how people make sense of their lives, Ideological Dilemmas presents an illuminating new approach to the study of everyday thinking. Contradictory strands abound within both ideology and common sense. In contrast to many modern theorists, the authors see these dilemmas of ideology as enabling, rather than inhibiting: thinking about them helps people to think meaningfully about themselves and the world. The dilemmas within ideology and their effects on thinking are explored through the analysis of what people say in specific key situations: education, medical care, race and gender. The authors identify common ideological themes running through the common-sense discourses they analyse. They highlight the tensions between themes of equality and authority, freedom and necessity, individuality and collectivity. Time and again, the contradictions between these ideological themes crop up as respondents argue and puzzle over their social worlds. Written with refreshing clarity, the discussion cuts across the boundary which often separates sociology from social psychology. Sociologists are reminded that the reproduction of ideology involves individual processes of thinking; social psychologists are urged to recognize the ideological nature of thought.