Enlightenment And Secularism

Author : Christopher Nadon
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2013-04-18
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780739177488

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Enlightenment and Secularism by Christopher Nadon Pdf

Enlightenment and Secularism is a collection of twenty eight essays that seek to understand the connection between the European Enlightenment and the emergence of secular societies, as well as the character or nature of those societies. The contributors are drawn from a variety of disciplines including History, Sociology, Political Science, and Literature. Most of the essays focus on a single text from the Enlightenment, borrowing or secularizing the format of a sermon on a text, and are designed to be of particular use to those teaching and studying the history of the Enlightenment within a liberal arts curriculum.

Author : Margaret Jacob
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2021-04-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691216768

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The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret Jacob Pdf

Provides a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Jacob demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. --Adapted from publisher description.

Author : Anna Tomaszewska,Hasse Hämäläinen
Publisher : Springer
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2017-10-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783319653945

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The Sources of Secularism by Anna Tomaszewska,Hasse Hämäläinen Pdf

This book examines the importance of the Enlightenment for understanding the secular outlook of contemporary Western societies. It shows the new ways of thinking about religion that emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries and have had a great impact on how we address problems related to religion in the public sphere today. Based on the assumption that political concepts are rooted in historical realities, this collection combines the perspective of political philosophy with the perspective of the history of ideas. Does secularism imply that individuals are not free to manifest their beliefs in public? Is secularization the same as rejecting faith in the absolute? Can there be a universal rational core in every religion? Does freedom of expression always go hand in hand with freedom of conscience? Is secularism an invention of the predominantly Christian West, which cannot be applied in other contexts, specifically that of Muslim cultures? Answers to these and related questions are sought not only in current theories and debates in political philosophy, but also in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Anthony Collins, Adriaan Koerbagh, Abbé Claude Yvon, Giovanni Paolo Marana, and others.

Author : Dafydd Mills Daniel
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783030522032

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Ethical Rationalism and Secularisation in the British Enlightenment by Dafydd Mills Daniel Pdf

This book reassesses the ethics of reason in the Age of the Reason, making use of the neglected category of conscience. Arguing that conscience was a central feature of British Enlightenment ethical rationalism, the book explores the links between Enlightenment philosophy and modern secularisation, while responding to longstanding criticisms of rational intuitionism and the analogy between mathematics and morals, derived from David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Questioning in what sense British Enlightenment ethical rationalism can be associated with a secularising ‘Enlightenment project’, Daniel investigates the extent to which contemporary, and secular liberal, invocations of reason and conscience rely on the early modern Christian metaphysics they have otherwise disregarded. The chapters cover a rich collection of subjects, ranging from the Enlightenment’s secular legacy, reason and conscience in the history of ethics, and controversies in the Scottish Enlightenment, to the role of British moralists such as John Locke, Joseph Butler and Adam Smith in the secularisation of reason and conscience. Each chapter expertly refines Enlightenment ethical rationalism by reinterpreting its most influential proponents in eighteenth-century Britain – the followers of ‘Isaac Newton’s bulldog’ Samuel Clarke – including Richard Price (Edmund Burke’s opponent over the French Revolution) and John Witherspoon (the only clergyman to sign the US declaration of Independence).

Author : William J. Bulman,Robert G. Ingram
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2016-04-25
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780190267094

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God in the Enlightenment by William J. Bulman,Robert G. Ingram Pdf

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 : David Sorkin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780691188188

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The Religious Enlightenment by David Sorkin Pdf

In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature. Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but three such movements, were influential participants in the eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new ideal of church-state relations. Sorkin shows how they pioneered a religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety. This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the same way.

Author : Anton M. Matytsin,Dan Edelstein
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-14
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781421426020

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Let There Be Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin,Dan Edelstein Pdf

Challenging the triumphalist narrative of Enlightenment secularism. According to most scholars, the Enlightenment was a rational awakening, a radical break from a past dominated by religion and superstition. But in Let There Be Enlightenment, Anton M. Matytsin, Dan Edelstein, and the contributors they have assembled deftly undermine this simplistic narrative. Emphasizing the ways in which religious beliefs and motivations shaped philosophical perspectives, essays in this book highlight figures and topics often overlooked in standard genealogies of the Enlightenment. The volume underscores the prominent role that religious discourses continued to play in major aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought. The essays probe a wide range of subjects, from reformer Jan Amos Comenius’s quest for universal enlightenment to the changing meanings of the light metaphor, Quaker influences on Baruch Spinoza’s theology, and the unexpected persistence of Aristotle in the Enlightenment. Exploring the emergence of historical consciousness among Enlightenment thinkers while examining their repeated insistence on living in an enlightened age, the collection also investigates the origins and the long-term dynamics of the relationship between faith and reason. Providing an overview of the rich spectrum of eighteenth-century culture, the authors demonstrate that religion was central to Enlightenment thought. The term “enlightenment” itself had a deeply religious connotation. Rather than revisiting the celebrated breaks between the eighteenth century and the period that preceded it, Let There Be Enlightenment reveals the unacknowledged continuities that connect the Enlightenment to its various antecedents. Contributors: Philippe Buc, William J. Bulman, Jeffrey D. Burson, Charly Coleman, Dan Edelstein, Matthew T. Gaetano, Howard Hotson, Anton M. Matytsin, Darrin M. McMahon, James Schmidt, Céline Spector, Jo Van Cauter

Author : Marek Sullivan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2020-01-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781350123694

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Secular Assemblages by Marek Sullivan Pdf

In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Âme (1649) to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and 'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.

Author : John M. Owen IV,J. Judd Owen
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2011-02-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231150064

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Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order by John M. Owen IV,J. Judd Owen Pdf

Largely because of the cultural and political shift of the Enlightenment, Western societies emerged from sectarian conflict and embraced a more religiously moderate path. In nine original essays, leading scholars ask whether it is possible to export the Enlightenment solution abroad. Contributors begin by revisiting the Enlightenment's restructuring of the West, examining its past and future encounters with Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. While strongly attuned to the difficulties of implementing the principles of the Enlightenment worldwide, these scholars ultimately believe its elements have a necessary place within the new global order. Their approach treats conflict as a means to cooperation and sees religious commitment as a bolster, instead of a detriment, to political civility. Ultimately, they collapse both the claim that the West's experience offers a ready-made template for the world to follow and the belief that the West's achievements are to be ignored, despised, or discarded.

Author : Aamir R. Mufti
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2009-01-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781400827664

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Enlightenment in the Colony by Aamir R. Mufti Pdf

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the "Jewish question" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls "the exemplary crisis of minority"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the "Jewish question" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance. Mufti examines the literary dimensions of this crisis of identity through close readings of canonical texts of modern Western--mostly British-literature, as well as major works of modern Indian literature in Urdu and English. He argues that the one characteristic shared by all emerging national cultures since the nineteenth century is the minoritization of some social and cultural fragment of the population, and that national belonging and minority separatism go hand in hand with modernization. Enlightenment in the Colony calls for the adoption of secular, minority, and exilic perspectives in criticism and intellectual life as a means to critique the very forms of marginalization that give rise to the uniquely powerful minority voice in world literatures.

Author : Anna Tomaszewska
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2022-08-22
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004523371

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Between Secularization and Reform by Anna Tomaszewska Pdf

The authors revisit the idea that Enlightenment spearheaded secularization. This book invites all to look at the Enlightenment religiosity as founded on a merger of religious criticism and heterodoxy.

Author : Paulos Gregorios
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : History
ISBN : UCAL:B3718716

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Enlightenment, East and West by Paulos Gregorios Pdf

Author : Brett C. McInelly,Paul E. Kerry
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2018-11-09
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781683931621

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New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment by Brett C. McInelly,Paul E. Kerry Pdf

The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

Author : T. D. Hemming
Publisher : University of Exeter Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : History
ISBN : 0859894169

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The Secular City by T. D. Hemming Pdf

The City is for the Enlightenment a central preoccupation, that social space where both the utopian and the pragmatic concerns of the eighteenth century come together in a typical tension. Unlike St Augustine's Civitas Dei, this is to be a city of men and women, planning their social geometry, interacting commercially, elaborating, as far as possible, human and secular principles of justice. This collection of specially commissioned essays, all by distinguished eighteenth-century specialists, charts the process from a variety of angles.

Author : John R. Betz
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-12
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780470674925

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After Enlightenment by John R. Betz Pdf

After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary is a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of eighteenth-century German philosopher, J. G. Hamann, the founding father of what has come to be known as Radical Orthodoxy. Provides a long-overdue, comprehensive introduction to Haman's fascinating life and controversial works, including his role as a friend and critic of Kant and some of the most renowned German intellectuals of the age Features substantial new translations of the most important passages from across Hamann's writings, some of which have never been translated into English Examines Hamann's highly original views on a range of topics, including faith, reason, revelation, Christianity, biblical exegesis, Socrates, theological aesthetics, language, sexuality, religion, politics, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity Presents Hamann as the 'founding father' of a distinctly post-modern, post-secular theology and, as such, as an alternative to the 'postmodern triumvirate' of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida Considers Hamann's work as a touchtone of modern Jewish-Christian dialogue, in view of debates with his friend Moses Mendelssohn Explores Hamann's role as the visionary founder of a 'metacritical' movement that radically calls into question the basic principles of modern secular reason, and thus reprises the debate between those defending Hamann's views and those labeling him the bête noir of the Enlightenment