Let There Be Enlightenment

Author : Anton M. Matytsin,Dan Edelstein
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 41,7 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 : Eckhart Tolle
Publisher : New World Library
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2010-10-06
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9781577313113

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The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle Pdf

It's no wonder that The Power of Now has sold over 16 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 foreign languages. Much more than simple principles and platitudes, the book takes readers on an inspiring spiritual journey to find their true and deepest self and reach the ultimate in personal growth and spirituality: the discovery of truth and light. In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind. He awakens readers to their role as a creator of pain and shows them how to have a pain-free identity by living fully in the present. The journey is thrilling, and along the way, the author shows how to connect to the indestructible essence of our Being, "the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death." Featuring a new preface by the author, this paperback shows that only after regaining awareness of Being, liberated from Mind and intensely in the Now, is there Enlightenment.

Author : Jed McKenna
Publisher : Wisefool Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2009-11-25
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9780980184822

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Spiritual Enlightenment:: The Damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna Pdf

A MASTERPIECE of illuminative writing, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing is mandatory reading for anyone following a spiritual path. Part exposé and part how-to manual, this is the first book to explain why failure seems to be the rule in the search for enlightenment, and how the rule can be broken. :: Book One of Jed McKenna's Enlightenment Trilogy. Contains Bonus Material.

Author : John Robertson
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 169 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Electronic books
ISBN : 9780199591787

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The Enlightenment by John Robertson Pdf

This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

Author : Dr Arthur B Stein,Dr Andrew Vidich
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2016-07-19
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0692731024

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Let There Be Light by Dr Arthur B Stein,Dr Andrew Vidich Pdf

Let There Be Light celebrates the splendor of radiant Light that has been known, embodied and taught by mystics, saints and sages over the millennia. Readers at every level will enjoy this book for its insights and message of hope: Light is available to all who seek it with humility and grace. Within the world's sacred scriptures, many significant passages involve light-be it the "burning bush" experience of the lawgiver Moses on Mount Sinai, the "light brighter than a thousand suns" of which the Bhagavad Gita speaks, or the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be filled with light" (Matthew 6:22, KJV). We seek to highlight in this book those who have experienced this divine light. Numerous esoteric references to Inner Light appear not only in the scriptures of the distant past, but also within the personal experiential accounts by Masters, sages, and seers across the centuries. Also we draw upon wisdom stories and tales from many cultural and ethnic traditions. We draw attention to a number of significant related references and accounts by teachers and practitioners of the closely related phenomenon of Inner Sound, which is also known within various teachings or mystic lineages as "audible sound current," Naam, Word, "celestial music," or other descriptions. Testimonies are provided by persons who have experienced aspects of Inner Light and Sound in a variety of circumstances outside of formal religious or spiritual contexts. These may be precipitated, for example, by being profoundly moved by uplifting music, sudden personal epiphanies, near-death experiences (NDEs), and during the dying process itself. One common thread among great teachers, sages and practitioners of spiritual traditions have emphasized throughout the ages is that Inner Light and enlightenment can be most directly accessed by utilizing meditation, prayer and other contemplative practices. Today humankind collectively is faced with a host of great challenges: political, socio-economic, and ecological-which ultimately at their roots are primarily spiritual in nature. Fortunately, possibilities for transformational changes are also accessible. Increasing numbers of people of all ages around the planet, both individuals and collectively, are seeking to tap into resources that will enhance self-understanding and recognition of a "deeper" shared level of Self and consciousness, within themselves and in the world. Simply put, can enough persons of goodwill find sufficient common ground to pull together and live into being a unifying ethos for humanity? What will it take to build a nonviolent, sustainable world upon foundations of lovingkindness, compassion, cooperation and social justice? It has becoming increasingly clear that there can be no real peace in the world until there is peace within and between religions. It is encouraging in this regard to witness increased participation among the faith traditions in interfaith dialogue. Harbingers of positive change include the "new" interspiritual movement, which attracts people from a wide range of perspectives and highlights a growing awareness that the basic core of spiritual experience emerges from the same wellspring(s). We sincerity hope that Let There Be Light can help contribute to thoughtful questioning, appreciative listening, and openhearted dialogue as people with diverse origins come together to share their spiritual journeys with each other.

Author : Anthony Pagden
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2013-05-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191636714

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The Enlightenment by Anthony Pagden Pdf

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form it was a creature of the Enlightenment attempt to create a new 'science of man', based upon a vision of humanity made up of autonomous individuals, free from all the constraints imposed by custom, prejudice, and religion. As Pagden shows, this 'new science' was based not simply on 'cold, calculating reason', as its critics claimed, but on the argument that all humans are linked by what in the Enlightenment were called 'sympathetic' attachments. The conclusion was that despite the many tribes and nations into which humanity was divided there was only one 'human nature', and that the final destiny of the species could only be the creation of one universal, cosmopolitan society. This new 'human science' provided the philosophical grounding of the modern world. It has been the inspiration behind the League of Nations, the United Nations and the European Union. Without it, international law, global justice, and human rights legislation would be unthinkable. As Anthony Pagden argues passionately and persuasively in this book, it is a legacy well worth preserving - and one that might yet come to inherit the earth.

Author : Steven Pinker
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2018-02-13
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780525427575

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Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker Pdf

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Author : Anton M. Matytsin
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2016-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781421420523

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The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Pdf

8. A Matter of Debate: Conceptions of Material Substance in the Scientific Revolution -- 9. War of the Worlds: Cartesian Vortices and Newtonian Gravitation in Eighteenth-Century Astronomy -- 10. Historical Pyrrhonism and Its Discontents -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Author : Arianne Baggerman,Rudolf Michel Dekker
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 569 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004172692

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Child of the Enlightenment by Arianne Baggerman,Rudolf Michel Dekker Pdf

A diary kept by a boy in the 1790s sheds new light on the rise of autobiographical writing in the 19th century and sketches a panoramic view of Europe in the Age of Enlightenment. The French Revolution and the Batavian Revolution in the Netherlands provide the backdrop to this study, which ranges from changing perceptions of time, space and nature to the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and its influence on such far-flung fields as education, landscape gardening and politics. The book describes the high expectations people had of science and medicine, and their disappointment at the failure of these new branches of learning to cure the world of its ills.

Author : James Shirley Hodson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1883
Category : Almshouses
ISBN : HARVARD:32044050502384

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A History of the Printing Trade Charities by James Shirley Hodson Pdf

Author : Peter B. Kaufman
Publisher : Seven Stories Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2021-02-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781644210611

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The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge by Peter B. Kaufman Pdf

How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone? In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely. Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police—throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Kaufman writes of times when the Bible could not be translated—you’d be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were trashed and pulped—sometimes along with their authors; and when efforts to develop public television and radio networks were quashed by private industry. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises—giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th- and 18th- and 20th- century predecessors. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the Monsterverse. The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge maps out the opportunities to mobilize for the fight ahead of us. With the Internet and other means of media production and distribution—video especially—at hand, knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives have a special responsibility now to counter misinformation, disinformation, and fake news—and especially efforts to control the free flow of information. A film and video producer and former book publisher, Kaufman begins to draft a new social contract for our networked video age. He draws his inspiration from those who fought tooth and nail against earlier incarnations of the Monsterverse—including William Tyndale in the 16th century; Denis Diderot in the 18th; untold numbers of Soviet and Central and East European dissidents in the 20th—many of whom paid the ultimate price. Their successors? Advocates of free knowledge like Aaron Swartz, of free software like Richard Stallman, of an enlightened public television and radio network like James Killian, of a freer Internet like Tim Berners-Lee, of fuller rights and freedoms like Edward Snowden. All have been striving to secure for us a better world, marked by the right balance between state, society, and private gain. The concluding section of the book, its largest piece, builds on their work, drawing up a progressive agenda for how today’s free thinkers can band together now to fight and win. With everything shut and everyone going online, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge is a rousing call to action that expands the definition of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

Author : Catherine Volpilhac-Auger
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2023-01-26
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781009249126

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Montesquieu by Catherine Volpilhac-Auger Pdf

Since the last biography of Montesquieu in English (Shackleton, Oxford, 1961) Montesquieu scholarship has been entirely renewed, culminating in a critical edition of his complete works in twenty-two volumes that is nearing completion. Since 1998, this new edition of the complete works has considerably modified what was known about Montesquieu and his procedures, eliciting new translations and further studies. Additionally, several thousand manuscript pages were made public in 1994 and continue to generate further scholarly inquiry. The author of this compact biography, originally published by Gallimard 2017, is the director of the critical edition of the works and the most qualified scholar of Montesquieu. At once an introduction to Montesquieu's thought and a synthesis of current knowledge about his life and work, this book is full of insights and revised judgements about Montesquieu and how his political philosophy helped thrust Enlightenment onto the European agenda.

Author : Dan Edelstein
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2010-12-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226184500

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The Enlightenment by Dan Edelstein Pdf

What was the Enlightenment? Though many scholars have attempted to solve this riddle, none has made as much use of contemporary answers as Dan Edelstein does here. In seeking to recover where, when, and how the concept of “the Enlightenment” first emerged, Edelstein departs from genealogies that trace it back to political and philosophical developments in England and the Dutch Republic. According to Edelstein, by the 1720s scholars and authors in France were already employing a constellation of terms—such as l’esprit philosophique—to describe what we would today call the Enlightenment. But Edelstein argues that it was within the French Academies, and in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, that the key definition, concepts, and historical narratives of the Enlightenment were crafted. A necessary corrective to many of our contemporary ideas about the Enlightenment, Edelstein’s book turns conventional thinking about the period on its head. Concise, clear, and contrarian, The Enlightenment will be welcomed by all teachers and students of the period.

Author : Caroline Warman
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2016-01-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781783742035

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Tolerance by Caroline Warman Pdf

Inspired by Voltaire’s advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.

Author : Matthew Kadane
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2024
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226832890

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The Enlightenment and Original Sin by Matthew Kadane Pdf

"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"--