Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here--not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between.

With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant's query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? "This Is Enlightenment "is a landmark volume""with the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.

Immanuel Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a seminal text in modern philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. It is a complex and challenging work, which students and scholars often find difficult to penetrate. This Reader's Guide provides a 'way in' to the text including: philosophical and historical context; an overview of key themes; section-by-section analysis of the text; a chapter on its reception and influence as a classic text of the Enlightenment; and a guide for further reading. It highlights the most important themes and ideas, clarifies certain opaque features, and examines the junctures in the text that are critical for any philosophical assessment of Kant's argument. Eddis N. Miller offers a sound understanding of Kant's Religion and the tools for students to philosophically assess Kant's overall argument.

John Locke (1632-1704) was a leading seventeenth-century philosopher and widely considered to be the first of the British Empiricists. One of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, his major works and central ideas have had a significant impact on the development of key areas in political philosophy and epistemology. The Bloomsbury Companion to Locke is a comprehensive and accessible resource to Locke's life and work, his contemporaries and critics, his key concepts and enduring influence. Including more than 80 specially commissioned entries, written by a team of leading experts, topics range from absolutism to toleration, from education to socinianism. The Companion features a series of indispensable research tools including a chronology of Locke's life, an A-Z of his key concepts and synopses of his principal writings. This is an essential resource for anyone working in the fields of Locke Studies and Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.

The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis: Descartes and the Modern Worldview traces the conceptual sources of the present environmental degradation within the worldview of Modernity, and particularly within the thought of Rene Descartes, universally acclaimed as the father of modern philosophy. The book demonstrates how the triple foundations of the Modern worldview - in terms of an exaggerated anthropocentrism, a mechanistic conception of the natural world, and the metaphysical dualism between humanity and the rest of the physical world - can all be largely traced back to Cartesian thought, with direct ecological consequences.

Aristotle famously said that humans are rational animals and distinguished two forms or kinds of human rationality. Practical rationality strives to answer questions about how to live and about what sort of person one should be. It deals with human action and the will. Theoretical rationality strives to answer questions about the nature of our world and our place in it. It deals with human knowledge and understanding. Philosophical work on rationality attempts to understand the similarities, differences, and relations between these forms of reasoning. In this valuable collection, eleven distinguished scholars explore philosophical conceptions of the relation between belief, on the one hand, and intention and action, on the other.