In June 2019, in an interview given to the Financial Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin baldly declared that the liberal idea had outlived its purpose as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism. If liberalism has indeed come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population then evidence should show that it is in retreat. Ipso facto, so should Enlightenment values that underpin liberal democracy. A key aim of the book is to garner evidence. Is the liberal idea characterised by Putin accurate or rather a caricature divorced from reality? Modern Europe and the Enlightenment explores whether the policy stance on the issues outlined above, and a host of similar topics being tackled by European governments, are consonant with Enlightenment values. The Enlightenment covered an array of issues on every aspect of life wherein reason was rigorously applied to solve problems, gain understanding and discover facts. It was a successor to the scientific revolution. The assumption is that the Enlightenment left a profound legacy on Western Europe, which lingers till the present day. The following broad areas of Enlightenment values are covered: reason, human rights, religion and secularism, freedom of expression, political and economic open-mindedness, race, and womens issues. The book examines the extent to which Enlightenment values are adhered to in various parts of modern Europe delineated into Western Europe, the progenitor of the Enlightenment; former communist countries that have joined the European Union; and former communist countries that are not in the EU. Discussion also focuses on the modern Counter-Enlightenment movement.

This book provides a new interpretation of the ethical theory of G.W.F. Hegel. The aim is not only to give a new interpretation for specialists in German Idealism, but also to provide an analysis that makes Hegel's ethics accessible for all scholars working in ethical and political philosophy. While Hegel's political philosophy has received a good deal of attention in the literature, the core of his ethics has eluded careful exposition, in large part because it is contained in his claims about conscience. This book shows that, contrary to accepted wisdom, conscience is the central concept for understanding Hegel's view of practical reason and therefore for understanding his ethics as a whole. The argument combines careful exegesis of key passages in Hegel's texts with detailed treatments of problems in contemporary ethics and reconstructions of Hegel's answers to those problems. The main goals are to render comprehensible Hegel's notoriously difficult texts by framing arguments with debates in contemporary ethics, and to show that Hegel still has much to teach us about the issues that matter to us most. Central topics covered in the book are the connection of self-consciousness and agency, the relation of motivating and justifying reasons, moral deliberation and the holism of moral reasoning, mutual recognition, and the rationality of social institutions.

Two major interpretations of Mendelssohn's achievements have attained prominence in recent works. One interpretation, defended most recently by David Sorkin and Edward Breuer, casts Mendelssohn as a Jewish traditionalist who uses the language of enlightened German philosophy to bolster his pre-modern religious beliefs. The other interpretation, defended by Allan Arkush, casts Mendelssohn as a radical Deist who defends Judaism exoterically in order to avoid arousing opposition from his co-religionists while facilitating their social integration into enlightened European society. In Faith and Freedom, Michah Gottlieb stakes out a middle position. He argues that Mendelssohn defends pre-modern Jewish religious concepts sincerely, but in so doing, unconsciously gives them a humanistic valence appropriate to life in a diverse, enlightened society. Gottlieb sees the Pantheism Controversy as part of a broader assessment of Mendelssohn's theological-political philosophy, framed in terms of Mendelssohn's relation to his two greatest Jewish philosophical predecessors, Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). While Mendelssohn's relation to Maimonides and Spinoza has been discussed sporadically, Faith and Freedom is the first book-length treatment of this subject. The connection is particularly instructive as both Maimonides and Spinoza wrote major theological-political treatises and exercised profound influences on Mendelssohn. Not surprisingly, Mendelssohn is deeply ambivalent about both of these figures. He reveres Maimonides for what he sees as his synthesis of Judaism with secular knowledge, while seeming deeply disturbed by Maimonides's elitism, his equivocation regarding many of the tenets of theism, his espousing religious coercion, and his intolerant view of Gentiles. As for Spinoza, Mendelssohn respects him as a model for how a Jew can fruitfully contribute to science and philosophy and be a model of ethical rectitude. But Mendelssohn objects to Spinoza's atheism, advocacy of state religion, debunking of Jewish chosenness, and rejection of Jewish law. For Mendelssohn, reason best preserves human dignity and freedom by upholding the individual's right to arrive at truth on their own and determine their own beliefs independently of all authority. As such, reason demands that the state respect diversity of thought and religious expression. Mendelssohn interprets faith in the Jewish sense as trust in God's providential goodness, arguing that reason affirms this as well. But he recognizes the difficulty of establishing metaphysical truth rationally and so in his final works adumbrates a form of religious pragmatism. The faith-reason debate rages again today. Gottlieb explores Mendelssohn's theological-political thought with an eye to axiological and political dimensions of the debate.

This book, first published in 1929, is an assessment of Voltaire's life and works. It contains valuable biographical details, as well as studies of his works, philosophy, poetry, plays and literary criticism.

The thesis of this book, first published in 1972, is that Kant's notions of 'absolute worth', the 'unconditioned' and 'unconditioned worth' are rationalistic and confused, and that they spoil his ontology of personal value and tend to subvert his splendid idea of the person as an End in himself.

This book, first published in 1935, is an examination of Hume's theories of causal inference and belief in substance and his analysis of the understanding.

This work, first published in 1985, offers a general interpretation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Most Hume scholarship has either neglected or downplayed an important aspect of Hume's position - his scepticism. This book puts that right, examining in close detail the sceptical arguments in Hume's philosophy.

This volume presents all of Voltaire's poetry for which a year of composition is unknown. It is composed exclusively of short pieces which provide an opportunity to study the place of shorter verse in Voltaire's corpus. Voltaire's impromptus, odes and epistles were often penned on specific occasions and given as gifts to friends and acquaintances, some well known, like Madame du Chatelet, others much more mysterious. As the author's reputation grew these short pieces became sought-after commodities: people would save them, and some would be copied and circulated to the wider public.

"The Other Adam Smith" represents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith's entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensive--though highly contestable--system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This book, first published in 1951, is an examination of Hume's 'Treatise of Human Nature', 'An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals', and 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'. It lucidly clarifies and makes alive the new discoveries of Hume's works in a study that makes plain the importance of this philosopher to the world today.

This volume collects the private letters and published epistles of English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650-1700). It includes the correspondences of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the interlocutors of some of the best-known intellectuals of their era, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion, moral theology, and ethics to epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. For the first time in one collection, the philosophical correspondences of these women have been brought together to be appreciated as a whole. Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England is an invaluable primary resource for students and scholars of these neglected women thinkers. It includes original introductory essays for each woman philosopher, demonstrating how her correspondences contributed to the formation of her own views as well as those of her better-known contemporaries. It also provides detailed scholarly annotations to the letters and epistles, explaining unfamiliar philosophical ideas and defining obscure terminology to help make the texts accessible and comprehensible to the modern reader. This collection and its companion volume, Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-Century England (forthcoming), provide valuable historical evidence that women made substantial contributions to the formation and development of early modern thought and reflect the intensely collaborative and gender-inclusive nature of philosophical discussion in the early modern period.

Contemporary interest in realism and naturalism, emerging under the banner of speculative or new realism, has prompted continentally-trained philosophers to consider a number of texts from the canon of analytic philosophy. The philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, in particular, has proven remarkably able to offer a contemporary re-formulation of traditional "continental" concerns that is amenable to realist and rationalist considerations, and serves as an accessible entry point into the Anglo-American tradition for continental philosophers. With the aim of appraising this fertile theoretical convergence, this volume brings together experts of both analytic and continental philosophy to discuss the legacy of Kantianism in contemporary philosophy. The individual essays explore the ways in which Sellars can be put into dialogue with the widely influential work of Quentin Meillassoux, explaining how-even though their methods, language, and proximal influences are widely different-their philosophical stances can be compared thanks to their shared Kantian heritage and interest in the problem of realism. This book will be appeal to students and scholars who are interested in Sellars, Meillassoux, contemporary realist movements in continental philosophy, and the analytic-continental debate in contemporary philosophy.

Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism identifies an ethically and politically engaged philosophy of religion in eighteenth century Rational Dissent, particularly in the work of Richard Price (1723-1791), and in the radical thought of Mary Wollstonecraft. It traces their ethico-political account of reason, natural theology and human freedom back to seventeenth century Cambridge Platonism and thereby shows how popular histories of the philosophy of religion in modernity have been over-determined both by analytic philosophy of religion and by its critics. The eighteenth century has typically been portrayed as an age of reason, defined as a project of rationalism, liberalism and increasing secularisation, leading inevitably to nihilism and the collapse of modernity. Within this narrative, the Rational Dissenters have been accused of being the culmination of eighteenth-century rationalism in Britain, epitomising the philosophy of modernity. This book challenges this reading of history by highlighting the importance of teleology, deiformity, the immutability of goodness and the divinity of reason within the tradition of Rational Dissent, and it demonstrates that the philosophy and ethics of both Price and Wollstonecraft are profoundly theological. Price's philosophy of political liberty, and Wollstonecraft's feminism, both grounded in a Platonic conception of freedom, are perfectionist and radical rather than liberal. This has important implications for understanding the political nature of eighteenth-century philosophical theology: these thinkers represent not so much a shaking off of religion by secular rationality but a challenge to religious and political hegemony. By distinguishing Price and Wollstonecraft from other forms of rationalism including deism and Socinianism, this book takes issue with the popular division of eighteenth-century philosophy into rationalistic and empirical strands and, through considering the legacy of Cambridge Platonism, draws attention to an alternative philosophy of religion that lies between both empiricism and discursive inference.

Is Kant really the 'bourgeois' philosopher that his advocates and opponents take him to be? In this bold and original re-thinking of Kant, Michael Wayne argues that with his aesthetic turn in the Third Critique, Kant broke significantly from the problematic philosophical structure of the Critique of Pure Reason. Through his philosophy of the aesthetic Kant begins to circumnavigate the dualities in his thought. In so doing he shows us today how the aesthetic is a powerful means for imagining our way past the apparent universality of contemporary capitalism. Here is an unfamiliar Kant: his concepts of beauty and the sublime are reinterpreted as attempts to socialise the aesthetic while Wayne reconstructs the usually hidden genealogy between Kant and important Marxist concepts such as totality, dialectics, mediation and even production. In materialising Kant's philosophy, this book simultaneously offers a Marxist defence of creativity and imagination grounded in our power to think metaphorically and in Kant's concept of reflective judgment. Wayne also critiques aspects of Marxist cultural theory that have not accorded the aesthetic the relative autonomy and specificity which it is due. Discussing such thinkers as Adorno, Bourdieu, Colletti, Eagleton, Lukacs, Ranciere and others, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique presents a new reading of Kant's Third Critique that challenges Marxist and mainstream assessments of Kant alike.

A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes. Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."

The importance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the history of philosophy is matched only by its difficulty. In particular, readers are often frustrated by how difficult it is to extract Kant's arguments from his dense prose. This book reconstructs, using the tools of propositional logic, the central arguments of the Critique. In all, the book reconstructs thirty-six of Kant's arguments spanning the Transcendental Aesthetic, Transcendental Analytic, and Transcendental Dialectic. For each argument, they begin with a quote from Kant's text followed by a synopsis that explains the argument informally. Finally, each synopsis is followed by a formal reconstruction of the argument. The synopses offer examples, metaphors, historical background, and objections/responses to aid the reader in appreciating Kant's arguments. Even though many readers who approach Kant for the first time have a good philosophical vocabulary, few will understand Kant's unique lexicon. In addition to formally reconstructing Kant's arguments, the book also includes a glossary that defines the technical terms that Kant uses in his arguments. Finally, since this book is directed largely at students, Bryan Hall enlisted two of his own students to ensure that the book is maximally student friendly. In contrast to most pedagogical philosophical literature, the content of this book has been tailored by students for students.

The texts in this volume date from 1769 with one unusual memoire from 1770. At the age of 75, Voltaire was still extremely active, developing and deepening familiar themes in his writings. After an epistolary dispute with the bishop of Annecy, we present five more works in his ongoing battle against the infame, concentrating on the threat to society produced by religious dogma and intolerance, and on abuses of ecclesiastical power. The volume ends with a contribution by the patriarch to Choiseul's plan to create a port on Lake Geneva that would be a haven for those suffering persecution in Geneva for demanding more civil rights. The memoire is accompanied by maps annotated by Voltaire.

This volume contains the key philosophical writings of maverick Enlightenment philosopher Andre-Pierre Le Guay de Premontval (1716-1764). Premontval was a prolific member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and in his career as academic he wrote a series of essays and books on a range of core philosophical topics, such as necessity and contingency, free will, sufficient reason, personal identity, the nature of the mind and its relationship with the body, optimism, and the existence of God. Premontval's philosophy, shaped by his opposition to key philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff, is notable for a number of original and often provocative positions on key philosophical issues of the time, which he supported by inventive critiques and a raft of novel arguments. In addition to developing a highly original proof for the existence of God based on the principles of atheism, Premontval argued that all possible beings exist, and do so necessarily and therefore eternally; he insisted that the universe unfolded through an interplay of chance and necessity, its direction influenced by God but not under God's direct control; and he considered free will a curse and the main impediment to the realization of the only aim fitting for God, which was to make all beings happy and holy as quickly as possible. His writings are notable for anticipating modern developments such as open theism, process theology, and animal theodicy. In this volume, Lloyd Strickland makes Premontval's key philosophical writings available in English for the first time. In making these translations, Strickland-a well-respected translator of Leibniz's work-has consulted the original manuscripts to ensure the greatest accuracy, and as befits a scholarly edition, the texts are meticulously documented with copious annotations. Accompanying the texts is a substantial and informative introduction.

Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and beauty. Voluntarism, Wolfram Schmidgen contends, provided both theological framework and aesthetic license. In Infinite Variety, he reconstructs this voluntarist tradition of literary invention. Once one accepted that creation was willful and order arbitrary, Schmidgen argues, existing hierarchies of kind lost their normative value. Literary invention could be radicalized as a result. Acknowledging that the will drives creation, such writers as Blackmore and Locke inverted the rules of composition and let energy dominate structure, matter create form, and parts be valued over the whole. In literary, religious, and philosophical works, voluntarism authorized the move beyond the natural toward the deformed, the infinite, and the counterfactual. In reclaiming ontology as an explanatory context for literary invention, Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of an aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite. It is a book that articulates how religious belief shaped modern literary practices, including novelistic realism, and one that will be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy.

Most academic philosophers and intellectual historians are familiar with the major historical figures and intellectual movements coming out of Scotland in the 18th Century. These scholars are also familiar with the works of Immanuel Kant and his influence on Western thought. But with the exception of discussion examining David Hume's influence on Kant's epistemology, metaphysics, and moral theory, little attention has been paid to the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on Kant's philosophy. This volume aims to fill this perceived gap in the literature and provide a starting point for future discussions looking at the influence of Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on Kant's philosophy.

Concentric Space as a Life Principle beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur invites a fresh vision of human experience and search for life meanings in terms of potential openings through relational space. Offering a radical spatial rereading of foundational ideas of influential thinkers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur, it argues that these ideas can be rethought for a more fundamental understanding of life, self and other. This book offers a radical reconceptualisation of space as an animating principle for life through common, although previously hidden, features across the thought of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur. It offers a fresh spatial interpretation of key themes in these thinkers' works, such as compassion, will to life, Dionysian rapture, will to power, selfovercoming, re-valuation of values, eternal recurrence, living metaphor and intersubjectivity. It proposes a spatial restructuring of experience from diametric spaces of exclusion towards concentric spaces of inclusion for an experiential restructuring towards unifying modes of experience. This spatial rereading of these major figures in philosophy directly challenges many previous understandings, to offer a distinctive spatial-phenomenological framework for examining a life principle. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduates engaged in the study of philosophy, wellbeing, education and human development. The book's interdisciplinary scope ensures that it is also of interest for those in the fields of psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and culture studies.

The A to Z of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy includes many entries on Descartes's writings, concepts, and findings. Since it is historical, there are other entries on those who supported him, those who criticized him, those who corrected him, and those who together formed one of the major movements in philosophy, Cartesianism. To better understand the period, the authors drew up a brief chronology, and to see how Descartes and Cartesianism fit into the general picture, they have written an introduction and a biography. Since everything cannot be summed up in one volume, a bibliography directs readers to numerous other sources on issues of particular interest.

Cosmotheism retrieves the importance of a cosmic approach to reality through its revival of the heliocentric creed championed by Copernicus, Bruno and Kepler, through its critiques of historical patterns of politics and technology, and through its sponsorship of emancipatory thinkers, artists, "psychonauts," and cosmologists.

This book, first published in 1951, is an examination of Hume's 'Treatise of Human Nature', 'An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals', and 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'. It lucidly clarifies and makes alive the new discoveries of Hume's works in a study that makes plain the importance of this philosopher to the world today.

Before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later eighteenth century, how did European readers find out about the varied cultures of Asia? Orientalism in Louis XIV's France presents a history of Oriental studies in seventeenth-century France, revealing the prominence within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India. The Orientalist writers studied here produced books that would become sources used throughout the eighteenth century. Nicholas Dew places these scholars in their own context as members of the "republic of letters" in the age of the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment.