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."

Ce volume comprend un ensemble de textes philosophiques et historiques, abordant des themes tels que la fatalite, la nature de l'ame, les dangers de l'atheisme, et la lente marche de l'histoire vers un avenir meilleur. Il contient, entre autres oeuvres, les contes "Histoire de Jenni, ou le Sage et l'athee" et "Les Oreilles du comte de Chesterfield", ainsi que des oeuvres de circonstance ("De la mort de Louis XV", "Eloge de Louis XV", "Eloge historique de la raison", "Lettre d'un ecclesiastique"), une allegorie ("Dialogue de Pegase et du Vieillard"), une defense de ses "Commentaires sur Corneille" ("Sentiment d'un academicien de Lyon") et, comme toujours, de la poesie.

Les analyses fondees sur l'environnement, qui font du terrain ou de la temperature des facteurs explicatifs de la diversite humaine, dominent les discours anthropologiques de l'Ancien Regime. Richard Spavin montre que ces theories climatiques revelent des demarches contestataires a lire a cote des theories de la souverainete, du constitutionnalisme et du republicanisme. Richard Spavin fonde son analyse sur trois auteurs qui ont une vision relativiste du determinisme climatique. Si, pour Bodin, Montesquieu et Rousseau, les theories des climats expliquent les causes geographiques derriere la diversite des societes, elles recelent egalement une dimension metaphorique. Pour eux, les climats mettent en recit des visions du pouvoir: les limites du politique sont comparees aux obstacles geographiques; la finalite politique ne se trouve plus dans le corps du monarque mais dans le sol, auquel le monarque et son peuple appartiennent ensemble. L'auteur invite notamment a relire a nouveaux frais les derangeants livres de L'Esprit des lois qui semblent justifier l'esclavage dans certaines regions eloignees du contexte europeen. Les theories des climats revelent ainsi une face cachee de la philosophie politique de l'Ancien Regime. Richard Spavin en reevalue le socle philosophique et en devoile l'ironie qui demeurait jusque-la inapercue. Il montre que les climats sont un outil rhetorique efficace pour penser le nouvel ordre moral de la modernite.

Kant on Intuition: Western and Asian Perspectives on Transcendental Idealism consists of 20 chapters, many of which feature engagements between Kant and various Asian philosophers. Key themes include the nature of human intuition (not only as theoretical-pure, sensible, and possibly intellectual-but also as relevant to Kant's practical philosophy, aesthetics, the sublime, and even mysticism), the status of Kant's idealism/realism, and Kant's notion of an object. Roughly half of the chapters take a stance on the recent conceptualism/non-conceptualism debate. The chapters are organized into four parts, each with five chapters. Part I explores themes relating primarily to the early sections of Kant's first Critique: three chapters focus mainly on Kant's theory of the "forms of intuition" and/or "formal intuition", especially as illustrated by geometry, while two examine the broader role of intuition in transcendental idealism. Part II continues to examine themes from the Aesthetic but shifts the main focus to the Transcendental Analytic, where the key question challenging interpreters is to determine whether intuition (via sensibility) is ever capable of operating independently from conception (via understanding); each contributor offers a defense of either the conceptualist or the non-conceptualist readings of Kant's text. Part III includes three chapters that explore the relevance of intuition to Kant's theory of the sublime, followed by two that examine challenges that Asian philosophers have raised against Kant's theory of intuition, particularly as it relates to our experience of the supersensible. Finally, Part IV concludes the book with five chapters that explore a range of resonances between Kant and various Asian philosophers and philosophical ideas.

Although many historical narratives often describe the eighteenth century as an unalloyed 'Age of Reason', Enlightenment thinkers continued to grapple with the challenges posed by the revival and spread of philosophical skepticism. The imperative to overcome doubt and uncertainty informed some of the most innovative characteristics of eighteenth-century intellectual culture, including not only debates about epistemology and metaphysics but also matters of jurisprudence, theology, history, moral philosophy, and politics. Thinkers of this period debated about, established, and productively worked for progress within the parameters of the increasingly circumscribed boundaries of human reason. No longer considered innate and consistently perfect, reason instead became conceived as a faculty that was inherently fallible, limited by personal experiences, and in need of improvement throughout the course of any individual's life. In its depiction of a complicated, variegated, and diverse Enlightenment culture, this volume examines the process by which philosophical skepticism was challenged and gradually tamed to bring about an anxious confidence in the powers of human understanding. The various contributions collectively demonstrate that philosophical skepticism, and not simply unshakable confidence in the powers of reason or the optimistic assumption about inevitable human improvement, was, in fact, the crucible of the Enlightenment process itself.

Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) was the foremost representative of the Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment and also a European figure of note. He published significant works in natural law and history, but also a very important body of moral essays and epistles. He authored several engaging autobiographies and European travelogues, a major utopian novel that was an immediate European succes, interesting satires that advocated women's education and career, and a large number of comedies. These comedies secured Holberg's status as the most significant playwright in Scandinavia before Ibsen and Strindberg. Through his extensive oeuvre, but especially through his plays, Holberg had a decisive influence on the formation of modern Danish as a literary language, something that was a self-conscious effort on the part of a man who saw himself as an educator of the public. Despite his contemporary impact at home and abroad and his ongoing popularity in Scandinavia, he remains little known in the wider world of enlightenment studies. It is the aim of this volume to revive Holberg as a major figure from a minor corner of the Enlightenment world by presenting the full variety of his work and giving it a European context.

The major part of this volume is taken up by two plays, "Don Pedre" and "Olympie", in which Voltaire attempted to inject dynamism and spectacle into the French theatre while still working in the classical tradition. At the same time Voltaire continued his defence of French literature against foreign, particularly English, influence, with his Avis referring to the prestigious edition of Corneille, and more importantly the "Parallele d'Horace, de Boileau, et de Pope". Other political, religious and philosophical themes of 1761 are articulated in the remaining texts of the volume.

How the concept of "deep time" began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries In this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman argues that the concept of "deep time"-most often associated with geological epochs-began as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about "the abyss of time" created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. Heringman, examining stories about the deep past by visionary thinkers ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin, challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, he argues, it has a rich imaginative history. Heringman considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook's second voyage around the world, who, inspired by encounters with Pacific islanders, connected the scale of geological time to human origins and cultural evolution; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who drew on travel narrative, antiquarian works, and his own fieldwork to lay out the first modern geological timescale; Blake and Johann Gottfried Herder, who used the language of fossils and artifacts to promote ancient ballads and "prehistoric song"; and Darwin's exploration of the reciprocal effects of geological and human time. Deep time, Heringman shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.

After his final attack on Shakespeare, the "Lettre de Monsieur de Voltaire a Messieurs de l'Academie francaise", Voltaire composed "Irene" as a demonstration of the supremacy of French theatre. Whereas he had previously failed to win Marie Antoinette's favour with his divertissement, "L'Hote et l'hotesse", "Irene" finally granted him a triumphant return to Paris shortly before his death. During the years 1776-1777, Voltaire continued his fight against serfdom in the Jura region through his "Supplique a M. Turgot", the "Lettre du reverend pere Polycarpe" and the "Lettre d'un benedictin de Franche-Comte", while his "Dialogue de Maxime de Madaure, entre Sophronime et Adelos" reveals a preoccupation with mortality at the close of his life.

Widely regarded as the father of modern Western philosophy, Descartes sought to look beyond established ideas and create a thought system based on reason. In this profound work he meditates on doubt, the human soul, God, truth and the nature of existence itself. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Lancees six ans apres le "Dictionnaire philosophique", les "Questions sur l'Encyclopedie" sont un des derniers chefs-d'oeuvre de Voltaire. OEuvre alphabetique, oeuvre polemique comme le "Dictionnaire", les "Questions" offrent une richesse thematique sans equivalent et constituent un veritable condense des idees de Voltaire sur une impressionnante diversite de sujets. La nouvelle edition des "Questions" en sept volumes de la Voltaire Foundation est la premiere edition fidele au texte original a paraitre apres plus de deux siecles. Pour la premiere fois, dans cette edition critique integrale, les experts explorent a fond les relations entre les "Questions" et l'objet avoue sur lequel elles se centrent - l'"Encyclopedie" de Diderot et D'Alembert. Collaborateurs: Christophe Cave, Nicholas Cronk, Olivier Ferret, Russell Goulbourne, Antonio Gurrado, James Hanrahan, Christiane Mervaud, Michel Mervaud, Francois Moureau, Christophe Paillard, Gillian Pink, John Renwick, Gerhardt Stenger.

In their first century of uninterrupted publication, newspapers reached an all-embracing readership: male and female, noble and artisan, in both town and country. Such was its impact that this seemingly ephemeral product became a collector's object. In Reading newspapers Uriel Heyd examines this vibrant new print medium and investigates its political, social and cultural implications. Adopting a comparative approach, the author traces the culture of newspaper reading in Britain and America. Previously unexplored sources such as newspaper indexes and introductions, plays, auction catalogues and a unique newspaper collection assembled and annotated by a Bostonian shopkeeper, provide invaluable access to perceptions of the press, reading practices, and the ever-changing experience of consumers. While newspapers supplied news of immediacy and relevance, their effect transcended the here and now, influencing readers' perceptions of the age in which they lived and helping to shape historical memory. But the newly found power of this media also gave rise to a certain fear of its ability to exploit or manipulate public opinion. Perceived as vehicles of enlightenment, but also viewed with suspicion, the legacy of eighteenth-century newspapers is still felt today.

A new intellectual biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, showing how nineteenth-century British liberal culture retained and transformed the ideas of the Enlightenment in a rapidly changing world. Macaulay and the Enlightenment sheds new light on both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of the life and ideas of this most famous of nineteenth-century British historians. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was a prominent representative of mainstream British liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was also a Member of Parliament and government minister, and famously spent several years as a member of the governing council in India, where he promoted legal and educational reforms. One of the book's key contributions is the investigation of Enlightenment influences on the more well-known aspects of Macaulay's thought: history, politics, social and economic issues, religion, revolution and colonialism. The book also offers new revelations about Macaulay's attitude towards women, and provides insight into his views on art, nature and animals. In this study, Macaulay emerges as a more subversive, at times even radical, figure than previously assumed. The book thus emphasizes the transformation of Enlightenment ideas into early nineteenth-century liberalism.

In the Louvre museum hangs a portrait of a middle-aged man with long dark hair, a mustache, and heavy-lidded eyes, and he is dressed in the starched white collar and black coat of the typical Dutch burgher. The painting is now the iconic image of Rene Descartes, the great seventeenth-century French philosopher. And the painter of the work? The Dutch master Frans Hals--or so it was long believed, until the work was downgraded to a copy of an original. But where, then, is the authentic version located, and who painted it? Is the man in the painting--and in its original--really Descartes?

A unique combination of philosophy, biography, and art history, "The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter" investigates the remarkable individuals and circumstances behind a small portrait. Through this image--and the intersecting lives of a brilliant philosopher, a Catholic priest, and a gifted painter--Steven Nadler opens up a fascinating portal into Descartes's life and times, skillfully presenting an accessible introduction to Descartes's philosophical and scientific ideas, and an illuminating tour of the volatile political and religious environment of the Dutch Golden Age. As Nadler shows, Descartes's innovative ideas about the world, about human nature and knowledge, and about philosophy itself, stirred great controversy. Philosophical and theological critics vigorously opposed his views, and civil and ecclesiastic authorities condemned his writings. Nevertheless, Descartes's thought came to dominate the philosophical world of the period, and can rightly be called the philosophy of the seventeenth century.

Shedding light on a well-known image, "The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter" offers an engaging exploration of a celebrated philosopher's world and work."

If it is true that a painting can 'think visually', then it is also true that Diderot was the first to say so - and he has spelled out this concept better than anyone else. Diderot's Salons show that the 'imaginal' sense that arises from the engagement with a picture needs to be investigated using the concepts of ekphrasis and theatricality - the capacity to explore the power of pictures in relation to the composition of the scene, to the expressive and pantomimic gestures, and to what can be called a 'theory of affections'. The book will focus on an issue that pertains to the theory of pictures, on a question that is ground-breaking in the English-speaking academic context: how can we look at a picture in order to rethink aesthetics as a discipline that allows us to look at pictures from a philosophical point of view? The Salons demonstrate that the 'imaginal' process leading to knowledge always emerges from the picture itself, and that this process always needs to be supported by a method of inquiry that can rightly be called a philosophical method - as Diderot was a philosopher himself. Even when approaching this issue from a contemporary perspective, this method should always be related to the concepts of ekphrasis and theatricality. Fundamental, however, is also the 'pathetic', the emotionally stimulating, due to its essential relation to the enjoyment of pictures - something rooted in aesthetic disinterestedness, absorption and, conversely, voyeurism.

Over the course of his career, Gianni Vattimo has assumed a number of public and private identities and has pursued multiple intellectual paths. He seems to embody several contradictions, at once defending and questioning religion and critiquing and serving the state. Yet the diversity of his life and thought form the very essence of, as he sees it, the vocation and responsibility of the philosopher. In a world that desires quantifiable results and ideological expediency, the philosopher becomes the vital interpreter of the endlessly complex.

As he outlines his ideas about the philosopher's role, Vattimo builds an important companion to his life's work. He confronts questions of science, religion, logic, literature, and truth, and passionately defends the power of hermeneutics to engage with life's conundrums. Vattimo conjures a clear vision of philosophy as something separate from the sciences and the humanities but also intimately connected to their processes, and he explicates a conception of truth that emphasizes fidelity and participation through dialogue.

Written substantially in the late 1740s and published between 1747 and 1749, the three contes which are collected in this volume are among the best known of Voltaire's works. They were composed at a time when Voltaire had abandoned the tranquillity of Cirey for the tumult of Paris and Versailles, and was enjoying new recognition from members of the court and the learned societies. The three contes in the present volume, "Zadig", "Memnon" and "Le Monde comme il va", mark a new departure for Voltaire. They are the first of his fictional writings to be composed especially for the general reading public. Secure in his official prestige by the late 1740s, Voltaire felt free to publish these fictional experiments which adapt the popular mode of oriental fiction, parodying and pastiching the works of other writers - while at the same time offering serious criticisms of French society and his reflections on the nature of human happiness and the problem of evil.

Le monde doit le premier manifeste d'envergure contre la torture et la peine de mort a Cesare Beccaria. Son livre "Dei delitti e delle pene" retentit dans toute l'Europe au dix-huitieme siecle. L'edition critique du "Commentaire" de Voltaire 'sur le livre des delits et des peines' permet d'apprecier pleinement l'importance de cette rencontre de deux grands esprits des Lumieres. "L'Avis au public sur les parricides" en defense des Sirven, les ecrits pour le compte des 'natifs' de Geneve et un trio de textes deistes viennent etoffer le concept de la justice chez Voltaire.

In this classic work of intellectual history, Ernst Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment. Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved.

In a new foreword, Peter Gay considers "The Philosophy of the Enlightenment" in the context in which it was written--Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. He also argues that Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century.

While Kant is commonly regarded as one of the most austere philosophers of all time, this book provides quite a different perspective of the founder of transcendental philosophy. Kant is often thought of as being boring, methodical, and humorless. Yet the thirty jokes and anecdotes collected and illustrated here for the first time reveal a man and a thinker who was deeply interested in how humor and laughter shape how we think, feel, and communicate with fellow human beings. In addition to a foreword on Kant's theory of humor by Noel Carroll as well as Clewis's informative chapters, Kant's Humorous Writings contains new translations of Kant's jokes, quips, and anecdotes. Each of the thirty excerpts is illustrated and supplemented by historical commentaries which explain their significance.

The Glasgow Enlightenment is widely regarded as the first book to explore the nature and accomplishments of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Glasgow in a comprehensive manner. In addition to a general introduction by the editors, there are seven chapters devoted to Glasgow University professors, such as Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, John Millar, William Leechman, and John Anderson. At a time when the Glasgow economy was booming in the strength of its trade with America, these and other Glasgow men of science and learning were making major contributions to the European world of philosophy, law, political economy, natural philosophy, medicine, and religious toleration. There are also five chapters on other individuals and topics, including the physician and author John Moore, James Boswell during his student days, images of Glasgow in popular poetry, and Popular party clergymen who challenged the dominant views of the academic Enlightenment with an alternative vision of liberty and piety. This edition features a new bibliographical preface by Richard B. Sher that discusses the substantial secondary literature on eighteenth-century Glasgow and the Glasgow Enlightenment since the original publication of this book more than a quarter of a century ago.

This volume contains two works of 1777. The "Prix de la justice et de l'humanite" is a summation of Voltaire's opinions over a lifetime about the confusions and cruelties in the contemporary justice system. The "Commentaire sur l'Esprit des lois de Montesquieu" resulted from Condorcet's criticisms of Voltaire's disparaging comments about Montesquieu. At first Voltaire had regarded Montesquieu as an ally in the fight against Church-led oppression, but by 1777 he associated him with republicanism, arguing that L'Esprit des lois 'aurait du etre intitule L'Esprit republicain'.

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is 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 landmark 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. Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, 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. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risque book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment 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.

Originally published in 1959. This book examines the French Enlightenment by analyzing critical thought in eighteenth-centruy France. It examines the philosophes' views on evil, free will and determinism, and human nature. This is an interesting group to look at, according to Crocker, because French Enlightenment thinkers straddled two vastly different time periods.