L'anneau magique qui relie musique et langage delimite un univers insondable dans lequel causes et effets s'enlacent indistinctement. Dans ce neant vertigineux, la galaxie rousseauienne exerce une attirance irresistible et promet, a l'esprit critique qui ose l'aborder, des aventures intellectuelles passionnantes. L'irreductible auteur des Confessions a justement place le fleau de sa pensee au point d'equilibre de ces deux poles, entre musique et langage, une zone definie par le concept de societe car, proclame-t-il dans l'Essai sur l'origine des langues: 'les oiseaux sifflent, l'homme seul chante; et l'on ne peut entendre ni chant, ni symphonie, sans se dire a l'instant. Un autre etre sensible est ici.' Rousseau reitere dans son Dictionnaire de musique sa theorie de l'exclusivite humaine de la parole et de la musique: 'Quoiqu'il en soit de l'etymologie du nom, l'origine de l'art est certainement plus pres de l'homme, et si la parole n'a pas commence par du chant, il est sur, au moins, qu'on chante partout ou l'on parle.' Autour de cette dialectique de la musique et du langage se sont reunis des rousseauistes et d'autres specialistes de la musique et du langage pour cogiter la thematique de ces noces infinies et en pourchasser les echos a travers les denses bocages de l'oeuvre du philosophe-musicien. Leurs textes ici reunis constituent les actes du XIIe colloque de l'Association Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Shows Goethe, the most famous of German writers, as a child of the Enlightenment. Throughout his oeuvre Goethe invokes the writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment: Voltaire and Goldsmith, Sterne and Bayle, Beccaria and Franklin. And he does not merely reference them: their ideas make up the salt of his most acclaimed works. Like Hume before him, Goethe takes up the topic of suicide, but in a best-selling novel, Werther; the beating heart of Faust I is the fate of a woman who commits infanticide, a burning social issue ofhis age; in an article for a popular journal Goethe takes up the cause of Kant and Penn, who wrote treatises on how to establish peace in Europe. In another essay Goethe calls for reconciliation between Germans who had fought against each other in those same Wars, as well as for worldwide understanding between Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Heathens. Professor Kerry shows that Goethe is a child of the Enlightenment and an innovator of its legacy. To do sohe discusses a chronological swath of Goethe's works, both popular and neglected, and shows how each of them engages Enlightenment concerns. Paul Kerry is Professor of History at Brigham Young University.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb documented the first burst, which came in the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Now, in his sequel, The Dream of Enlightenment, Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short period-from the early 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution-Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and that of the birth of modern philosophy. As Gottlieb explains, all these men were amateurs: none had much to do with any university. They tried to fathom the implications of the new science and of religious upheaval, which led them to question traditional teachings and attitudes. What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and for our ideas of God? How should a government deal with religious diversity-and what, actually, is government for? Such questions remain our questions, which is why Descartes, Hobbes, and the others are still pondered today. Yet it is because we still want to hear them that we can easily get these philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think they speak our language and live in our world; but to understand them properly, we must step back into their shoes. Gottlieb puts readers in the minds of these frequently misinterpreted figures, elucidating the history of their times and the development of scientific ideas while engagingly explaining their arguments and assessing their legacy in lively prose. With chapters focusing on Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, and Voltaire-and many walk-on parts-The Dream of Enlightenment creates a sweeping account of what the Enlightenment amounted to, and why we are still in its debt.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

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.

Marking the tercentenary of David Hume's birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain. Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume s autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order.

Excerpts from Hume s autobiography at the beginning of each chapter open a window onto the eighteenth-century context in which Hume s philosophy developed. Famous in Christian Britain as a polymath and a nonbeliever, Hume recounts how his early encounters with clerical authority laid the foundation for his lifelong skepticism toward religion. In Scotland, where he grew up, he had been forced to study lists of sins in order to spot his own childish flaws, he reports. Later, as a young man, he witnessed the clergy s punishment of a pregnant unmarried servant, and this led him to question the violent consequences of the Church s emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. Baier s clear interpretation of Hume s "Treatise of Human Nature "explains the link between Hume s growing disillusionment and his belief that ethics should be based on investigations of human nature, not on religious dogma.""

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" "Four months before he died, Hume concluded his autobiography with a eulogy he wrote for his own funeral. It makes no mention of his flaws, critics, or disappointments. Baier s more realistic account rivets our attention on connections between the way Hume lived and the way he thought insights unavailable to Hume himself, perhaps, despite his lifelong introspection.

Originally published in 1963. Perhaps the most generative ethical question of eighteenth-century France was how to live a virtuous and happy life at the same time. During the Age of Enlightenment, Christianity fell out of vogue as the dominant and authoritative moral code. In place of Christianity's emphasis on sin and redemption in light of a supposed afterlife, present happiness became recognized as an appropriate end goal among French Enlightenment thinkers. French intellectuals struggled to find equilibrium between nature (a person's individual goals and needs) and culture (the political, economic, and social organization of humans for a collective good). Enlightenment discourse generated a unique cultural moment in which thinkers addressed the problems of humans' moral coexistence through the dichotomy of nature and culture. Lester Crocker addresses these questions in an overview of ethical thought in eighteenth-century France.

The first book to explore the role of images in philosophical thought and teaching in the early modern period Delving into the intersections between artistic images and philosophical knowledge in Europe from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, The Art of Philosophy shows that the making and study of visual art functioned as important methods of philosophical thinking and instruction. From frontispieces of books to monumental prints created by philosophers in collaboration with renowned artists, Susanna Berger examines visual representations of philosophy and overturns prevailing assumptions about the limited function of the visual in European intellectual history. Rather than merely illustrating already existing philosophical concepts, visual images generated new knowledge for both Aristotelian thinkers and anti-Aristotelians, such as Descartes and Hobbes. Printmaking and drawing played a decisive role in discoveries that led to a move away from the authority of Aristotle in the seventeenth century. Berger interprets visual art from printed books, student lecture notebooks, alba amicorum (friendship albums), broadsides, and paintings, and examines the work of such artists as Pietro Testa, Leonard Gaultier, Abraham Bosse, Durer, and Rembrandt. In particular, she focuses on the rise and decline of the "plural image," a genre that was popular among early modern philosophers. Plural images brought multiple images together on the same page, often in order to visualize systems of logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, or moral philosophy. Featuring previously unpublished prints and drawings from the early modern period and lavish gatefolds, The Art of Philosophy reveals the essential connections between visual commentary and philosophical thought.

Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives. In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems-and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised-were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it. Building his argument on the similarity between Smith's and Rousseau's theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics-the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.

Explores early modern interpretations of Roman Scotland Examines an important aspect of the development of Scottish identity, a subject being brought to the fore again in recent debates surrounding Scottish independence Offers an in-depth study of a largely overlooked aspect of Scottish historiography Makes extensive use of archival and manuscript material, much of it previously unpublished Takes a broad, multidisciplinary approach Examines the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment, James Macpherson's Ossianic poems and the rise of Romanticism This book focuses on early modern attitudes towards Scotland's ancient past and looks in particular at the ways in which this past was not only misunderstood, but also manipulated in attempts to create a patriotic history for the nation. Adding a new perspective on the formation of Scotland's national identity, the book documents a century-long, often heated debate regarding the extent of Roman influence north of Hadrian's Wall. By exploring the lives and writings of antiquarians, poets and Enlightenment thinkers, it aims to uncover the political, patriotic and intellectual influences which fuelled this debate. Classical Caledonia will cast light on a rarely discussed aspect of Scotland's historiography, one which played a vital role in establishing early modern notions of 'Scottishness' at a time when Scotland was coming to terms with radical and traumatic changes to its position within Britain and the wider world.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

'Man being born...to perfect freedom...hath by nature a power...to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate.' Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) is one of the great classics of political philosophy, widely regarded as the foundational text of modern liberalism. In it Locke insists on majority rule, and regards no government as legitimate unless it has the consent of the people. He sets aside people's ethnicities, religions, and cultures and envisages political societies which command our assent because they meet our elemental needs simply as humans. His work helped to entrench ideas of a social contract, human rights, and protection of property as the guiding principles for just actions and just societies. Published in the same year, A Letter Concerning Toleration aimed to end Christianity's wars of religion and called for the separation of church and state so that everyone could enjoy freedom of conscience. In this edition of these two major works, Mark Goldie considers the contested nature of Locke's reputation, which is often appropriated by opposing political and religious ideologies. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Immanuel Kant laid the foundations of modern Western thought. Every subsequent major philosopher owes a profound debt to Kant's attempts to delimit human reason as an appropriate object of philosophical enquiry. And yet, Kant's relentless systematic formalism made him a controversial figure in the history of the philosophy that he helped to shape. Introducing Kant focuses on the three critiques of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgement. It describes Kant's main formal concepts: the relation of mind to sensory experience, the question of freedom and the law and, above all, the revaluation of metaphysics. Kant emerges as a diehard rationalist yet also a Romantic, deeply committed to the power of the sublime to transform experience. The illustrated guide explores the paradoxical nature of the pre-eminent philosopher of the Enlightenment, his ideas and explains the reasons for his undiminished importance in contemporary philosophical debates.

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.

In this concise and powerful book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical interpretations of the era have long been hopelessly confused, Vincenzo Ferrone makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was--and why it is still relevant today. Ferrone explains why the Enlightenment was a profound and wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped Western identity, reformed politics through the invention of human rights, and redefined knowledge by creating a critical culture. These new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and understood. Featuring an illuminating afterword describing how his argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, The Enlightenment provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history. The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS--Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche.

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. Collaborateurs: Marcus Allen, Francois Bessire, Alice Breathe, Christophe Cave, Marie-Helene Cotoni, Nicholas Cronk, Olivier Ferret, Michael Freyne, Graham Gargett, Paul Gibbard, Russell Goulbourne, Dominique Lussier, Christiane Mervaud, Michel Mervaud, Guillaume Metayer, Paul H. Meyer, Jeanne R. Monty, Francois Moureau, Christophe Paillard, Gillian Pink, Stephane Pujol, John Renwick, Bertram E. Schwarzbach, Arnoux Straudo, Jeroom Vercruysse.

The "Questions sur l'Encyclopedie" stands as Voltaire's longest work, and yet it is one of his least known. In this complete critical edition, scholars explore fully for the first time the relationship between the "Questions" and its named object of enquiry - Diderot and D'Alembert's "Encyclopedie". They also assess the complex techniques by which Voltaire fashions new material through extensive copying and borrowing from his earlier publications. The work as a whole, written and revised principally between 1770 and 1774, is a compendium of Voltaire's views on a broad range of subjects including religion, history, art and literature. It varies greatly in style and tone - from joking asides and fleeting observations to long and complex disquisitions. It casts new light on familiar themes - justice, humanity and tolerance - and explores many new ones, constituting finally, in Voltaire's own words, 'un livre moral, fait en forme de dictionnaire'. The Voltaire Foundation's new edition of the "Questions" in eight volumes is the first authentic edition of this work to appear in over two centuries. Contributors: David Adams, Marcus Allen, Francois Bessire, Alice Breathe, Christophe Cave, Marie-Helene Cotoni, Nicholas Cronk, Olivier Ferret, Michael Freyne, Graham Gargett, Paul Gibbard, Russell Goulbourne, Antonio Gurrado, James Hanrahan, Dominique Lussier, Laurence Mace, Myrtille Mericam-Bourdet, Christiane Mervaud, Michel Mervaud, Guillaume Metayer, Paul H. Meyer, Jeanne R. Monty, Francois Moureau, Jose-Michel Moureaux, Christophe Paillard, Gillian Pink, Stephane Pujol, John Renwick, Bertram E. Schwarzbach, Maria Susana Seguin, Gerhardt Stenger, Arnoux Straudo, Claire Trevien, Jeroom Vercruysse, Mark Waddicor.