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.

The reputation of the Marquis de Sade is well-founded. The experience of reading his works is demanding to an extreme. Violence and sexuality appear on almost every page, and these descriptions are interspersed with extended discourses on materialism, atheism, and crime. In this bold and rigorous study William S. Allen sets out the context and implications of Sade's writings in order to explain their lasting challenge to thought. For what is apparent from a close examination of his works is the breadth of his readings in contemporary science and philosophy, and so the question that has to be addressed is why Sade pursued these interests by way of erotica of the most violent kind. Allen shows that Sade's interests lead to a form of writing that seeks to bring about a new mode of experience that is engaged in exploring the limits of sensibility through their material actualization. In common with other Enlightenment thinkers Sade is concerned with the place of reason in the world, a place that becomes utterly transformed by a materialism of endless excess. This concern underlies his interest in crime and sexuality, and thereby puts him in the closest proximity to thinkers like Kant and Diderot, but also at the furthest extreme, in that it indicates how far the nature and status of reason is perverted. It is precisely this materialist critique of reason that is developed and demonstrated in his works, and which their reading makes persistently, excessively, apparent.

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man." Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how "ethnography" originated as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as "ethnology" by scholars in Goettingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries. Before Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on "other" cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.

Figures of Natality reads metaphors and narratives of birth in the age of Goethe (1770-1832) as indicators of the new, the unexpected, and the revolutionary. Using Hannah Arendt's concept of natality, Joseph O'Neil argues that Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist see birth as challenging paradigms of Romanticism as well as of Enlightenment, resisting the assimilation of the political to economics, science, or morality. They choose instead to preserve the conflicts and tensions at the heart of social, political, and poetic revolutions. In a historical reading, these tensions evolve from the idea of revolution as Arendt reads it in British North America to the social and economic questions that shape the French Revolution, culminating in a consideration of the culture of the modern republic as such. Alongside this geopolitical evolution, the ways of representing the political change, too, moving from the new as revolutionary eruption to economic metaphors of birth. More pressing still is the question of revolutionary subjectivity and political agency, and Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist have an answer that is remarkably close to that of Walter Benjamin, as that "secret index" through which each past age is "pointed toward redemption." Figures of Natality uncovers this index at the heart of scenes and products of birth in the age of Goethe.

Rene Descartes is famous as the philosopher who was prepared to doubt everything- even his own physical existence. Most people know that he said 'I think, therefore I am', even if they are not always sure what he really meant by it. Introducing Descartes explains what Descartes doubted, and why he is usually called the father of modern philosophy. It is a clear and accessible guide to all the puzzling questions he asked about human beings and their place in the world. Dave Robinson and Chris Garratt give a lucid account of Descartes' contributions to modern science, mathematics, and the philosophy of mind- and also reveal why he liked to do all of his serious thinking in bed.

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.

Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632-1677) was one of the most systematic, inspiring, and influential philosophers of the early modern period. From a pantheistic starting point that identified God with Nature as all of reality, he sought to demonstrate an ethics of reason, virtue, and freedom while unifying religion with science and mind with body. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, politics, and the analysis of religion remain vital to the present day. Yet his writings initially appear forbidding to contemporary readers, and his ideas have often been misunderstood. This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza includes new chapters on Spinoza's life and his metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and biblical scholarship, as well as extensive updates to the previous chapters and bibliography. A thorough, reliable, and accessible guide to this extraordinary philosopher, it will be invaluable to anyone who wants to understand what Spinoza has to teach.

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. The Time of Enlightenment argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

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.

This is the first English-language anthology to provide a compendium of primary source material on the sublime. The book takes a chronological approach, covering the earliest ancient traditions up through the early and late modern periods and into contemporary theory. It takes an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to this key concept in aesthetics and criticism, representing voices and traditions that have often been excluded. As such, it will be of use and interest across the humanities and allied disciplines, from art criticism and literary theory, to gender and cultural studies and environmental philosophy. The anthology includes brief introductions to each selection, reading or discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography and index - making it an ideal text for building a course around or for further study. The book's apparatus provides valuable context for exploring the history and contemporary views of the sublime.

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be 'the Newton of the moral world', as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read and debated in the 250 years since its publication. Rousseau's Social Contract: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining Rousseau's famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication in 1762.

"Margaret L King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant -- but by no means the most obvious -- texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is simply the best introduction to the subject now available ." -- Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters

The general introduction to Voltaire's "Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, par des amateurs" traces the history of its genesis and publication, its contemporary critical reception and the historical and literary questions raised by the text. The volume also comprises several appendices and a thematic index of the text as a whole. Collaborateurs: Christiane Mervaud, Nicholas Cronk, Dominique Lussier.

The museum 'La Specola' in Florence hosts a celebrated collection of eighteenth-century anatomical models in wax - lifelike body parts and bodies in vivid poses, reminiscent of famous works of art and anatomical illustration. Based on a detailed study of rich archival sources, Model Experts explores practices of model production and display, and reveals the often invisible labours of the co-operating artisans, anatomists, and administrators. The book shows that the models were central to a remarkable political experiment: 'La Specola' opened in 1775 as the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History, one of the first public science museums in Europe. As a venue for public enlightenment, the museum displayed model anatomies to create the model citizen. The study also moves beyond the borders of Tuscany, following a set of Florentine waxes to Vienna to explore the diverse reactions of medical professionals and general audiences as the models travelled in enlightened Europe. Focusing on the models' role for articulations of expertise in state service, the study uncovers the tensions and controversies behind the artificial anatomies' serene surfaces to highlight the fragility of expert authority, and the mutual constitution of notions of expertise, the public, and the state around 1800. The book will be of interest to historians of medicine, science, art, and enlightenment, to scholars in museum studies and in science & technology studies interested in the historical emergence of expertise, public engagement with science, and the relationship between science and the state.

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.