The keywords of the Enlightenment-freedom, tolerance, rights, equality-are today heard everywhere, and they are used to endorse a wide range of positions, some of which are in perfect contradiction. While Orwell's 1984 claims that there is one phrase in the English language that resists translation into Newspeak, namely the opening lines of that key Enlightenment text, the Declaration of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...', we also find the Wall Street Journal saying of the Iraq War that the US was 'fighting for the very notion of the Enlightenment'. It seems we are no longer sure whether these truths are self-evident nor quite what they might mean today. Based on the critically acclaimed Oxford Amnesty Lectures series, this book brings together a number of major international figures to debate the history of freedom, tolerance, equality, and to explore the complex legacy of the Enlightenment for human rights. The lectures are published here with responses from other leading figures in the field.

Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and translation of Diderots Letter on the Blind for Use by the Sighted (the first translation into English since the eighteenth-century). Diderot was the founder and editor of the Encyclopdie, a novelist, a philosopher and an active proponent of democratic ideals. His Letter on the Blind is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature. By discussing the blind, Diderot undercuts a central assumption of the Enlightenment, present in the very term itself in its reference to light, namely that moral and philosophical insight was dependent on seeing.

Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind. Diderot was the editor of the Encyclopedie, that Trojan horse of Enlightenment ideas, as well as a novelist, playwright, art critic and philosopher. His Letter on the Blind of 1749 is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature because it contradicts a central assumption of Western literature and philosophy, and of the Enlightenment in particular, namely that moral and philosophical insight is dependent on seeing. Kate Tunstall's essay guides the reader through the Letter, its anecdotes, ideas and its conversational mode of presenting them, and it situates the Letter in relation both to the Encyclopedie and to a rich tradition of writing about and, most importantly, talking and listening to the blind.>

There are few issues more urgently in need of intelligent analysis both in the UK and elsewhere than those relating to displacement, asylum, and migration. In this volume, based on the 2004 Oxford Amnesty Lectures, major figures in philosophy, political science, law, psychoanalysis, sociology, and literature address the challenges that displacement, asylum, and migration pose to our notions of human rights. Each lecture is accompanied by a critical response from another leading thinker in the field. The volume contains lectures by Slavoj Zizek, Bhikhu Parekh, Ali A.Mazrui, Matthew J. Gibney, Saskia Sassen, Harold Hongju Koh, Caryl Phillips, and Jacqueline Rose, with critical responses from Michael Ignatieff, Seyla Benhabib, Iftikhar Malik, Melissa Lane, Christian Joppke, Rey Koslowski, Elleke Boehmer, and Ali Abunimah. This is the twelfth volume of Oxford Amnesty Lectures to be published since 1992. 'All good citizens should probably want to buy them . . . simply because they are published in support of such a good cause. It turns out, though, that no self-sacrifice is involved. [These] are immensely rich, challenging, stimulating volumes . . . The contributors' lists are star-studded . . . and each book has a clear, coherent, overarching theme, despite the extreme diversity of the individual lectures' (The Independent, April 10, 2003).