Roger L.  Williams. French Botany in the Enlightenment: The Ill‐Fated Voyages of La Pérouse and His Rescuers. (International Archives of the History of Ideas, 182.) 240 pp., illus., bibl., index. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001. €89, $85 (cloth).

Isis ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Frost
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

GEOGRAPHY, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND IMPROVEMENT Geography and Enlightenment. Edited by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii+455. ISBN 0-226-48720-2 (hb). $52·00. 0-226-48721-0 (pb). $25·00. Nature's government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world. By Richard Drayton. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi+346. ISBN 0-300-05976-0. £25·00. Enlightenment geography: the political languages of British geography, 1650–1850. By Robert J. Mayhew. London: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. viii+324. ISBN 0-333-79186-X. £45·00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
FELIX DRIVER
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Lecture Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

Philosophie als Konfliktgeschehen

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Ludwig Stockinger
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interpretation Of Literature

Abstract The reception of Panagiotis Kondylis’ depiction of the Enlightenment published in 1981 was determined by its reduction to the thesis of the ›rehabilitation of sensuality‹ (Sinnlichkeit). In addition, the objection raised by critics against ›decisionism‹ impaired an adequate reception of Kondylis’ work. This article attempts to reconstruct Kondylis’ argument and clarify its social-anthropological presuppositions, by interpreting the history of ideas as a history of the struggle for power between philosophy and theology. Employed as an agent in this struggle, the ›rehabilitation of sensuality‹ generates a second problem: the danger of relativizing all values as in nihilism. This article identifies work on this problem, which remains ultimately unresolved, as the central goal of the Enlightenment movement. Understood in this light, Kondylis’ these can be contextualized in the social-historical interpretation of literature and culture grounded in theories of secularization and history of problems in the modern period.

scholarly journals Opinion och revolution: Upplysning i Lund 1719

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Bo Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Popular Opinion ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Different Levels

<p>This article examines the words revolution and opinion in an academic dissertation written in Latin and defended at the University of Lund in 1719. The dissertation reflects the meaning of these words before they became the keywords of the Enlightenment, as modern historical scholarship has come to identify them. Revolution here retains the connotation of cyclical political change, although it is noteworthy that the author of the dissertation apparently had the ongoing change of the Swedish constitution from autocracy to parliamentary rule in mind. Opinion vacillates between the dominant values of an era and unstable popular opinion. More interesting, however, are the efforts of the author to describe the relation between opinion and society. With the help of Longinus, a connection is postulated between philosophical opinions and political systems: Greek democracy fostered salutary idealist philosophy whereas autocratic monarchy begot materialism and atheism. Still more interesting are the endeavours of the author to discern different levels of ideas in society. He makes a distinction between the articulated, explicit ideas of philosophers, or scholars, and the non-discursive opinions which are not explicit but stay hidden in the consciousness (mente) of the people. The dissertation is an academic exercise written in Latin at a peripheral university in Europe. In spite of the presumed backwardness of universities, it articulates an emerging awareness of the relation between ideas and society; in fact, it can be seen to signify a beginning of an interest in the history of ideas.</p>

Epicurus in Nineteenth-Century Germany

2020 ◽  
pp. 760-790
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Unique Point ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

Epicurus marks a unique point of convergence for three unlikely bedfellows in the nineteenth century: Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Each sees a different “Epicurus” in this fourth-century successor to Democritus, the fifth-century co-founder of atomism. Each renders Epicurus and his materialism into a symptom of modernity’s engagement with antiquity, a role that atomism increasingly played from the Enlightenment onwards. Fresh readings of each of these philosophers contribute to a better understanding of their ways of construing the history of ideas, and in particular their bold reinterpretations of Epicurus himself, in addition to correcting a number of misconceptions surrounding their individual readings of Epicurus, be this in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy and his Science of Logic, Marx’s dissertation, or Nietzsche’s sprawling corpus of published and unpublished writings.

scholarly journals Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment; Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton. Ed. Charles Walton. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. xvii, 244p. ISBN 978-0-271-05012-6. $49.95

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-207
Author(s):  
Greg Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
State University ◽  
Pennsylvania State University ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Penn State ◽  
History Of

Appearing as a title in the Penn State Series in the History of the Book, Into Print is a collection of twelve essays demonstrating a debt to Robert Darnton’s ground-breaking scholarship on the social history of ideas (Walton, vii; Pasta, 82). Divided into five thematic parts (“Making News,” “Print, Paper, Markets, and States,” “Police and Opinion,” “Enlightenment in Revolution,” and “Enlightenment Universalism and Cultural Difference”), it includes contributions from scholars, primarily historians, who studied under Darnton. Editor Charles Walton points out in his superb preface that, while topics covered are diverse, each essay exhibits Darnton’s influence by “analyzing the dynamic . . .

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