The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Revisionist History through the Lens of Jewish-Christian Relations

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-86
Author(s):  
Anthony Le Donne

This essay challenges the standard paradigm for the intellectual history of ‘Jesus Quests’ popularized by Albert Schweitzer and mimicked by almost every survey since. I argue that historical reconstruction begins at least with Augustine (perhaps sooner) and with an eye to Jewish-Christian relations. By analyzing key moments in the intellectual history of Jesus studies, I argue that a common thread has been Jewish-Christian relations. This thread suggests that an important (perhaps seminal) impetus for study of the historical Jesus before the Enlightenment and through to the modern period has been largely neglected by the standard ‘Jesus Quests’ paradigm.

2001 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-171
Author(s):  
Christopher Torr

Various pair-wise classifications have been employed in historiography, the most recent being Waterman's distinction between intellectual history and the history of economic analysis. Other dichotomies are rational reconstruction and historical reconstruction, the context of discovery and the context of justification, internal history and external history and relativist and absolutist accounts. In the 1930s Butterfield differentiated the Whig interpretation of history from the non-Whig approach. Another dichotomy which has a much older history is the distinction between text and context. Perhaps the oldest dichotomy of all is the distinction between particulars and universals. An attempt is made to show the age-old controversy between nominalism and universals provides a common thread to the dichotomies discussed in this paper.


Author(s):  
David Randall

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....


Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke

This chapter retraces Alasdair MacIntyre's own construal of the Enlightenment Project's trajectory in order to show how his interpretation of an intellectual tradition depends above all on his assessment of its impact. It argues that MacIntyre's Enlightenment Project is largely unreconstructed, unredeemed, and undiminished in its failure, even after substantial embellishment. His three principal works comprise an extraordinary indictment of the theoretical and practical legacy of eighteenth-century philosophy. His account projects the Enlightenment's implications and influence as they stem from its aims. He holds it to blame for some of the most sinister aspects of a morally vacuous civilization, cursed by the malediction of unlicenced Reason. His intellectual history of the period forms one of the mainsprings of his own philosophy.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Ludwig Stockinger

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.


1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Goldie

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scott's tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement.It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-30
Author(s):  
Kevin Fernlund ◽  

The idea that societies or cultures can evolve and, therefore, can be compared and graded has been central to modern history, in general, and to big history, in particular, which seeks to unite natural and human history; biology and culture. However, while extremely useful, this notion is not without significant moral and ethical challenges, which has been noted by scholars. This article is a short intellectual history of the idea of cultural evolution and its critics, the cultural relativists, from the Age of the Enlightenment, what David Deutsch called the “beginning of infinity,” to the neo-Hegelianism of Francis Fukuyama. The emphasis here is on Europe and the Americas and the argument is that the universal evolutionism of the Enlightenment ultimately prevailed over historical partic-ularism, as global disparities in social development, which were once profound, narrowed or even disappeared altogether.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (41) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Rodrigues de Castro

RESUMOO presente trabalho é um estudo de história intelectual do direito e tem como objetivo descrever a evolução de alguns tópicos do pensamento jurídico-político setecentista. Na teoria política pró-absolutista do século XVIII, um dos tópicos mais importantes foi a figura do legislador, que aparece já no começo do século no âmbito do discurso da felicidade pública. Posteriormente, o tema volta a ser elaborado pela incipiente filosofia utilitarista que se desenvolvia ainda dentro do iluminismo com Claude-Adrien Helvétius e Cesare Beccaria. De tal forma, o tema do legislador contribuiu de forma decisiva para a transição à segunda modernidade no âmbito do pensamento jurídico, fundamentando a hegemonia da lei sobre as outras fontes de direito e facilitando a emergência dos direitos – direitos humanos, direitos fundamentais, direitos da personalidade – como centro da ordem jurídica. Procuramos seguir este itinerário, demonstrando como a questão do legislador e os temas a ele conectados vão sendo reelaborados ao longo do desenvolvimento do pensamento político setecentista. Demonstramos, assim, que no âmbito de uma fundamentação teórica do absolutismo monárquico, que se inicia com a metamorfose na compreensão do papel da coroa com relação à sociedade, o tema do legislador converte-se em pedra angular de algumas importantes tendências do pensamento jurídico moderno. Utilizamos os métodos propostos pela história conceitual.PALAVRAS-CHAVEHistória do pensamento jurídico. Legislador. Utilitarismo. Máxima felicidade. ABSTRACTThe present work is a study on the intellectual history of law and aims to describe the evolution of some topics of eighteenth-century legal-political thinking. In the eighteenth-century pro-absolutist political theory, one of the most important subjects of debate was the legislator, which appears already at the beginning of the century in the “public happiness” discourse. Subsequently, it continued to be discussed by the incipient utilitarian philosophy that started being developed within the Enlightenment with Claude-Adrien Helvétius and Cesare Beccaria. The debate on the legislator contributed decisively to the transition to the second modernity in the field of legal thought, laying the foundations for the hegemony of statutory law over other sources of law and facilitating the emergence of rights – human rights, fundamental rights, personality rights – as the center of the legal order. We seek to follow this itinerary, demonstrating how the legislator question evolved throughout the eighteenth-century political thought. We thus intend to demonstrate that within the framework of a theoretical justification for monarchical absolutism, the legislator subject became the cornerstone of some important trends in modern legal thought. We use the methods proposed by conceptual history.KEYWORDSHistory of legal thought. Legislator. Utilitarianism. Greatest happiness.


Author(s):  
Claire Brizon

Based on three case studies of artifacts from 18th century collections preserved in Swiss cultural institutions, I attempt to rethink the use of the word "colonial" before the 19th century, and to apply it to describe collections from the modern period. I attempt to shed light on how these collections could be exhibited to provide critical perspective on these artefacts and the stories they are allowed to tell, in view of the upcoming exhibition entitled Exotic Switzerland? A Global History of the Enlightenment to open in 2020 at the Palais de Rumine in Lausanne.


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