Between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment: Jean-Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva. By Michael Heyd. International Archives of the History of Ideas 96. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983. xiv + 308 pp. f. 150.

1984 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-557
Author(s):  
Richard L. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hague

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.

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