Enlightenment thought. An anthology of sources . King Margaret L.

Enlightenment Thought

An Anthology of Sources

Edited and Translated, with an Introduction, by Margaret L. King

Cambridge, MAHackett Publishing Company, March 2019 - 304 pp. 

62$

978-1-62466-754-1



Contents:
Chronology, Introduction
Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697

• Idols, or false notions: Francis Bacon, The New Instrument (1620)
• I think, therefore I am: René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)
• God, or Nature: Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
• The system of the world: Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)
• He searched for truth throughout his life: Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697)

Chapter Two - The Learned Maid: 1638–1740

• A face raised toward heaven: Anna Maria van Schurman, Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman (1638)
• The worlds I have made: Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666)
• A finer sort of cattle: Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673)
• I warn you of the world: Madame de Maintenon, Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr (August 1, 1686), and Instruction: On the World (1707)
• The daybreak of your reason: Émilie Du Châtelet, Fundamentals of Physics (1740)

Chapter Three - A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695

• The chief criterion of the True Church: John Locke, Letter on Toleration (1689)
• Freedom from any superior power on earth: John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689)
• A white paper, with nothing written on it: John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
• Let your rules be as few as possible: John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
• From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life: John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695)

Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784

• In the wilderness, they are reborn: Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725/1730/1744)
• Without these Names, nothing can be known, Carl Linnaeus, System of Nature (1735)
• All the clouds at last are lifted: Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind (1750)
• A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge: Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse (1751)
• Dare to know! : Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784)

Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779

• The narrow limits of human understanding: David Hume, An Abstract of a Book Lately Published (1740)
• The soul is but an empty word: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747)
• All is reduced to sensation: Claude Adrien Helvétius, On the Mind (1758)
• An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods: Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Common Sense (1772)
• Let each believe that his own ring is real: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779)

Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764

• This is the country of sects: Voltaire, Philosophical Letters (1733)
• Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes: Voltaire, The Culture and Spirit of Nations (1756)
• The best of all possible worlds: Voltaire, Candide (1759)
• Are we not all children of the same God?: Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance (1763)
• If a book displeases you, refute it! : Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764)

Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776

• Things must be so ordered that power checks power, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
• Complete freedom of trade must be ensured: François Quesnay, General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom (1758)
• The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764)
• There is no peace in the absence of justice: Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)
• Led by an invisible hand: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785

• Thus died this great man: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave (1688)
• Not one sins the less for not being Christian: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Embassy Letters (1716–1718)
• Do you not restore to them their liberty?: Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies (1770)
• Some things which are rather interesting: Captain James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (1777)
• The inner genius of my being: Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind (1785)

Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782

• The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality (1754)
• The supreme direction of the General Will: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
• Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761)
• Build a fence around your child’s soul: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762)
• This man will be myself: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1770)

Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792

• No higher design than to get her a husband: Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1700)
• The days of my bondage begin: Anna Stanisławska, Orphan Girl (1685)
• A dying victim dragged to the altar: Denis Diderot, The Nun (1760/1780)
• Created to be the toy of man: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• Man, are you capable of being just?: Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen (1791)

Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792

• I took upon me to assert my freedom: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771/1792)
• Freedom has been hunted round the globe: Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
• Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: Thomas Jefferson and Others, Declaration of Independence (1776)
• A safeguard against faction and insurrection: James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)
• An end to government by force and fraud: Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–1792)

Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794

• A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
• The future destiny of the human species: Nicolas de Condorcet, A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793–1794)

Texts and Studies, Index

The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason

The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason.

J.D. Burson and A.M. Matytsin

Liverpool University Press,

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2019:03

ISBN: 9781786941947, 248 pages, £65.00

This collection of essays challenges the notion that the eighteenth century was an unalloyed ‘Age of Reason’, and instead depicts a complicated Enlightenment culture to which philosophical skepticism was far more central than hitherto conceived. This volume examines the process by which skepticism was challenged and gradually tamed to bring about an anxious confidence in the powers of human understanding.

• An original captivating work that shows how pervasive doubt and lingering anxiety about the limits of human understanding were at the very heart of the early Enlightenment.
• This fascinating series of essays by an international array of historians and philosophers underscores the significance of lesser-known clergy and legal scholars (Claude Buffier, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Georg Heber), and unseats regnant understandings of more well-known figures (Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, George Berkeley, Baron d’Holbach, and David Hume) by insisting that pervasive and enduring sceptical crisis was a vital and constructive part of the early Enlightenment.
• This book tellingly reveals how the seemingly boundless confidence of eighteenth-century figures in the transformative capacity of human understanding actually masked profound anxiety about the circumscribed limits of the mind’s powers.

Table of Contents:

Anton M. Matytsin and Jeffrey D. Burson, Introduction: from an “age of skepticism” to an “age of reason”

Jeffrey D. Burson, Healing the skeptical crisis and rectifying Cartesianisms: the notion of the Jesuit synthesis revisited

Elena Rapetti, “A man who sticks only to his own sentiments”: Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain

Martin Mulsow and John Christian Laursen, Georg Michael Heber on legal and (possibly) religious skepticism in early Enlightenment Germany

Sébastien Charles, George Berkeley, or the skeptic in spite of himself

Rodrigo Brandão, Voltaire and modern skeptical doubt

John P. Wright, Skepticism and incomprehensibility in Bayle and Hume

Anton M. Matytsin, Taming thought with practice: philosophical skepticism in the Encyclopédie

Alan Charles Kors, Political skepticism in Holbach’s circle

Summaries

Biographies of contributors

Bibliography

Index

Jeffrey D. Burson is Associate Professor of French History and the Enlightenment at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), and The Culture of Enlightening and the Entangled Life of Abbé Claude Yvon (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), in addition to numerous articles and chapters in edited collections of essays. He is co-editor, with Ulrich L. Lehner, of Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014) and, with Jonathan Wright, of The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Anton M. Matytsin is Assistant Professor of European History at Kenyon College. He is the author of The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) and co-editor, with Dan Edelstein, of Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

*

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.

Le cas Dieu Roland Vrebos

Le Cas Dieu
Roland Vrebos ; préface de Luc Nefontaine
Arquennes : Memogrames , 2018. 159p
ISBN 978-2-930698-50-2 : 18 €


Roland Vrebos est curieux de nature et de structure. Chimiste de formation, il débute sa vie professionnelle dans industrie pharmaceutique, avant de s'orienter rapidement vers l'enseignement. Il y mesure toute la difficulté de transmettre aux jeunes sa propre curiosité et son émerveillement pour le, monde qui nous entoure. II se tourne alors vers la psychanalyse, tant pour lui-même que pour tes autres, afin de tenter d'y trouver la recette de la seule réussite qui en vaille la peine le bonheur, A trente-huit ans, il retourne sur tes bancs d'école pour approfondir le solfège et s'initier aux instruments : orgue, trombone, vibraphone. Lui, le scientifique, s'engage aussi activement dans la mouvance Richelieu pour y participer à la défense de la langue française Le présent ouvrage se voudrait un exemple de parcours qui, s'il n'est pas nécessairement paradigmatique, serait une proposition de réflexion à partir de ce que M. Dieu, d'abord dans la souffrance, arrive à réaliser en se détachant progressivement de sa position fictive de Dieu-le-Petit. L'auteur tente de montrer que l'individu a intérêt, à partir d'un regard personnel critique en miroir, d'étendre son champ de vision sur l'Humanité.