Ideas of Poverty in the Age of Enlightenment ed. by Niall O’Flaherty and R. J. W. Mills (review)

Physics in the Czech lands in the era of scientific enlightenment (1750–1850). The article provides a comprehensive outlook on the history of physics in the Czech lands in the era of Enlightenment and its heritage in the first half of the 19th century. Enlightenment in the Czech lands was a process of reforms directed from the imperial court, whose part was also the directive to teach experimental physics at the universities in Prague and Olomouc. After overcoming the Aristotelianism of Jesuit physics, it was dominated by Joseph Stepling, later the new research of electrical phenomena with the personality of the autodidact Prokop Diviš and at its end the influence of the professors František Petřina and Christian Doppler.

The discovery of America contributed not only to the radical expansion ofhuman knowledge and to a reorientation of man's place on earth, but causedsome theological problems too. These difficulties appeared mainly because ofthe existence of indigenous population in the New World. What was the originof these people? Were they descended from Adam and Eve? Were they affectedby the original sin? Had Christ saved them? Why are they not mentioned in theBible? What was their relation to the inhabitants of the already known world?Among the various answers to these questions in Western Europe, the Preadamitetheory by Isaac La Peyrere (1596-1676) should be mentioned here. La Peyreresuggested a polygenetic theory and argued for the existence of human beingson earth before the creation of Adam and Eve. Despite harsh criticism andcountermeasures by the religious establishment ofthat time, La Peyrere's theorytried to reconcile the biblical information with the new discoveries, exertedstrong influences in the long run and paved the way for the wider disseminationof polygenism (e.g., by Voltaire). The purpose of this article is to examine the belated diffusion of theseideas and discussions in pre-independence Greece during the period of the(Neo)Hellenic Enlightenment. Our main source is the correspondence betweenNeophytos Kausokalyvitis (1713-1784) and Nikiphoros Theotokis (1731-1800),two of the eminent intellectual figures of the eighteenth century. Neophytoshad some questions about the New World, therefore he asked for Theotokis'opinion, whom he esteemed highly. For example, had the Christian messagereached the New World before 1492? What was exactly the origin of theAmericans? How did they manage to reach this remote continent? When wasAmerica first inhabited? Did the universal flood affect the New World? Theotokisin his lengthy answer exhibited clearly the characteristics of a polyhistor.Aside from his strong theological background, he was very well informed ofthe latest developments in the fields of archaeology, history, geography andnatural science. He put particular emphasis on the defense of the historicity ofthe biblical account concerning the universal deluge. For this reason, he triedto prove that America was populated for the first time after this cosmogonieevent. He also discussed some additional (theological) issues in relation to theAmerican continent. Theotokis' main concern was to show that the biblicalinformation in general can be corroborated and verified by science, because the Bible is a God-inspired work that can never lie. It should not be forgotten thatTheotokis wrote his letter during the period of the Enlightenment and wasacutely aware of the serious dangers posed to Christian doctrine by variousanti-religious currents. No doubt, the discovery of America did not cause amajor controversy at that time. Its limited discussion, however, is indicative ofa certain religious mentality which has a long historical background since theearly Christian times and which constantly seeks to reconcile the Bible withscientific knowledge and progress. Despite the differentiation of science fromreligion, this mentality prevails in various forms among certain religious circleseven nowadays. Its objective is to marry the Bible with science and todemonstrate the scientific reliability of the former in every possible detail (e.g.,the creation account of Genesis, the universal flood).

The weather in the architecture: Soane, Turner and the ‘Big Smoke’

ABSTRACTThis article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Religious Toleration in the Age of Enlightenment’. It begins by characterizing the Enlightenment's attitude towards religion as an opposition to bigotry and ecclesiastic authority based on a particular interpretation of the European Wars of Religion. Then it acknowledges the problematic nature of the phrase ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which seems to push some of the most relevant eighteenth-century realities to the margins of history. Next, it challenges some common scholarly assumptions regarding Enlightenment ideas on tolerance. In particular, it disputes that these ideas were essentially principled, secular, pluralist and liberal. By way of conclusion, this introductory article suggests that the Enlightenment's main contribution to the history of toleration is found not in the originality or subtlety of its ideas, but rather in the promotion of a new mentality according to which toleration came to be regarded as an essential feature of modern civilization.

Reviewed by: The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Roger Maioli Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2016. Pp. xi + 361. $60. This book is an illuminating reappraisal of the two broad topics in its title: skepticism and Enlightenment. On the one hand, it revises a thesis made popular by Richard Popkin, rearticulating the impact of skepticism on eighteenth-century intellectual history. On the other, it opposes traditional accounts of the Enlightenment as an age of reason against faith, seeking to reintegrate religious thinkers into a progressive history of knowledge. Siding with Popkin on the historical importance of skepticism, Mr. Matytsin offers a more layered account of its reception and influence. To begin with, skepticism "was not always the cause, but often the result, of intense, mutually destructive debates among dogmatic philosophies." Between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, unending controversies in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and historiography fostered reticence regarding claims to certainty. This reticence, the book's argument goes, sets the stage for the spread of skepticism—especially in its Pyrrhonian variety, given currency through the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1562; first French translation, 1725) and the publication of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Popkin and others have shown that responses to Pyrrhonism made concessions to doubt and replaced old metaphysical certainties with more modest claims to probable knowledge. But this "mitigated skepticism," according to Mr. Matytsin, was not the single-handed achievement of antireligious philosophers; it was also fully articulated by [End Page 158] Protestant and Catholic antiskeptics such as Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Laurent-Josse Le Clerc, and Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling. In seeking to shield religion from the skeptical critique, they "were successful in promoting pragmatic solutions, such as the recourse to moral certainty and probability." Their arguments were then retooled by less pious writers, including the central figures of the French Enlightenment. The novelty of this argument resides less in its picture of skepticism than in its attention to antiskepticism, an uncoordinated international phenomenon involving less well-known figures whom Mr. Matytsin does much to revitalize. The book is especially valuable in its treatment of Crousaz, a Swiss logician and devout Huguenot whom Popkin dismisses as unimportant, but whose Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et modern (1733) may have been the most extensive and sustained response to Pyrrhonism in the long eighteenth century. As Mr. Matytsin demonstrates, Crousaz's work inflected not only the historical skepticism of Gibbon but also the responses to Pyrrhonism at the Académie de Prusse, a fertile seedbed for Enlightenment materialism. In bringing the Huguenot diaspora as well as Jesuit intellectuals into the fold of the Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin is joining the postsecular turn in Enlightenment studies—represented among others by J.G.A. Pocock, Karen O'Brien, and Thomas Ahnert—while acknowledging that to make the case for a religious Enlightenment also deflates "the Enlightenment" as a historical category. For his purposes, "the Age of Enlightenment" serves mostly as a chronological framework, with boundaries in 1697 (when Bayle's Dictionnaire brought the skeptical crisis into the limelight) and 1772 (when the Encyclopédie was completed), but the framework has no philosophical program and no body of central doctrines. In treating "the Enlightenment" as essentially another name for "eighteenth-century intellectual history," this book takes to task more essentialist accounts of the movement—whether by Paul Hazard and Peter Gay or by Jonathan Israel—on the grounds that they restrict their focus to premonitions of the French Revolution or of modern secular values. "By exploring the intellectual universe of the eighteenth century on its own terms," Mr. Matytsin states, "scholars might finally abandon the intellectual crutch provided by the increasingly meaningless phrase the Enlightenment and walk unaided toward previously unexplored avenues and unexpected connections." His study is a compelling example of where those avenues may lead. In calling for a more capacious conception of Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin paradoxically also returns to a narrower view of the movement, one that scholars since Pocock have been especially invested in transcending. Here the Enlightenment means the Francophone Enlightenment, whether...

The European Enlightenment differed from country to country and was often shaped by local conditions and grievances. In France, the French Enlightenment began to take shape in the early 1700s, reaching its peak by the middle of the century. The French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was a great intellectual movement started by advanced bourgeois thinkers in France before the revolution to inspire people to free their minds from the confinement of religious theology and feudal dictatorship. Politically, most of these philosophes concerned with two issues: how to understand and improve government and how to create a society based on reason, logic and merit. The objects of criticism ranged from the established church, judicial practice, freedom of speech, art, literature and manners in general, the role of the King, and economic reform. The French Enlightenment achieved a complete negation of the feudal autocracy and fundamentally denied the existence of theocracy, monarchy and privilege. The French Enlightenment thinkers used their pens as weapons to expose the hypocrisy of religious theology, unveil the mysteries of tyranny, and accuse the evils of social inequality. The French Enlightenment also promoted the modernization of Christianity. As a result of religious tolerance, non-believers were no longer discriminated and persecuted, and people of pagan faiths in various countries began to enjoy universal human rights. The principle of disestablishment was finally established as a constitutional principle. Although it pit modern society against religious faith, which brought negative influence, the French Enlightenment had the significance as a milestone. It broke up religious regulation and feudal tyranny, reconstructed the ontological order and the legitimacy of the social and political orders, and formulated a cultural and political program of modernity.

In the works devoted to the phenomenon of transhumanism, it is widely recognized that philosophy of the Enlightenment had a great intellectual influence on the formation of transhumanism. Yet, this article states that the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy can be reasonably treated as not only consisting the conceptual transhumanism core but also as being a source of its internal contradictions. The paper defends the position that transhumanism in general is an intrinsically controversial project and introduces the premises for this contradiction – the basic anthropological views inherited from philosophy of the Enlightenment. Finally, the article questions the status of transhumanism as a techno-scientific program and states it to be an ideologically engaged project in anthropological engineering, which, in its turn, is devoid of any clear theoretical and practical outline.

The name of Friedrich II and his nearly half-century reign from 1740 to 1786 are virtually synonymous with the advent and advance of the Enlightenment in Prussia. In his famous 1784 answer to the question posed by theBerlinische Monatsschrift, “What is enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant asserted that enlightenment could be partially conceptualized as a temporal epoch, one whose salient characteristics, especially in regards to religion, were manifested in the personal opinions and public policies of his royal Prussian sovereign. “We do not live in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment – the century of Friedrich.” In a similar spirit, a generation after Kant wrote, Friedrich Schleiermacher delivered a paean to Friedrich II's memory in a January 24, 1817 address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on what would have been Friedrich II's one-hundred-and-fifth birthday. Schleiermacher heralded Friedrich II as “a friend of the muses,” who doubtlessly conversed with Plato in the afterlife, the legacy of whose domestic initiatives had been to transform Prussia into a more cultured society, while his “heroic” and “glorious” victories secured for the Prussian Army its vaunted reputation for military prowess. As the 29-year-old king himself wrote in a February 24, 1741 battlefield letter from the frontlines of the First Silesian War, “I love war for its glory, but if I were not a ruler, I would be nothing but a philosopher.”

In this article, certain factors that influenced legal continuity during the Age of Enlightenment are discussed. The major processes of the period are analyzed, and the importance of legal traditions as the foundation of legal continuity is highlighted. A brief overview of the key approaches to understanding legal traditions is given. Particular attention is paid to the regional divergences of the Age of Enlightenment, with a focus on its specifics in England and later Great Britain, the German and Italian states, France, Russia, and the USA. It was revealed that all factors can be divided into two groups. The first group includes general conditions, circumstances, and prerequisites, which can be further classified into natural and social ones. Natural factors are largely unaffected by the landscape of the period, while social factors are closely tied to society. The factors pertaining to the Age of Enlightenment are part of the latter group. They are of two types. The first type is not actually related to the legal reality of the period. The second type reflects the Enlightenment political and legal doctrines. Conclusions are drawn about the direct and indirect impacts of these factors on the historical processes. It is also demonstrated that the factors of legal continuity formed a unique combination in each studied society, with their influence apparent even after the Age of Enlightenment.

Reviewed by: Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 by Alexander Lock Christopher Strangeman Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810. By Alexander Lock. [Studies in Modern British Religious History, Volume 34.] (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. 2016. Pp. x, 270. £60.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-132-0.) Alexander Lock's Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment is a study of one particular English Catholic—Sir Thomas Gascoigne (1745–1810)—and how he can be seen as an example of the intersections of the Enlightenment and English Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lock, the Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, makes interesting contributions in this work to two important areas of recent historiography—the construction and manifestation of English Catholicism at a time during which the penal laws were still in place and of a distinct English national identity. It is an attractive book with a wonderful bibliography. In some ways, it serves as a complementary study to Gabriel Glickman's The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 (2009); while Glickman covered the period of the perceived Jacobite threat, Lock focuses on the later eighteenth century when English Catholics were slowly making inroads into elite social and political circles. The book is divided into three sections. The first section (chapters 1 and 2) deals with Gascoigne's years abroad, through which he received a liberal education and took Grand Tours during which he met with different European heads of state. This is the most interesting and powerful section of the book, and Lock places his argument—about how the Enlightenment influenced English Catholic thought and behavior—within the work of earlier scholars, such as J. C. H. Aveling, Joseph Chinnici, and the aforementioned Glickman. However, while Lock [End Page 357] makes sure to explain what he means by liberal, he does not fully explain what he means by Enlightenment; it seems as though he equates the two—liberal and Enlightenment—which is problematic considering the demonstrated diversities of the Enlightenment. Lock also argues that Gascoigne's experiences with fellow English travelers on the Grand Tour highlight how equating an English identity with anti-Catholicism can be very misleading. This is good stuff and is an important contribution to English national identity studies, simultaneously being framed within and challenging earlier studies by scholars such as J. C. D. Clark, Linda Colley, and Colin Haydon. In the book's second section (chapter 3), Lock moves on to explaining how Gascoigne settled in England and abjured his faith publicly in order to gain a seat as an MP. According to Lock, this was the deal that Gascoigne was willing to make—becoming Anglican to make other things possible, though remaining at heart and in sympathies Catholic. This is a convincing portrait of Gascoigne. But, it begs the question: how representative was Gascoigne as an English Catholic? Locke's answer to this question is not fully convincing as he argues throughout that Gascoigne was an exceptional figure, given his upbringing and foreign education and his subsequent political, economic, and social position, but then contending that any answer to "typicality" is elusive. Nevertheless, scholars with an interest in how well biographies—or "life histories"—can serve to deepen a broader historical narrative will find Lock's argument in his introduction thought-provoking. In the last section (chapters 4 and 5), Lock provides an analysis of Gascoigne as a successful manager of his estate, whose ideas regarding estate management were shaped by the liberal education that he had received. This section should prove of interest to economic historians as Lock presents Gascoigne in contrast to the leading view of Anglican gentry who left direct management of their estates to others; in contrast, Gascoigne was forced to be different because of penal law obstacles and restrictions. Ultimately, Lock's work is a welcome addition to studies on English Catholic history and English national identity. The book's great strength is in depicting how the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was an important time...

This is an impressive and lucid survey of eighteenth-century intellectual life, providing a real sense of the complexity of the age and of the cultural and intellectual climate in which imaginative literature flourished. It reflects on some of the dominant themes of the period, arguing against such labels as 'Augustan Age', 'Age of Enlightenment' and 'Age of Reason', which have been attached to the eighteenth-century by critics and historians.

The Cultural Histories are multi-volume sets that survey the social and cultural construction of specific subjects across six historical periods, broadly: – Antiquity – The Medieval Age – The Renaissance – The Age of Enlightenment – The Age of Empire – The Modern Age The subjects covered range from Animals to Dress and Fashion, from Sport to Furniture, from Money to Fairy Tales. Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters so that readers may gain an understanding of a period by reading an entire volume, or follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume. Each six-volume set is illustrated. Titles are available as printed sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com).

History followed the developmental logic of Kant's vision, he argued that his present 'age of enlightenment' would lead to 'an enlightened age', and Romanticism as the next period would realize rather than rejection. The technology of Enlightenment is writing; the tools are the forms that writing assumed in the eighteenth century; the procedures are the characteristic ways those forms mixed. Throughout the eighteenth century, writers maintained a Baconian caution regarding the use of system. The historicizing of Romanticism thus has been, and is, part of the process of historicizing literature, and thus a way of providing a touchstone for all of the volumes of the New Cambridge History. The period played a substantial role in drawing the other lines that have made Romanticism into a recognizable whole: generations, gender and genre. The purpose of embedding system into other forms was to allow its principles to travel into new areas of inquiry.

The Age of Enlightenment was a movement of philosophy that dominated Europe's sphere of ideas. This movement advocated ideals like as freedom, progress, compassion, brotherhood, constitutional rule, church and state separation, all based on the concept that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy. The precise beginning of such an age of enlightenment is under discussion, while the beginnings of the 18th century (1701) are often mentioned as starting points, even in the mid-19th century (1650). According to French historians, the period is usually between 1715 and 1789. The end of the Enlightenment was usually the result of many historians until the latter years of the siècle; generally, the French Revolution began in 1789, or the Napoleonic War (1804– 15). The Enlightenment was generally adopted by most European countries with a regional emphasis. Cultural contact between particular European countries and across the Atlantic had occurred in both ways throughout Age of Enlightenment. In the discussion and thought about illumination, science started to take center stage. The Enlightenment was long regarded by Western civilizations as the intellectual and political foundation. It was in charge of the political modernization of the West. Concerning religion, the critique of the Enlightenment era has responded to the European religious struggle of the last century. The researchers have reviewed the relevant studies on the Age of Enlightenment and determined that, by living in the present moment in the future, their knowledge of life and the world around it may be enlightened and expanded.

A Corpus of Magazines from the Age of Enlightenment ― Formation and Application