Enlightenment Thinkers Research Articles

Light through Time and Space

Chinese Confucianism, which emerged during the Axial Age, has had a profound influence on many intellectual and cultural movements in history, including the European Enlightenment. This article analyzes the influence of Confucianism on the European Enlightenment from four perspectives: human rights, a benevolent government, religion and nature. The humanist spirit propagated by Confucianism was similar to the views expressed by Enlightenment thinkers on reason and human rights and provided a powerful ideological weapon for Enlightenment thinkers to criticize religious theocracy and break through the darkness of the Middle Ages. During this process of learning and absorbing the humanist spirit of Confucianism, French Enlightenment thinkers developed the rational and critical spirit of the Enlightenment and paved the way for intellectual liberation. Today, the world is facing the new challenges of global climate change, artificial intelligence and genetic technology. In the context of these global problems, China and the West can learn from each other and join efforts to gather new ideological resources to carry out a new ideological enlightenment movement on a global scale and achieve sustainable development for all humanity.

John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith

Reviewed by: John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith Robert Butler Michel Feith. John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2019. 269 pp. $45.00. Since the appearance of A Glance Away in 1967, John Edgar Wideman has published over twenty important books of both fiction and nonfiction. Scholarly interest in his work has remained strong, particularly in recent years, as is evidenced by the appearance of four important book-length studies since 2010. The latest of these books, Michel Feith's John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue, by submitting Wideman's work to a meticulous critical and cultural analysis, will draw added attention to the fact that Wideman is a major American writer who has charted new directions in African American literature with his bold fictional experiments and his unique vision of Black experience. Thematically rather than chronologically organized, Feith's book focuses intensively on Wideman's lucid critiques of certain aspects of modernity that date back to the rise of capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism, and stresses their rootedness in various structures of racial oppression. Feith argues persuasively that Wideman's [End Page 260] response to modernism is kaleidoscopic, providing multiple perspectives that "decenter" narrative (244) and give voice to marginalized people. Viewed from one angle, modernism provides a "harmonious, organized universe ruled by universal, mathematical laws" (207) that promise progress and justice. But when Wideman's kaleidoscopic vision tips and is viewed from "a minority perspective," it reveals "a nightmarish culture of death" (23). Modern rationalism, far from releasing humanity from ignorance and superstition, has created structures of social and political oppression, beginning with slavery and later developing into colonial dominance and ghettoization. Seen from this perspective, "Prison becomes a metaphor for modernity as a whole" (46); Feith persuasively argues from this view that "a continuous thread in Wideman's œuvre" (69) is an intensive scrutiny on how literal and metaphoric prisons function as a way of defining a carceral society. Wideman, like Michel Foucault, envisions the modern prison system as originating with the humanitarian project created by the Philadelphia Quakers, whose progressive reform deteriorated quickly into a brutal means of social control and political repression. Feith's brilliant analysis of Brothers and Keepers discusses Wideman's treatment not only of his brother's unjustly prolonged incarceration but also his vision of prison as "a total institution" (46), which serves as a model of the modern state that is centered in "an enclosed, formally administered life" (47), a "rational plan" (48) designed by a dominant group to control marginalized people. (In this sense, Feith claims that Brothers and Keepers, published in 1984, prefigures Michelle Alexander's landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.) Feith's highly original structural analysis of The Cattle Killing explores another central metaphor in Wideman's books: disease. Wideman's kaleidoscopic imagination is a critical instrument also in this work, as he triangulates Philadelphia during the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic, South Africa during its era of slavery, and the contemporary United States. Challenging the modern faith in linear time's unerring ability to produce a steady development of "progress," Wideman draws revealing parallels between a disease devastating eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a "plague" (146) raging through eighteenth-century Africa, and various forms of cultural sicknesses afflicting modern America—urban violence, drug abuse, racial segregation, and family collapse. Ironically, the disease of American racism is traced back to a period when such Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were laying the foundation for American democracy while inscribing slavery into the Constitution. Like Paul Gilroy, Wideman makes "a strong connection between the Enlightenment and slavery" (16). Feith traces a clear line of development in Wideman's work from modern alienation and isolation in works such as A Glance Away (1967) and Hurry Home (1970) to a search in his later works for roots in African American history and communal life. He regards the short story "Fever" and the Homewood Trilogy as pivotal texts because they redirect Wideman toward "a recovery of community and oral culture" (41) to which he devoted the remainder of his career. Brothers...

The Quest for a Global Age of Reason. Part II: Cultural Appropriation and Racism in the Name of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is more global and complex than the standard Eurocentric Colonial Canon narrative presents. For example, before the advent of unscientific racism and the systematic negligence of the contributions of Others outside of “White Europe,” Raphael centered Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his Vatican fresco “Causarum Cognitio” (1511); the astronomer Edmund Halley taught himself Arabic to be more enlightened; The Royal Society of London acknowledged the scientific method developed by Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen). In addition, if we study the Transatlantic texts of the late 18th century, it is not Kant, but instead enlightened thinkers like Anton Wilhelm Amo (born in present-day’s Ghana), Phillis Wheatley (Senegal region), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti), who mostly live up to the ideals of reason, humanism, universalism, and human rights. One obstacle to developing a more balanced presentation of the Age of the Enlightenment is the influence of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and methodological nationalism. Consequently, this paper, part II of two, will also deal with the European Enlightenment’s unscientific heritage of scholarly racism from the 1750s. It will be demonstrated how Linnaeus, Hume, Kant, and Hegel were among the Founding Fathers of intellectual white supremacy within the Academy. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment is not what we are taught to believe. This paper will demonstrate how the lights from different “Global Enlightenments” can illuminate paths forward to more dialogue and universalism in the 21st century.

Discording Enlightenment on China

It is usually acknowledged that the core contribution of the Enlightenment is primarily twofold: the first being the introduction of reason and science as judgmental principles, and the second being the belief in the future progress of humankind as a shared destiny for humanity. This ‘modern’ reason—an exclusively human prerogative among creatures—could be applied to create a better society from the political, civil, educational, scientific, and religious points of view. What is usually less known is that for most of the Enlightenment thinkers, this philosophical and cultural step was the prerogative of European or Western-educated thinkers, which implied a gradual exclusion of extra-European civilizations from human progress as a natural phenomenon. Thus, with the exception of a few French libertines, the creation of a better society was due to reason and critical thinking absent in other civilizations, who could, at most, inherit this ‘rational power’ from Western education. This exclusion, which is usually attributed to the violence of the colonialist period, is already implied in the arguments of several Enlightenment thinkers. Our investigation will follow three steps: an exposition of the three Western historical paradigms in which Eastern civilizations were inserted between the 17th and 18th century; a comparison between the attitude toward China and Buddhism of two very distant philosophers of the Enlightenment—i.e. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) and Johann Jacob Brucker (1696–1770)—and a brief reflection on the Enlightenment from an ‘external/exotic’ point of view that will suggest the necessity of a ‘new skeptical Enlightenment’ for inducing actual intercultural dialogue.

“Sacred Calling” in Nineteenth-Century Authorship: Wordsworth, Emerson, Thackeray

“Sacred Calling” in Nineteenth-Century Authorship: Wordsworth, Emerson, Thackeray Günter Leypoldt (bio) To be “called,” as a prophet or priest, requires a gift, “grace,” which entails special powers—a privileged sensibility—combined with special obligations, such as public service for a higher good. In this essay, I wish to examine the discourse of higher calling in two nineteenth-century spaces of literary practice, one defined by poets and what some have called sage writers (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Longfellow, Ruskin, Arnold, Carlyle, Whitman), the other by journalist novelists (Dickens, G. H. Lewes, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, W. D. Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain).1 The sage network cultivates a notion of “literature as world-disclosure” that frames writers as spiritual virtuosi who compete with traditional religion. The network of journalist-novelists, by contrast, leans toward entrepreneurial concepts of writing as disciplined work for a democratic marketplace. My claim is that these two tendencies do not reflect successive historical periods (one more religious or idealist, the other more secular and realist) but rather modalities shaped by network-specific writerly sensibilities and performative genre conventions. The nineteenth-century shift in conceptions of authorship from an art-religious visionary poetics to a tough-minded [End Page 599] secular realism, I argue, meant only a shift in the quest for authentic higher principles. In what follows, sections one and two will outline the sage-specific concepts of vocation with a view to Emerson’s and Carlyle’s literary-religious Transcendentalism and Wordsworth’s monumental Recluse project. Section three places Wordsworth and Scott and some of their US successors (Whitman, Longfellow, Stowe, Melville) in the “laureate position” in the literary system, a space that defines how writers of literary ambition mediate between higher and lower aspects of professionalization (peer-based vocational principles vs. economic gain).2 Next, I chart how the rise of quality cultural journalism in the 1830s complicates the discourse of vocation, giving literary authors a sense of leading a “double life” to keep breadwinning and peer-orientation in a meaningful relationship. Finally, section five traces the discourse of vocation in midcentury artist novels of disillusionment (Balzac’s Lost Illusions and G. H. Lewes’ Ranthorpe) and the more pronounced anti-vocational and yet still authenticity-pursuing stance in W. M. Thackeray’s criticism and his novel Pendennis. For all his manifesto-level debunking of Transcendentalist concepts of vocation, I will claim, Thackeray is no less oriented toward higher purposes than the Emersonian sage. Emerson’s and Thackeray’s notions of higher calling follow from their investment in the laureate position, rather than from metaphysical certainties (spiritual, religious, logocentric) that the detranscendentalizers within Emerson criticism frame as a historical naivety to be superseded by modern thinking. The effort of retranscendentalizing nineteenth-century literary culture requires us to see that strong notions of literary vocation reach across the religious-secular divide. [End Page 600] 1. emerson’s “ministry of song” The sage network participates in the visionary turn in romantic-period poetics that blurs the borders between religion and art established by Enlightenment thinking. The new poetics suggested that great poetry requires extraordinary powers of ontological vision, that major poets differ from minor ones mainly by their ability to produce a higher language (a poetic music beyond concepts), and that poetry provides better access to sources of transcendence than theological speculation and religious dogma. These beliefs did not dominate romantic-period literary culture (Lord Byron and Walter Scott had little use for them), but they were central to a tradition that ran from German romanticism to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Longfellow, Fuller, Emerson, and Whitman. Consider, for example, how Emerson describes his vocation to Lydia Jackson, his second-wife-to-be, during their courtship in 1835: “I am born a poet [. . .]. That is my nature & vocation. My singing be sure is very ‘husky,’ & is for the most part in prose. Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & specially of the correspondences between these & those.”3 The context of this passage is Emerson’s transition from a Boston minister to a literary intellectual. His 1832 resignation from his pastoral appointment...

Cold Sun • Hot Planet

This article considers how Georges Bataille’s account of solarity informs a planetary perspective. Bataille is credited with formulating a critical analysis of “solar societies” whose economies are shaped by the exchange of solar energy. However, a sometimes understated facet of Bataille’s reading of solarity is the way he positions living beings at the axis of the sun and the earth, and in the midst of elemental forces such as cold, heat, light, and darkness. Bataille deploys these elemental forces in his writing in order to disfigure the restricted economy of capitalism and its bourgeois subjects. Rather than considering it as a social or subjective predilection, this article emphasizes solarity as a critical form and disorganizing force. This article addresses Bataille’s elemental aesthetics and his positioning of the subject as both a capitalist predator that accumulates solar energy, and a speculative subject, a being who is preyed upon by its own accumulation of energy and that is ultimately disfigured and expended by it. I argue that solarity arises in Bataille’s writing as an aesthetic operation per se. He invokes a mythological language to dismantle the scientific and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment. Solarity is therefore the antithesis of Enlightenment thinking and values: it entails the invocation of mythic force in order to dramatize earthly elements and their anarchical energy exchange. I connect Bataille’s mythic language to recent theorizations of planetarity and political ecology, from Gayatri Spivak, to Isabel Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway. I emphasize how his aesthetic maneuvers disfigure the restricted economy of concepts that accompanies the resourcing of the earth.

Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 by Mary Gibson

Reviewed by: Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 by Mary Gibson Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli Gibson, Mary – Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 336 p. Mary Gibson’s Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 aims to emphasize the connections between the Italian experience and the broader cultural trends of that era. Such contextualization marks the first important challenge in the book: that of rethinking, through the Italian case study, some general assumptions in the history of modern prison. By going beyond the study of those countries (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that led the “first wave of reform” at the end of the eighteenth-century, new perspectives emerge in the analysis of the relation between prisons and modern society. The wider perspective generates two notable methodological choices: that of treating gender and age as important factors in the study of systems of punishment and that of combining small-scale, local realities with large-scale national and global ones. Gibson’s first contribution is to start a discussion about the chronology and geographical mapping of the accepted narrative concerning “the birth of the prison,” starting from an apparently peripheral viewpoint, that of late nineteenth-century Italy. Her introduction includes some short but pointed remarks on prison historiography (pp. 4–7), beginning with the so-called revisionist historians David Rothman, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ignatieff. Though fundamental, the work of these pioneers has been later criticized as presenting an oversimplified evolution from corporal punishment to penal incarceration based on the average adult-male prisoner. Gibson underlines the positive effect of Gender Studies in turning the attention towards prisons for women, as well as the usefulness of a broader approach to confinement practices during the Ancien Régime. From this perspective, the history of prisons in Italy appears much less isolated from the international landscape than could be thought at first. The book’s persuasive argument revolves around presenting the convergence on the Italian scene of three cultural currents that are crucial to understanding the success of the prison in modern penal systems. These aspects include the following: the traditional forms of confinement imposed by Catholics during the counterreformation; the revolutionary influence of Cesare Beccaria’s penal Enlightenment; and the interpretation of Positivism transpiring from the works on criminal anthropology by Cesare Lombroso. Following the Unification of Italy in 1861, such complex inheritance influenced the development of a “second wave of reform,” a phase that has been less intensely researched in previous scholarship, but that comes to the fore as central in Gibson’s book. During such a process of nation-building, Rome provides a case study within the larger Italian case study. Rome, being capital first of the Papal States and then of the Kingdom of Italy, is taken as a “laboratory” (p. 11) wherein the author retraces the politics of the liberal ruling class and party. The first chapter, “Punishment before Italian Unification,” deals with the Roman models of “proto-prison,” among which are the well-known examples of the Carceri nuove (1658) and of the Houses of Correction of San Michele a Ripa for children (1703) and women (1735) respectively. These new solutions supported by the popes received attention [End Page 708] from many contemporary observers and have been studied as early examples of cellular structures reflecting the internal activities of work and religious practice. Keeping in mind these significant beginnings, Gibson considers that the process of national unification marks a pivotal point in the passage from Rome’s leading role to that of other Italian regions that were more deeply imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment. During the Risorgimento, in fact, experts, reformers, and Italian philanthropists participated in a European debate concerning the Auburnian and Philadelphian models of confinement, while both the Roman and the Neapolitan models were fiercely opposed. William Gladstone’s letters are one example of such open criticism (p. 43). Italian patriots considered prisons as an emblem of oppression by the Restauration’s rulers, while Liberals inherited the role of Enlightenment thinkers from the previous century in leading the fight for reform. Nonetheless, these nationalist movements met with failure...

Prawo naturalne w ramach radykalnego oświecenia

The main difference between classical (both ancient and medieval) and modern concepts of natural law lies in the assumption of its supernatural (divine) foundation. Early modern philosophical concepts tend to undermine and gradually to deny God or some other metaphysical entity as the source of natural law. Some contemporary scholars (e.g. Habermas, Bobbio) define this process as transition (modernization, rationalization, Positivisierung) of traditional natural law towards the idea of natural rights and human rights. We can distinguish at least three main schools of natural law during the 17th and 18th centuries, each one more radical than the others: de Groot dares to consider the natural law “as if there were no God”. The philosophers of early Enlightenment (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire) were perhaps more daring, nevertheless they were all deists and the “Supreme Being” still validates natural law in their writings. The article aims to examine the most radical view on natural law, i.e. partly forgotten and underestimated ideas of French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet. For they were all thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (J. Israel), all of them were materialists and atheists, and they perceived the nature and natural law as completely separated from God or other supernatural being. Unlike their older colleagues, these radical philosophers demanded equality (for women and ethnical minorities as well), emancipation, and social justice for all classes. This papers describes the idea of natural law within the radical Enlightenment movement,and investigates some political consequences of this interpretation during the French Revolution. While strongly materialistic, progressive, and atheist, the ideas of Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet were also perceived as politically dangerous. All revolutionary attempts to put these ideas into political and social practice have failed. Finally, these ideas were refuted, but they returned during the 19th- and 20th-century debates on human rights.

Realpolitik and Translation, one Example : Early Meiji Military History and Nishi Amane

The purpose of this paper was to examine the overall work done by Nishi Amane (1829-1897) in the Ministry of Military Affairs, later referred to as the Department of the Army, beginning in 1870. Until now, Nishi Amane has been noted in domestic research as “a thinker representing the intellectual transformation of East Asia in the 19th century.” In particular, many studies have analyzed the aspects of Nishi s concept translation or the design of modern academic planning based on text. Meanwhile, in Japanese academia, Nishi s studies on law and political science in the Netherlands have been shown to be of great import, but still highlight the “enlightenment thinker” idea and prove his contribution to “militarism”. It was Sugawara s 2009 study that tried to overcome this simple characterization. This paper explores how Nishi Amane called himself “a person who works for the government and translates”. The author examines the relationship between the real politicians and translators through Nishi Amane. It is widely known that Nishi worked for the Army, but there has been no paper to summarize the whole situation as it played out. In addition, it is not just an outline on what Nishi did in the Ministry of Military Affairs, but also about organizing facts about the early Meiji military system from a different perspective, and reveals where Nishi Amane and the Ministry of Military Affairs occupy this part of history.

Çevresel Determinizm Üzerine Karşılaştırmalı Bir Değerlendirme: İbn-i Haldun ve Montesquieu

Throughout human history, natural environment and human have been intertwined. People who interact with nature are affected by the natural environment and the elements that make it up. At this point, the natural environment is the determinant of people and society. Environmental determinism, which has an important place in determination of human and society, has been handled by many thinkers until today. In this article, in the framework of environmental determinism, Ibn Khaldun's theory on the impact of human geography on individual and social behavior and Montesquieu's theory of geography and the laws put forward by the legislators that vary accordingly and their effects on society, the climate theory in the center of environmental determinism have been tried to be handled under two main headings by using analysis method. The basis of the theory of Asabiyet and the scientific concepts of Umran, which form the basis of sociology happened in the 19th century deals with the formation process of the state and society basically. Montesquieu, one of the thinkers of the 18th century enlightenment, mentions the necessity of laws that will enable individuals to live together. He states that the law is necessary for the social order and that each society emerges by being affected by differences such as its own characteristic features, geography, morality and management style. The main purpose of this study is to compare the way between how Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu dealt with the climate, political and social life, taking into account the periodic differences they lived, based on their living in a different time and social environment. This comparison is handled on the basis of natural environment, individual and social values. In this context, in order to compare the common and, if any, different aspects of the understanding of environmental determinism that they dealt with in different periods, the works named "Muqaddime" and "Spirit of Laws" were examined with a geographical perspective. The assumption of this study is that the sovereignty of human geography in the public order, society and administration absolutely affects societies regardless of time and place of residence. However, it has an important place in forming the basis of many understandings.

Optimism in a time of uncertainty. Spinoza, Kant and the eternal peace

Aim: This article describes ideas of Enlightenment thinkers about the building of a democratic state with responsible and rationally thinking citizens. The article starts with the ideas of Spinoza, formulated in the seventeenth century, and will end in our time, where democracy is under threat.
 
 Design/Research method: The article relies on professional publications, both within the fields of philosophy and political sociology.
 
 Conclusions/findings: The study concludes that the optimistic expectations about the increase of democracy and the stability of democratic institutions in the world are no longer valid.
 
 Originality/Value of the article: Recent developments in the political field in the western world make this optimism questionable

L’influence de la pensée socio-politique britannique des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles sur les « Lumières » orthodoxes en Russie

L’adoption des idées occidentales en Russie fut un processus complexe, dépendant de leur adaptation au contexte social et politique russe. Le rapprochement entre la Russie et la culture britannique commença principalement après la visite en Angleterre, en 1698, de Pierre Ier. Bon connaisseur des auteurs anglais des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Théophane Prokopovitch, l’un des principaux idéologues du tsar, se contente pourtant d’adopter le côté formel de leurs réflexions. Sa justification du pouvoir étatique absolu n’est pas sans rappeler le Léviathan de Thomas Hobbes. Dans ses réflexions sur l’égalité, une idée chère aux Lumières, le métropolite de Moscou, Platon II, recourt en fait à la théologie et aux principes moraux de l’orthodoxie. Les « Lumières orthodoxes » offrent ainsi une synthèse des cultures laïque et sacrée, de la théologie traditionnelle et des nouvelles pratiques intellectuelles occidentales.

Viral Vampires

Viral Vampires

A “Syncretism of Piety”: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle

AbstractThis essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

“Pure Joy”: Spinoza on Laughter and Cheerfulness

AbstractLaughter is a significant topic for Renaissance and seventeenth‐century philosophers. Still, the latter rarely approved of laughter but endorsed it as useful mockery for theological or philosophical purposes. Benedict Spinoza’s view of laughter stands out as an exception to this attitude as well as to previous and later ones. Spinoza differentiates between mockery and laughter, denounces the former as evil, and characterizes the latter as “pure joy”: laughter is about oneself rather than another and originates in noticing something good, rather than base or ugly. In contrast to melancholy, cheerfulness is “always good” and is a precondition of our liberation as it furthers the use of reason. Not only is Spinoza’s view original, but it is an important source of the eighteenth‐century notions of good‐natured laughter and good humor through a more than probable influence on their proponent, the Earl of Shaftesbury. Whilst Spinoza’s view of cheerfulness is briefly addressed in recent studies, his view of laughter goes unnoticed in most commentaries and is misrepresented in humor studies. Contrary to what is assumed in the philosophy of laughter, I argue that the most important defense of laughter comes not from a British Enlightenment thinker, but from the Dutch Jewish seventeenth‐century philosopher.

Between Athens and Paris: The life and intellectual contribution of Cornelius Castoriadis

This paper presents a biographical outline of the life of Cornelius Castoriadis and the intersections between philosophy, politics and experience that shaped his vibrant and prolific intellectual contribution. Castoriadis grew up in Athens, at a time when Greece’s internal differences came to the fore as a result of the movements of wider European history. This was a symbolic beginning that set up his migration to Paris and shaped the trajectory of this thought. In Castoriadis, we discover a fiercely independent character fixated on contributing to a more just society. In this, and in his passion for knowledge and discourse, we can detect both an Athenian citizen and a champion of the Enlightenment. In this amalgam, his location in Paris and commitment to politics are both the choices and conditions of his life and character. This paper plays on this pendulum between Athens and Paris as well as between politics and philosophy and positions Castoriadis as an Enlightenment thinker with an eye and an ear for the quotidian pulse of the social historical.

Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy

Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy

PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF THE DRAMATICAL WORKS BY ERIC-EMMANUEL SCHMITT

The article studies the drama of the modern French-speaking author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. It analyses of the problems of the French artist's plays, the role of his work in the context of the literary process of the XX-XXI century and traces the development of his philosophical thought. The article used comparative-typological, comparative-historical and structural methods to study the stated issues, which made it possible to compare the dramatic works of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt with other literary phenomena, to single out his creative achievements in the literary field of the postmodern period, especially in their systems in the works of this author: the play "Guest" is taken for a more detailed analysis. It is noted that the determining factor in the formation of philosophical worldviews of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt was the writing of a thesis on Denis Diderot and acquaintance with other famous artists of the Enlightenment. While working on his research, the writer could not miss the study of contemporary trends in philosophy and literature, including drama. The ideas and beliefs of artists of the Enlightenment had a great influence on the formation of Schmitt's philosophical thought: he was inspired by their belief in the possibility of human knowledge, considered man not only as a sensitive but also as an intelligent being; like the Enlightenment, the French writer turned to a variety of religious themes and metaphysical ways of thinking. The author is convinced that philosophy is around everyone: it should not be hidden behind pathetic phrases and complex texts; it should live in the form of fairy tales, plays, and dialogues. The philosopher must be able to mix the humour with the serious things, so Schmitt took on the responsibility of talking to people about important things in a simple way and he treats this task as a mission. Tracing the author's own style, it is concluded that in general, Schmitt's spiritual development took place mainly under the influence of Enlightenment thinkers, so his work used the principles and techniques inherent in the work of educators.

Vienna Circle's Reception of Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth-century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle’s members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna Circle’s leader Moritz Schlick admired and praised Nietzsche, rejecting what he saw as a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as a militarist or proto-fascist. Schlick, Frank, Neurath, and Carnap were in different ways committed to the view that Nietzsche made a significant contribution to the overcoming of metaphysics. Some of these philosophers praised the intimate connection Nietzsche drew between his philosophical outlook and empirical studies in psychology and physiology. In his 1912 lectures on Nietzsche, Schlick maintained that Nietzsche overcame an initial Schopenhauerian metaphysical-artistic phase in his thinking, and subsequently remained a positivist until his last writings. Frank and Neurath made the weaker claim that Nietzsche contributed to the development of a positivistic or scientific conception of the world. Schlick and Frank took a further step in seeing the mature Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker.

Medir, controlar y proyectar: la cartografía urbana de las Luces como nuevo campo del saber

A mediados del siglo XVIII la confluencia entre el cientifismo ilustrado y las exigencias modernizadoras de los Estados dio lugar a un giro radical en la representación cartográfica de territorios y ciudades. Una "intelligentsia" compuesta de científicos, ingenieros, geógrafos, geómetras, etc. produjo en menos de cincuenta años muchos ejemplos de este novedoso modo de mirar el mundo que encarnaba a la perfección el "Sapere aude!" de Kant. Este artículo trata de esbozar, mediante el análisis de algunos casos paradigmáticos, la naturaleza de los planos urbanos de las Luces como producto de la exigencia de un conocimiento cierto de la fisonomía del entorno y como expresión cartográfica de las ideas de "progreso, felicidad pública y riqueza de la nación", así como de la cara utópica del pensamiento ilustrado.