Suchergebnisse

Enlightenment values, including an emphasis on human rights and belief in rationalism and progress, aspire to be universals, yet at the same time they are concepts grounded in the eighteenth century. Since the French Revolution we have grappled with the concepts of Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung, in an attempt to understand how these eighteenth-century concepts continue to shape and influence modern notions of liberal culture. This collection of essays approaches these important questions in a resolutely European and multi-lingual perspective

This dissertation is a study of the materialist current of the French Enlightenment. Far from assuming that early modern materialism constituted a homogenous philosophical current, my dissertation applies the materialist method of critique to the category of "materialism" itself. I argue that "Materialism" was invented in the 18th century, and it had little to do with the simple affirmation of the primacy of matter or the reductionist "one -substance monism", as its detractors at the time wanted the public to believe. I show that the adjective "materialist" was coined in the context of a social transformation of philosophy (a social reconfiguration of philosophical activity with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere) and in the midst of an ideological crisis of French absolutism. I argue that religious and political authorities labeled a set of public philosophical interventions that advocated for a new conception of public philosophy, an experimental and critical one, as "materialists". Most of the thinkers which were labeled as materialists (Julien Offray La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, Claude-Hadrien Helvetius, Paul Henry Thiry D'Holbach) borrowed from the emerging field of modern science a critical method of inquiry, yet, what distinguished them particularly was that they extended this critique to moral values, metaphysical concepts and the political institutions of the regime. They also shared a commitment to an intellectual political independence from the State and to the development of the critical function of philosophy in an expanded public sphere. It was for this reason that materialism was considered morally and politically "dangerous" as a philosophy, one that needed to be repressed and persecuted. By the early 19th Century with the re-institutionalization of philosophy by the Empire materialism as a public philosophical critique was dead. After 1758 the debate around materialism polarized the Enlightenment movement itself. Some of the key figures of the Enlightenment, like Voltaire, Jean e Rond D'Alembert or Nicolas Condorcet, which had secured for them a place in the French academy, began to distance themselves from the materialist figures and from their public positions, by defending publicly the benefits of an "enlightened monarchy" and a necessary metaphysical base for science, philosophy and morality. In my dissertation I argue that the "radical" and "political" dimension of La Mettrie's and Diderot's philosophy is not to be found in the proposal of a positive program of reform. Theirs was an exploration of the new public status of philosophy and the philosophical means to achieve a popular enlightenment. Besides being the first advocates for a public education system open to all and targeted to a diversity of social needs, they reflected on the form philosophical texts should produce. Philosophical form, for La Mettrie and Diderot had to necessarily appeal not only to reason but also to imagination, using fiction, and requesting from the reader an active and open interpretation in order to "enlighten" him or her in a non-deterministic way.

"Liminal periods in politics often serve as points in time when traditional methods and principles organizing society are disrupted. These periods of interregnum may not always result in complete social upheaval, but they do open the space to imagine social and political change in diverse forms. In 'Queering the Enlightenment: kinship and gender in eighteenth-century French literature', Tracy L. Rutler uncovers how numerous canonical authors of the 1730s and 1740s were imagining radically different ways of organizing the masses during the early years of Louis XV's reign. Through studies of the literature of Antoine-François Prévost, Claude Crébillon, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny among others, Rutler demonstrates how the heteronormative bourgeois family's rise to dominance in late-eighteenth-century France had long been contested within the fictional worlds of many French authors. The utopian impulses guiding the fiction studied in this book distinguish these authors as some of the most brilliant political theorists of the day. Enlightenment, for these authors, means reorienting one's relation to power by reorganizing their most intimate relations. Using a practice of reading queerly, Rutler shows how these works illuminate the unparalleled potential of queer forms of kinship to dismantle the patriarchy and help us imagine what might eventually take its place."--Page 4 of printed paper wrapper

L'oeuvre de Troeltsch s'inscrit dans le projet moderne des Lumières européennes et l'historicisme qui l'a prolongé, tout en en proposant une problématisation pouvant ouvrir sur une reprise reflexive. Si Troeltsch instruit bien une critique de la modernité, il s'agit donc d'une critique interne. On peut parler à son propos d'"historicisme de deuxième degré". Troeltsch y relit la modernité dans une perspective généalogique large, et notamment en fonction de la problématique religieuse. Les différenciations internes à la société moderne, le pôle de l'individu ou du sujet et l'ambivalence de toutes choses sont ici soulignés et réfléchis. Troeltsch ouvre au final sur une "synthèse culturelle du présent", à instaurer, et selon une philosophie de l'histoire conjointe à une philosophie de la religion (distincte d'une théologie à proprement parler ainsi que distincte des sciences religieuses).

Peter Fitzpatrick développe une théorie sociale inspirée de Foucault. Le droit est considéré comme une force dispersée extérieure et dominant les relations sociales. La force du droit est une métaphore du pouvoir de la connaissance implicite dans l'expression même des Lumières. Cette force est exclusive et répressive. Ce qui est exclu de l'universalité du droit est ce qui contredit le rationnel, c'est-à-dire le crime, la folie et, surtout, ce qui se trouve au-delà des limites de l'Europe, l'indigène et le sauvage.