Suchergebnisse

The opening of the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum in 2003 is doubly welcome: first, because it opens up to visitors the debates about the history and purpose of museums; and, secondly, because it puts philosophy and political theory back at the centre of our work. The British Museum has made a major statement about the place of museums in society and should be warmly congratulated for this.

This dissertation treats the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III (1703-1730) in the context of the European early enlightenment. Intellectual historians have generally placed the Ottoman Empire outside the Enlightenment movement, while Ottoman historians have viewed the early eighteenth century as a transitional period between the crisis of the seventeenth century and the reformist movements of the late eighteenth century. The research presented in this work seeks to call these interpretations into question and suggests that the defining features of Ahmed III's regime were similar to those of the early enlightenment : cosmopolitanism, sociability, religious tolerance and, the valorization of philosophy and of social mobility. It was in this enlightened atmosphere that natural philosophy became a contested space where different parties negotiated their new social status: What was the function of natural philosophy? Who could legitimately speak about nature? The Greek commercial elite argued that the Aristotelian universe was an orderly whole and claimed that the rational contemplation of natural order engendered virtue. And virtue legitimized social status. Ottoman physicians, a second group aspiring to high office, contended that their empirical philosophy was superior to Aristotelianism. They believed that their innovative approach to nature was the right one because it yielded effective results. It was experience and effectiveness that entitled them to social and political recognition. Thus, moral virtue and technical expertise became competing values that represented different upwardly mobile groups in Ahmed III's Istanbul. The Ottomans had no experimentalist tradition that could accommodate both logical methods and novel empirical knowledge. A young Ottoman bureaucrat, a Socinian convert to Islam and a Polish Pietist finally presented systematic experimentation as a possible solution to the Empire's social and epistemic problems. Their goal was to reconcile the two competing views of nature and to cultivate solidarity among the new elite. The Ottoman imperial printing press, which was established in 1729, served to disseminate the new experimental knowledge. The founding documents of the press drew an explicit connection between knowledge and political power, and showed that the Sultan intended to offer widespread access to both

Initially proposed as a tool to unify different groups, electricity was used to silence and further marginalize the Hazara, a Shia minority in Afghanistan. This piece tracks and analyzes this ongoing problem, centering on the "Enlightenment Movement," Hazara protestation of the state in response to rerouting electricity. Discussing the governmental, ethnic, and geographic features at play in the issue of electricity, this paper argues that the Enlightenment Movement is not just fueled by a desire for electricity, but a demand for a wider discussion of Hazara civil rights.

The co-existence of Enlightenment and ideology has long vexed Jews in modernity. They have both loved and been leary of Enlightenment reason and its attending scientific and political institutions. Jews have also held a complex relationship to ideological forms that exist alongside Enlightenment reason and which have both lured and victimized them alike. Still, what accounts for this historical proximity between Enlightenment and ideology? and how does this relationship factor into the emergence of modern anti-Semitism? Can Jewish communities participate in contemporary societies committed to scientific developments and deliberative democracies and neither be targeted by totalizing systems of thought that eliminate Judaism's difference nor fall prey to the power and seduction of ideological forces that compete with the Jewish life-world? This article argues that Hegel's discussion of the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit as a social practice of critical common sensism provides an immanent critique of Max Horkheimer's and Theodore Adorno's analysis of the absolutism of the Enlightenment that can bolster Jewish communal and philosophical hope in the commensurability between Judaism and the contemporary expressions of Enlightenment reason, even if it does not fully eradicate the challenges presented by ideology for Jewish communities and thinkers.

The historical literature on maternal death gives little attention to the problem in Scotland. Data in a popular, yet serious, national publication for 1739–1772 suggest that there was some public interest in the problem of maternal mortality. This interest may have been associated with the democratization of many forms of knowledge, central to the Scottish Enlightenment. The publication of these data is linked to the little-known, but ground-breaking, work of Alexander Gordon on puerperal fever in Aberdeen, which long predated the study by Ignaz Semmelweis. This 18th-century publication is compared with the popular media of the 21st century.

In this paper I discuss the religious ideas and religious criticism voiced by a Greek eighteenth-century philosopher, Christodoulos Efstathiou from Acarnania, also known by the pejorative surname Pamblekis (1730?–1793). He is known in Greek intellectual history on the basis of three works, Αληθής Πολιτική (True Politics) published in 1781, Περί Φιλοσόφου (On Philosopher), published in 1786, and Περί Θεοκρατίας (On Theocracy), published in 1793. The paper presents an analysis of the criticism of the clergy, the Church and organized religion voiced in the latter work. It is argued that Christodoulos's religious ideas were inspired by the historical criticism of religion that emanated from the ideas of Spinoza and thus he could be considered a rare representative of the Radical Enlightenment in the Greek Enlightenment tradition and its broader Southeastern European context.