Suchergebnisse

The "age of reason" and the specter of skepticism -- The spectrum of anti-skepticism -- The walking ignorant: the skeptical "epidemic" in the eighteenth century -- Pierre Bayle-Bete Noire and the elusive skeptic -- The specter of Bayle returns to haunt France -- Secret skepticism: Huet's fideistic fumbles -- A new hope: the critics of Pyrrhonism strike back -- The Berlin compromise: mitigated skepticism and probability -- Disciplining doubt -- Matter over mind: dualism, materialism, and skepticism in eighteenth-century epistemology -- A matter of debate: conceptions of material substance in the "scientific revolution" -- War of the worlds: Cartesian vortices and Newtonian gravitation in eighteenth-century astronomy -- Historical Pyrrhonism and its discontents

This article explores continuities between the antiquarian erudition of humanist historians and Enlightenment philosophical histories, showing that supposedly revolutionary developments in eighteenth-century historiography emerged from an older scholarly tradition. It focuses on the research of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, a learned society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France that went from serving as a propaganda tool for promoting King Louis XIV's absolutist regime to becoming the first modern historical research institute and a cradle of the Enlightenment. The article examines the emergence of what might be called "cultural history" or "the history of culture" (histoire des moeurs, as eighteenth-century authors called it). It analyzes how the academicians studied pagan beliefs and speculated about the functions of ancient myths and cults, thus transforming the views about the origin of religion and its role in society. The article also discusses how the academicians made sense of customs and daily practices and how they understood the causes of the progress and decline of civilizations.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One. Lux -- Via Lucis in tenebras: Comenius as Prophet of the Age of Light -- Whose Light Is It Anyway? The Struggle for Light in the French Enlightenment -- The "Lights" before the Enlightenment: The Tribunal of Reason and Public Opinion -- Writing the History of Illumination in the Siècle des Lumières: Enlightenment Narratives of Light -- Part Two. Veritas -- Another Dialogue in the Tractatus: Spinoza on "Christ's Disciples" and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) -- A Backward Glance: Light and Darkness in the Medieval Theology of Power -- Lumen unitivum: The Light of Reason and the Aristotelian Sect in Early Modern Scholasticism -- The Aristotelian Enlightenment -- Part Three. Tenebrae -- Secular Sacerdotalism in the Anglican Enlightenment, 1660-1740 -- Refracting the Century of Lights: Alternate Genealogies of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Culture -- Enlightenment in the Shadows: Mysticism, Materialism, and the Dream State in Eighteenth-Century France -- Light, Truth, and the Counter-Enlightenment's Enlightenment -- Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z