18th century
A01=T. J. Reed
Author_T. J. Reed
Category=NHD
Category=QDHM
communication
cultural studies
culture
enlightenment
epistemology
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethics
europe
european
friedrich schiller
german
germany
gotthold lessing
historiography
immanuel kant
intellectual life
johann wolfgang von goethe
liberal thinking
literature
philosophy
poetic ideal
political
politics
power
science
theology
western thinkers
Product details
- ISBN 9780226205106
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 24 Feb 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Germany's political and cultural past, from ancient times through World War II, has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany's Enlightenment. Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature's assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development.
Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance - despite their frequent dismissal-to us in the twenty-first century.
T. J. Reed is an emeritus fellow at Queen's College, Oxford, a fellow of the British Academy, and president of the English Goethe Society. He is the author of many books.
