18th century
academic
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Category=QDH
criticism
culture
english translations
enlightenment
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eq_history
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eq_nobargain
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essay anthology
essay collection
faith
freedom of expression
german essay
german language
german philosopher
german philosophy
germany
historian
historical
immanuel kant
johann gottlieb fichte
michel foucault
modern world
moses mendelssohn
philosopher
philosophy
revolution
scholarly
translations
world history
Product details
- ISBN 9780520202269
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Sep 1996
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, 'What is Enlightenment?'. The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present. In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.
Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jurgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.
James Schmidt is Chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston University. He is author of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (1985).
