Browse Items · Legacies of the Enlightenment

Nature: Course Notes from the College de France

Merleau-Ponty, one of the greatest 20th Century thinkers of perception, the body, and its operation in the natural world, gives a course on the history of nature and its relationship with human freedom and thinking. These are notes on the course…

Tags: disciplines, ethics, freedom, materialisms, mechanism, organism, perception, philosophy, physics, physiology, science

La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine

Vartanian establishes the authoritative French text of La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, and several essays on its background, claims, its materialism, and its place in 18th Century science.

Tags: disciplines, ethics, materialisms, mechanism, medicine, philosophy, physics, physiology, science

The Starship Philosophy: Its Heritage and Competitors

Examines the distinctive features of the astronautical philosophy characteristic of the current surge of interest in interstellar spaceflight. Contrasts them with the conflicting features of more Earthbound philosophies in order to elucidate the…

Tags: colonialism, diaspora, history, Matter, philosophy, political philosophy, science

Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life

Nealon explores the (liminal yet significant) role played by concepts of vegetable life within biopolitical discussions of life in the humanities today. Where Nealon, following Foucault, suggests that modernity has been primarily invested in an…

Tags: agency, climate, climate change, In-between, philosophy, plants, subjectivity, world

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Less a single coherent argument than a series of meditations, this book introduces many of the concepts that would become foundational to Marxist thought and critical theory, more generally, including alienation, exploitation, and dialectical…

Tags: Anthropocene, capitalism, critical theory, Marxism, materialism, new materialism, philosophy

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

Perhaps the most canonical work of Marxist critical theory in the twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment investigates how the project of the Enlightenment transforms into a logic of domination and instrumentalization in…

Tags: capitalism, critical theory, Marxism, materialism, myth, philosophy, psychoanalysis

Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France

Vila's study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose.

Tags: 18th century, biology, disciplines, France, In-between, materialism, medecine, philosophy, physiology, science, sexuality

The Great Cat Massacre

Translated into 18 languages to date, this work is delightful read and also gets one thinking about the many ways in which we impose our own cultural assumptions, inaccurately, on previous eras; very useful as a pedagogical tool to get students out…

Tags: 18th century, disciplines, Europe, history of ideas, materialism, philosophy

The Republic of Letters

A ground-breaking consideration of the social history of gender in the Enlightenment. As well as an invaluable source on the social history of the Enlightenment overll, this study gave rise to a meaningful and revaling debate about the lack of…

Tags: 18th century, collective identities, Europe, female authors, feminism, France, gender, In-between, materialism, philosophy, sexuality

Mapping the Republic of Letters

This website provides interactive, visual tools that depict the vast networks of people and information during the Enlightenment. Using archived letters, travel logs, and other resources, it depicts visually the routes traveled by letters, people,…

Tags: 18th century, citizenship, civilization, collective identities, colonialism, education, Europe, In-between, interdisciplinarity, philosophy, upheavals

The Theology of Climate Change: Sin as Agency in the Enlightenment’s AnthropoceneThe Theology of Climate Change: Sin as Agency in the Enlightenment’s Anthropocene

Tags: 17th century, Anthropocene, climate, climate change, philosophy

Machine and Organism

Canguilhem inverts the normal scientific question--what is the mechanism underlying this organic process?--and asks how machines are organic. He traces the history of the relationships between organism and machine from the ancient Greek political…

Tags: biology, disciplines, history, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, politics, science

The Paradox of the Automaton: From Diderot to Cybernetics

A concise and provocative history of the idea of automata from Diderot to the present. She argues that the automaton is the cornerstone of modern knowledge and its powers.

Tags: disciplines, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, physics, science

Man a Machine

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was one of the earliest French Enlightenment materialists. Exiled from France after publishing a book (A Natural History of the Soul) arguing that psychical phenomena could be explained by examining bodily processes, he…

Tags: disciplines, ethics, materialism, medicine, philosophy, physics, physiology, science

"Art and Democracy"

Interprets an “increasingly visible weariness and distrust towards democracy” and proposes the construction of contemporary “Academies of Art” to aid in the education of “mature” citizens. Lachenmann interpolates his remarks into two discourses.…

Tags: aesthetic, citizenship, contemporary, destruction, disciplines, Lachenmann, music, philosophy, Schiller

"Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society, 1640–1790"

Shows how Kant wrote his Critique of Judgment as a synthesis of English theories of “taste” and civil society and German theories of “aesthetic.” Writers since Hobbes have used theories of art to advance theories of society. Kant sought a middle way…

Tags: 18th century, aesthetic, citizenship, disciplines, Kant, philosophy, Schiller

Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy

Argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgment represents his mature political philosophy. Judgment is important for Arendt as the faculty which mediates between particularity and universality, thereby providing the conditions for a uniquely human…

Tags: aesthetic, Arendt, citizenship, contemporary, disciplines, Kant, philosophy, Schiller

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Deserves as much credit as any source for bringing the political implications of Kant’s Critique of Judgment into contemporary discourse. Despondent over the perceived failure of the French Revolution, Schiller asks, “Why are we still barbarians?” He…