Humanism and Enlightenment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Brent Crosson
Keyword(s):  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Theories Of Religion ◽  
Human Difference

Humanism and Enlightenment are words associated with the birth of rights-bearing Man. Yet this birth was accompanied by the rise of another Enlightenment concept: race. This chapter theorizes the effects of the twinned, contradictory birth of pseudo-biological human difference and “universal” Man. Starting in the Renaissance and concluding in the “posthuman” present, the chapter shows how conceptions of the human emerged from interactions between Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. From the Enlightenment onward, theories of religion, politics, and culture have centered on contestations over the limits of this human. Rather than telling a linear narrative of Man–human–posthuman, such contests present an unfinished project that continues to this day.

The Changes in the Attitude of Polish Society Toward the Jews in the 18th Century

2004 ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Jacob Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Population ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
The Impact

This chapter evaluates the changes in the attitude of Polish society toward the Jews in the 18th century. The transformations in the social structure, politics and culture of 18th-century Poland had their impact upon the evolution of the predominant attitudes of Polish society towards the Jews. The large numbers of the latter constituted in the second half of the century the largest concentration of Jews in the world. They amounted to about ten per cent of the country's population, which means that their numbers roughly equalled those of the szlachta. This is why in the last century of the Commonwealth's existence, the demographic factor determined Polish attitudes towards the Jews far more than ever before. However, the growth in the demographic potential of the Jewish population coincided with the impact of the ideas of the Enlightenment, with the result that the two factors compounded one another in rendering all problems concerning the Jews highly visible and in considerably influencing the designs for social and political reforms at the time of the Four-Year Diet.

Race and Its Discontents in the Enlightenment

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
The One

This chapter surveys some of the more important developments in the history of the concept of race in eighteenth-century Germany. It reveals an inconsistency between the desire to make taxonomic distinctions and a hesitance to posit any real ontological divisions within the human species. This inconsistency was well represented in the physical-anthropological work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was, in many respects, the most important eighteenth-century theorist of human difference. Johann Gottfried Herder, a contemporary of Blumenbach's, was intensely interested in human diversity, but saw this diversity as entirely based in culture rather than biology, and saw cultural difference as an entirely neutral matter, rather than as a continuum of higher and lower. Herder constitutes an important link between early modern universalism, on the one hand, and on the other the ideally value-neutral project of cultural anthropology as it would begin to emerge in the nineteenth century.

Offshoring the invisible world? American ghosts, witches, and demons in the early enlightenment

2021 ◽  
pp. 205030322098697
Author(s):  
Craig Koslofsky
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Street Lighting ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
The Invisible

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.

Saving the Self: Between the Enlightenment and the Deluge

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-660
Author(s):  
Mary Gergen
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Enlightenment

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

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