The Anti-Theological Theology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2014 ◽  
pp. 593-600
Author(s):  
Carolina Armenteros
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
The Enlightenment

Rousseau’s theology, like much of his philosophy, is paradoxical. It comprises both a rejection of traditional Christian dogma—notably original sin—as incommensurate with reason, and a defense of Christianity and political religion as institutions transcending the rationalism of the Enlightenment. His thoughts on religion may thus be considered to comprise an anti-theological theology. This chapter discusses the private religion that Rousseau espoused in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, and the civil religion he described in the last chapter of the Social Contract. It points out that his fame as an anti-theologian derives from his anti-intellectualism and personal mystical inclinations. It likewise recounts the influence that his religious thought exercised in Europe until the turn of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism and the German Enlightenment

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Leander Fillafer ◽  
Jürgen Osterhammel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
German Society ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Innate Ideas ◽  
The Universe

The European Enlightenment has long been regarded as a host of disembodied, self-perpetuating ideas typically emanating from France and inspiring apprentices at the various European peripheries. This article focuses on the idea of cosmopolitanism in the context of the German Enlightenment. There clearly was a set of overarching purposes of emancipation and improvement, but elaborating and pursuing ‘the Enlightenment’ also involved a ‘sense of place’. The Enlightenment maintained that human reason was able to understand nature unaided by divine revelation, but attuned to its truths; many Enlighteners agreed that God, like Newton's divine clockmaker, had created the universe, but thereafter intervened no more. John Locke's critique of primordialism challenged the existence of innate ideas and original sin. This article moves on to explain notions of religion, empire, and commerce, as well as the laws of nation. Transitions in the German society in the nineteenth century and after that are explained in details in this article.

Rousseau's Political Religion

1965 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred H. Willhoite
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
Main Emphasis

THE tendency among interpreters of Rousseau's political ideas has been to give, at most, cursory attention to the role played by religion in his thought. Although it is impossible to overlook the long penultimate chapter on civil religion in the Social Contract, analysts have generally viewed it as, at best, a Machiavelli-like attempt to provide emotional “cement” for the state or, at worst, as a lamentable and eccentric departure from Rousseau's main emphasis on the realization of freedom through democracy.

Hume's Sceptical Enlightenment

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryu Susato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Positive Assessment

David Hume (1711–1776) remains one of the most equivocal thinkers in eighteenth-century Europe. Some emphasise his conservatism because of his criticism of rationalism in morals and of the social contract theory in politics, while others deem him one of the most important liberal thinkers. He can also be characterised as a forerunner of utilitarianism or even postmodernism. How can these images be integrated? To address this issue, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment demonstrates the uniqueness and complexity of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker through an investigation of the ‘historical’ Hume. Based on a sceptical adaptation of Epicureanism, he delineates the variable and vulnerable nature of the workings of our imagination and opinions, and emphasises the essential instability of civilisation. In addition, he retains a positive assessment of such modern values as liberty, politeness and refinement, and carries the banner for secularisation. His ‘spirit of scepticism’, which permeates even his non-epistemological writings, enables these seemingly paradoxical positions. This book is not only for Hume specialists, but is also a contribution to the flourishing fields of the Enlightenment study. This intellectual history connects Hume’s early eighteenth-century Continental and British predecessors not only to Hume, but also to British philosophers writing up until the nineteenth century.

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.

Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment*

2017 ◽  
Vol 235 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Kadane
Keyword(s):  
Original Sin ◽  
The Enlightenment

scholarly journals The phenomenon of "civil religion" in the verification of Ukrainian and world religious thought

2015 ◽  
pp. 284-293
Author(s):  
Yuriy Vil’khovy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Religion ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
State And Society

The article reviews the works of Ukrainian and foreign researchers, the object of which was the phenomenon of «civil religion» in the context of harmonization of relations between church, state and society

scholarly journals ‘A Kind of Geological Novel’: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ongoing Work ◽  
Geological Map ◽  
Humphry Davy

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition.

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