7 A Global Way of War in the Age of Reason environcide and genocide in 18th- century America, Africa, and Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 243-278
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Age Of Reason

The Quest for a Global Age of Reason. Part II: Cultural Appropriation and Racism in the Name of Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Dag Herbjørnsrud ◽  
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is more global and complex than the standard Eurocentric Colonial Canon narrative presents. For example, before the advent of unscientific racism and the systematic negligence of the contributions of Others outside of “White Europe,” Raphael centered Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his Vatican fresco “Causarum Cognitio” (1511); the astronomer Edmund Halley taught himself Arabic to be more enlightened; The Royal Society of London acknowledged the scientific method developed by Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen). In addition, if we study the Transatlantic texts of the late 18th century, it is not Kant, but instead enlightened thinkers like Anton Wilhelm Amo (born in present-day’s Ghana), Phillis Wheatley (Senegal region), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti), who mostly live up to the ideals of reason, humanism, universalism, and human rights. One obstacle to developing a more balanced presentation of the Age of the Enlightenment is the influence of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and methodological nationalism. Consequently, this paper, part II of two, will also deal with the European Enlightenment’s unscientific heritage of scholarly racism from the 1750s. It will be demonstrated how Linnaeus, Hume, Kant, and Hegel were among the Founding Fathers of intellectual white supremacy within the Academy. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment is not what we are taught to believe. This paper will demonstrate how the lights from different “Global Enlightenments” can illuminate paths forward to more dialogue and universalism in the 21st century.

Book reviews: William Heberden, physican of the Age of Reason

1991 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-118
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Subject

Ernest Heberden, William Heberden, physician of the Age of Reason . London: Royal Society of Medicine, 1990. Pp. 246, £12.95 (hardback), £7.95 (softback). ISBN 1-85315-116-5. ‘ Ultimus Romanorum , the last of our learned physicians’, Samuel Johnson called William Heberden, not neglecting on another occasion to label him ‘ timidorum timidissimus ’ when Heberden would not accede to the dropsical Johnson’s request to have deep incisions made into his legs (Johnson took matters into his own hands and stabbed his legs with a pair of scissors after Heberden had left). Heberden, one of the most distinguished (and rich) London physicians of the 18th century, has not until now been the subject of a biography. This work, by one of William’s descendants, makes possible a rather more informed assessment of this illustrious figure.

ISLAM AND ARABS THROUGH THE EYES OF THE ENCYCLOPÉDIE: THE “OTHER” AS A CASE OF FRENCH CULTURAL SELF-CRITICISM

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Joubin
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Cultural Self ◽  
Reason And Faith

The 18th-century European Enlightenment championed rational philosophy and scientific methodology, rather than any form of traditional theology, as the way to understand the objective truth.1 In their quest for the fundamental truth, France's philosophes, the rational and anticlerical intellectuals of the Age of Reason, were forced to brave official censorship, persecution, and imprisonment as they disentangled themselves from their Christian heritage. Thus, the French Enlightenment was informed by a dualistic view of history—an ongoing contest between reason and faith. Although faith had gained ascendancy with Christianity's triumph over classical antiquity in the late 3rd and 4th centuries, according to the philosophes, many of whom served as key contributors to the Encyclopédie, religion and science had once again joined battle in the 18th century, this time with science and reason poised to overcome religious irrationality.2 In this context, the renowned philosophe Voltaire, in his highly controversial Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), attacks Christian dogma, refutes the tenet of Christ's divine nature, and rejects the possibility of miracles as running contrary to all scientific evidence.3 Similarly, in Système de la Nature (1770), another philosophe, d'Holbach, deplores man's pursuit of the chimeras of religious revelation and refusal to engage in rational methods of inquiry.4 The arguments of Voltaire and d'Holbach are just two examples of the French Enlightenment tenet that knowledge can be based only on science and reason.

The Lisbon Earthquake and the Age of Reason

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Elizabeth Hough ◽  
Roger G. Bilham
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Natural Phenomenon ◽  
Solid Core ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Lisbon Earthquake ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Acts Of God

An individual’s response to any catastrophic event, including the capacity for rebound, surely depends a great deal on one’s expectations before the event. In a short-term sense, earthquakes remain as utterly unpredictable and abrupt as they have been since the dawn of time. Looking back through history, however, it becomes apparent that some earthquakes were more unexpected— and seemingly more mercurial—than others. In the middle of the 18th century, earthquake science had barely reached its infancy. Earthquakes had fascinated, and posed a challenge to, the best minds since at least the day of Aristotle. Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, St. Thomas Aquinas—whether they viewed earthquakes as acts of God or not, they and other philosophers approached the subject with a decidedly naturalist bent. Aristotle and Pliny interpreted earthquakes as the result of subterranean winds or subterranean storms. St. Thomas Aquinas argued in favor of the scholastic approach, supporting Aristotle’s scientific views over later, more theologically oriented interpretations. During the 17th century, earthquakes continued to be the source of scientific speculation. Galileo argued that the earth had a dense, solid core. In 1680 Robert Hooke published Discourse on Earthquakes, arguably the first significant book dealing with earthquakes as a natural phenomenon. In 1750 a series of earthquakes was widely felt throughout England. During this “year of earthquakes,” shocks were felt in London on February 19 and March 29, in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight on March 29, in northwest England and northeast Wales on April 18, and in and around Northamptonshire on October 11. These shocks are now estimated to have been no larger than mid-magnitude-4: the first two events were quite small, felt strongly in London only because their epicenters were within city limits. But pound for pound—or, rather, magnitude unit for magnitude unit—the impact of these earthquakes far outstripped their literal reverberations within the earth.

What Indeed Was Neo-Classicism?: A Reply to James William Johnson's “What Was Neo-Classicism?”

1970 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Donald Greene
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
External Aid ◽  
Augustan Age ◽  
Classical Age ◽  
Scientific American

Bernal calls the Dark Ages the Age of Faith; the period from the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 18th century is often called the Age of Reason. — Scientific American“Shortest damn age in history” was The New Yorker's comment on this little gem; and the phrase, which for some decades did manful duty among writers of school textbooks and “popular historians” like the Durants and Sir Harold Nicolson as a substitute for study and thought, deserves no better epitaph. To the serious historian, these questions of labeling — “Shall we call the Dark Ages the Age of Faith, or shall we call the Age of Faith the Dark Ages? Shall we call 1660-1800 in Britain the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment or the Neo-Classical Age or the Augustan Age?” — seem only tedious pseudo-problems, better left for journalists — and professors of literature — to play with if it amuses them and their readers; for his purposes, it suffices to call 1660-1800 “1660-1800.” He knows too well that such labels represent not only naive oversimplifications and distortions of history, but sometimes even reversals of the historical actuality. “The Age of Reason” is certainly one of these latter. Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that “reason,” as signifying the power of the human mind, without external aid, to arrive at valuable truth, was, together with its handmaid “logic,” seldom in worse repute than in Britain from 1660 onward. The whole tendency of the ruling empiricist philosophy of the time, that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” — is to minimize it and exalt experience in its place.

scholarly journals Protestant Propaganda in a Cold War of Religion: From the Hartlib Circle to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Author(s):  
Sugiko Nishikawa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Set Up

This article considers how, impelled by confessional divisions caused by the Reformation, a general sense of pan-Protestant community grew across Europe, and its members launched a long battle against Roman Catholicism far beyond the 16th century. Indeed, it continued into the mid-18th century, the so-called Age of Reason. If it cannot necessarily be described as an open war of religion like the Thirty Years War, it was at least a cold war. From their points of view, the Protestant minorities threatened by the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation, such as the Waldensians in northern Italy and the Lithuanian Calvinists, stood on the front line in this war. Thus, financial support was regularly offered by the Protestant churches in Great Britain and Ireland to their distressed brethren across the continent, university scholarships were set up for students from Catholicdominated areas, and plans were drafted for a Protestant union in Europe, from a military level to an ecclesiastical one. It is in this context that we must understand how apparently strange a phenomenon as British support for the translation of the Bible into Lithuanian developed. The author sees Chylinski’s activities in the tradition of learning and charity exhibited in the 1650s by the three leading members of the Hartlib philosophical circle, namely, Samuel Hartlib (originally from Elbing), Jan Amos Comenius (from Moravia), and John Dury (born in Edinburgh, he spent his early life in various places in northern Europe), who were, in a sense, Protestant refugees to England from north-central Europe. After Chylinski, British support for Lithuanian Protestants did not end. She traces the work of Robert Boyle and the foundation of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1699), which organised relief for Žemaitijan Calvinists in the early 1730s.

Reason and Power in Benjamin Franklin's Political Thought

1953 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1092-1115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Stourzh
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
History Of ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Heaven And Earth ◽  
Unanimous Agreement

Perhaps no period of modern history has been more a victim of generalization than the Age of Enlightenment. The worship of reason and progress and belief in the essential goodness and perfectibility of human nature are most commonly associated with the 18th century climate of opinion. Many of the stereotypes which have been applied to it have automatically been transferred to Benjamin Franklin. Already to contemporaries of his old age, Franklin seemed the very personification of the Age of Reason. Condorcet, who had known Franklin personally, summed up his description of Franklin's political career as follows: “In a word, his politics were those of a man who believed in the power of reason and the reality of virtue.” In Germany, an admirer was even more enthusiastic: “Reason and virtue, made possible through reason alone, consequently again reason and nothing but reason, is the magic with which Benjamin Franklin conquered heaven and earth.” This is also the judgment of posterity. F. L. Mott and Chester E. Jorgensen, who have so far presented the most acute analysis of Franklin's thought and its relationship to the intellectual history of his time, do not hesitate to call him “the completest colonial representative” of the Age of Enlightenment. Unanimous agreement seems to exist that Franklin was “in tune with his time.”

EPITAFIES OF THE RELATIVES OF HADJI IBRAHIM AL-URADI AS A SOURCE ON THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE SCIENTIST AND ON THE HISTORY OF GIDATL

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-21
Author(s):  
Sh M Khapizov ◽  
M G Shekhmagomedov
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The Look ◽  
Cultural Monuments ◽  
Written Sources

The article is devoted to the study of inscriptions on the gravestones of Haji Ibrahim al-Uradi, his father, brothers and other relatives. The information revealed during the translation of these inscriptions allows one to date important events from the history of Highland Dagestan. Also we can reconsider the look at some important events from the past of Hidatl. Epitaphs are interesting in and of themselves, as historical and cultural monuments that needed to be studied and attributed. Research of epigraphy data monuments clarifies periodization medieval epitaphs mountain Dagestan using record templates and features of the Arabic script. We see the study of medieval epigraphy as one of the important tasks of contemporary Caucasian studies facing Dagestani researchers. Given the relatively weak illumination of the picture of events of that period in historical sources, comprehensive work in this direction can fill gaps in our knowledge of the medieval history of Dagestan. In addition, these epigraphs are of great importance for researchers of onomastics, linguistics, the history of culture and religion of Dagestan. The authors managed to clarify the date of death of Ibrahim-Haji al-Uradi, as well as his two sons. These data, the attraction of written sources and legends allowed the reconstruction of the events of the second half of the 18th century. For example, because of the epidemic of plague and the death of most of the population of Hidatl, this society noticeably weakened and could no longer maintain its influence on Akhvakh. The attraction of memorable records allowed us to specify the dates of the Ibrahim-Haji pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, as well as the route through which he traveled to these cities.

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