Politicization and Natura Naturans

Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines two major phenomena that had a profound influence on the Late Enlightenment: the sudden and momentous politicization of the Republic of Letters, and the gradual move towards neonaturalism in all fields of knowledge. Over the course of more than a hundred years, the Enlightenment had evolved into a cultural revolution directed against the Ancien Régime, culminating in the significant transformation of Western identity. The crisis of the Ancien Régime arose in step with the Late Enlightenment, setting off a process of cultural hegemony that has rarely been witnessed in any other time or place. The chapter considers how the actual enthronement of man and all his faculties as preached by the Encyclopédie and by Enlightenment humanism went hand in hand with the emergence of the new paradigm of a natura naturans.

Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This book has examined the philosophers' point of view about the Enlightenment, and more specifically the question Was ist Aufklärung? that had been posed by Immanuel Kant. It has also postulated a new history of the Enlightenment as an epochal rift and cultural revolution of the Ancien Régime, a cultural history that is ready to embrace a new, extraordinary and original form of humanism, a bold project for the emancipation of man by man, scientifically investigating himself. The book's argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters such as Jonathan Israel, who critiqued a kind of social and cultural history of the Enlightenment that has long since ceased to exist in the form in which he still appears to conceive of it, and claimed that Spinozistic secularization and philosophical materialism were the authentic source and original character of our modernity.


Author(s):  
Anna Kołos

The article addresses the issue of one of the more intense and captivating European scientific disputes, likewise common to Poland, in the era of the seventeenth-century transformation of knowledge formation, which centered around the possibility of the existence of vacuum, and which culminated in 1647. The fundamental aim of the article comes down to an attempt to determine a position in the scientific-cognitive debate, from which the pro and anti-Polish and European representatives of The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria)  could voice their opinions. In the course of the analysis of the mid-seventeenth century scientific discourse, the reflections of Valeriano Magni, Torricelli, Jan Brożek, Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz, Blaise Pascal, Giovanni Elefantuzzi, Jacob Pierius, and Pierre Guiffart are subjected to close scrutiny. From the perspective of contextualism in the history of science, experiments demonstrating the existence of vacuum are perceived as anomalies that fall into the crisis of normal science, largely based on Aristotle’s physics. The conflict between the old and the new is not, however, presented as a battle of progression with epigonism, but merely as a contest between opposing individual views and the concept of science, which before the formation of the new paradigm was accompanied by ambiguous verification criteria.


Author(s):  
Élodie Ripoll

This article investigates chocolate in Ancien Régime society through a selection of treatises, dictionaries, and novels from the Enlightenment.  These texts provide valuable information on its benefits, preparation, and consumption – revealing new dietary as well as social rituals, closely linked to the libertine imagination.  In addition, the novels inform the evolution of descriptive practices. The analysis of short excerpts enables us to propose a few topoi, such as “to take one’s chocolate,” “to invite to take chocolate,” “to feel pleasure with chocolate” or “(to attempt) to administer poison or narcotic in chocolate.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (269) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Azevedo

Uma melhor compreensão da importância de Dom Vital na história brasileira do século XIX exige uma visão mais ampla da política eclesiástica regalista no Brasil, verificando as suas raízes no iluminismo já no “ancien régime” em Portugal. Em sintonia com o movimento ultramontanista que vinha se formando frente aos movimentos de liberalismo e nacionalismo, especialmente na Itália, a experiência de Dom Vital na França o ajudou a ver de perto as suas possibilidades de enfrentar as políticas hostis à Igreja. De volta ao Brasil e já consagrado Bispo, tomou uma decisão imprevista, mas decisiva: enfrentou o Imperador ao defender-se contra uma parte mais radical da Maçonaria em Pernambuco. Para o Império, sua posição foi política e não contra a Maçonaria, contra a autoridade imperial, enquanto para Dom Vital foi uma expressão de fé, defendendo a liberdade de ação da Igreja.Abstract: A better understanding of the importance of Dom Vital in Brazilian history during the Nineteenth Century requires a larger vision of the regalist and ecclesiatical policies in Brasil, verifying its roots already in the enlightenment of the “ancien régime” in Portugal. In conformity with the utramontanist movement which was taking shape in reaction to liberalism and nationalism, specially in Italy, the experience of Dom Vital in France helped him grasp the possibilities of how to face up to the hostil policies against the Church. Back in Brazil and already consacrated Bishop, he made an unforeseen, but decisive decision. He confronted the Emperor by defending himself against the most radical elements of Free Masonry in Pernambuco. For the Empire, his stance was political and not against Free Masonry, against the imperial authority while for Dom Vital, it was an expression of faith, defending the Church’s freedom of action.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-224
Author(s):  
Manuel F. Vieites

For Spaniards during the Enlightenment, education was a key element in their proposals for reform and modernisation of a country still stubbornly anchored in the feudal structures of the Ancien Régime. As such, different educational issues pervaded the writings and public activities of the most progressive intellectuals. In the same way, educational themes began to pervade the theatre, which these intellectuals saw as an ideal platform for disseminating the ideas of modernisation and convergence with other European countries. Based on a review of different documentary sources from the period and other pertinent literature, this paper shows how educational issues permeated the work of numerous authors, who considered drama a useful tool for the transmission of principles, values and social norms, with the ultimate aim of building a new society for Spanish citizens. At the same time, we analyse different initiatives designed to modernise both theatres and the plays enacted within them, as media for public education designed to appeal to a new audience – a reflection of the new civility.


Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines the unifying element, and the ultimate defining trait of, the Enlightenment style of thought that pervaded the new humanism of the moderns: a radical cultural reform of the European identity that was implicit in the Enlightenment idea of civilization. It also considers the Enlightenment's critique of traditional revealed religions in relation to its humanism of the moderns in the context of Ancien Régime Europe. The chapter first considers the effects of the traditional reading of Immanuel Kant's philosophy and the historical discontinuity between the humanisms of earlier centuries and Enlightenment humanism before discussing Voltaire's view of religion as a necessity and a useful tool in the life of man.


Author(s):  
D. Bruce Hindmarsh

Evangelicals reprised the biblical trope of the “one thing needful” (the unum necessarium) but emphasized singular devotion not in the context of cloister or vestry but in the wider world. This book gives an account of this dynamic spirituality in the new social space of a modernizing society where the traditional bonds of ancien régime society were weakening. It describes the emergence of evangelical spirituality but views devotion, culture, and ideas all together. Evangelical devotion appeared alongside the rise of Modernity, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, and in the midst of a shift from the authority of the ancients to that of the moderns. Evangelical devotion is therefore examined in relation to the key cultural domains of science, law, and art, and the leading intellectual discourses of natural and moral philosophy. The leading subjects and sources for the book and the content of each chapter are also briefly introduced.


Author(s):  
David Randall

The humanist educational project to educate the elite of Western Europe produced as one of its dizzy successes the application of conversation to the speech and behavior of nobleman at court. This, the development of the ideal of the courtier, took conversation from the leisurely retreat from the ancient political world to the courtly heart of the Renaissance political world. The salons of seventeenth-century France further transformed the conversational tradition of the court: in principle, the conversation of the salons began quietly to set itself to rival the world of oratory, to address itself to the same worldly subject matter. The Republic of Letters provided an alternate social matrix for sermo, scholarly rather than courtly—and one which migrated away from its Ciceronian roots towards the mode of Baylean critique. Where the courtly and scholarly traditions of sermo acted as complementary modes during the Renaissance, the increasing scope of salonnier conversation and the increasing abandonment of sermo by the Republic of Letters set them at odds with one another in the opening of the Enlightenment. Both now harbored universalizing ambitions, which would set these sibling modes to fierce conflict.


1959 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Rose

The “war communism” of the Jacobins, mobilizing all economic forces for the defence of the Republic, has many features which seem to anticipate later regimes more self-consciously and more consistently socialist. At the same time it appears in some respects as a partial return to the étatisme of the Ancien Régime in reaction against the liberalism of 1789. Particularly is this true of the adoption, in 1793, of a system of price control for essential commodities.


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