D’Alembert’s Contribution to the French Enlightenment

The French Enlightenment directly influenced and promoted the Enlightenment in other European countries. During the Enlightenment, the development of natural science and the dissemination of scientific knowledge greatly promoted the emancipation of human minds. D’Alembert is a famous French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. As a representative on mission during the French Enlightenment, d’Alembert made important contributions to mechanics, mathematics, and astronomy that greatly promoted the development of natural sciences.

EUROPE IN OUR BLOOD... About the Nadezhda Venediktova`s book Caesar and Venediktova. Cultural excavations

Cultural Excavations by Nadezhda Venediktova were published in late autumn 2021, at the time most suitable for philosophical speculations. This way of thinking brings us close to a collapse that might equally turn out productive or catastrophic. Its anaemic academic manner stands out among full-blooded well-crafted literature of saturated and inspiring reality. Pandemic or not, we seek to know whether there is a need to distinguish between various cultures if at the end of the day people are still people. The author does not provide the answer but rather invites us to join a sophisticated mental game in fine textual decorations. And readers will walk away a little confused about simplicity of binary oppositions, and straightforwardness of the logic that a bored visitor so happily lays their hands on, eager and happy to get down to work. The book evolves around the topic of meeting thyself in different cultural surroundings. Sunlit essays bear the imprint of the bitter rationalism of the French enlightenment coupled with a weathered love of personal presence in the world. In her latest work, Nadezhda Venediktova ‘ambitiously comments on life’s creative abilities’. Vivid sketches entitled Passions for Europe may take place by a nameless lake in Zurich but remind readers of Michel Houellebecq’s concrete jungle, of Spengler’s mathematics. But nothing here speaks of The Decline of the West, under the author’s thoughtful gaze Europe comes to life fresh and real — a proverbial sphynx with its intriguing riddles. The author’s underworld meetings with the world literature alternate with colorful Italian landscapes. Vibrant images of friends are so true to life that remind of the immortality of soul. The soul of Europe is truly immortal and found across the continent — Italy, Britain, Austria, Germany, France, Greece, Switzerland, Spain — gave their name to the chapters but cannot be reduced to a dusty catalogue. Nadezhda Venediktova presents European countries through effortless florid metaphors. This what happens when Europe looks into the author’s soul, though it might look otherwise from an outside perspective.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTIONARY PATRIOTIC MOVEMENTS IN VIETNAM AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The patriotic movement in Vietnam at the beginning of the twentieth century, to a certain extent, demonstrated the unity of two tasks: national liberation and social renewal with an orientation towards democracy, naturally, in relation to the conditions of that time. Vietnamese patriotic movements of that time, experiencing the influence of Western culture, including French, gradually moved away from feudal consciousness and over time came to understand the need to combine patriotism with bourgeois democratic values of the Western type. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Vietnamese patriots could not find a scientifically correct way to liberate their people.

All Production Is Reproduction

The aim of this article is to probe the connections between two key fields of knowledge of the French Enlightenment: political economy and natural history. It does so by analyzing the uses of reproduction, a term that eighteenth-century political economists imported from natural history. While historians of knowledge have demonstrated the crucial role played by political and economic concerns in the practices of naturalists, intent on improving their nation, the significance of natural history for the development of political economy has not been sufficiently analyzed. Studying side-by-side the works of the period’s most famous school of political economy, the physiocrats, and one of its most influential naturalists, the Comte de Buffon, the paper demonstrates that the physiocrats adopted not only the term from natural historians, but also the conceptual baggage that accompanied it. Buffon radically reconceptualized the reproduction of living beings as a process governed by natural laws and not divine intervention. As the paper argues, the physiocrats’ political-economic system was based on precisely such a conception of the natural laws of reproduction, which they extended from the world of the living to the entire economy of the nation.

DEISM AS A DEFINITIVE PRINCIPLE FOR THE FORMATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY HISTORY OF WOLTER’S

Voltaire’s creativity ismultifaceted, covering the problems of philosophical knowledge, the assertion of a deistic worldview, the implementation of the principles of human free will, a comprehensive critique of religion and the church, the beginning of the political concept of “educated absolutism.” The thinker became one of the greatest authorities of the French Enlightenment, being highly gifted, universally educated, owning the principles of critical thinking. The aimof this article is to determine the basic principles of the philosophical principle of deism in Voltaire’s creativity and its influence on the formation of the philosophical-historical concept. The tasks of this article are perform an analysis the formation of the deistic worldview of the French thinker, the influences of the philosophy of sensualism and rationalism on the formation of the general foundations of social philosophy of the enlightener. Research methods are principles of unity of historical and logical, dialectical unity of analysis and synthesis, convergence from abstract to concrete, principles of objectivity and systematization. Research results: philosophical worldview of the XVII ‒ early XVIII centuries. had a one-sided character: on the one hand ‒ the philosophy of empiricism, based on knowledge of scientific facts using experimental methods of scientific research, and on the other ‒ rationalist philosophy, which took as primary the original theoretical generalizations. The integral system of philosophical knowledge in the first half of the eighteenth century was absent. Conclusion. The deistic foundations of Voltaire’s philosophical worldview determine not only the ontological and epistemological aspects, but undoubtedly forming the general principles of his philosophy of history, which have an abstract, mostly narrative character. However, the possibilities of a deistic worldview direct the thinker to search for an objective pattern of development of historical knowledge. They usually have a general theoretical value, as well as their practical implementation

Food For Thought

This chapter focuses on the emergence of a remarkable print culture in Dublin. It states that the capital city had become a major center of publishing in the English-speaking world by 1730. The chapter mentions John Smith, one of the leading importers of books directly from Holland and France for near forty years. Smith and his contemporaries had played a critical role in introducing some of the canonical writers of the French Enlightenment to Irish readers, both by sourcing foreign-language imports and by reprinting English translations at rates cheaper than London. The chapter also uncovers how the rise of the print culture resonated in provincial centers but less clearly so in rural Ireland. Critical to the growth of provincial print culture was the spread of newspapers. The chapter then assesses the implications of the great contraction of Dublin book publishing on booksellers, library societies in urban centers, and libraries in provincial centers.

The National Sericultural Utopia and Debates on the Acclimatization of Plants in New-born Belgium (1830–1865)

This two-folded contribution firstly addresses the little-known history of an agricultural utopia that took over the newly born Belgium. The history of the Belgian sericultural utopia is not anecdotal, however, it was based on the conviction that it was possible to acclimatize exotic species. This conviction has a long history that is depicted in the second part of this research. The permanence in time of this hope is explained by various factors: famous supporters, a lexical fog, experiments considered successful, routines, agricultural crisis, etc. They kept alive the dream of acclimatization carried out by the French Enlightenment, but not only. Yet, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the zealots of the famous André Thouin confronted those—early phytogeographers, or not—who rejected acclimatization more often. It might even be that biological nationalism militated against acclimatization, as showed the International Congress of Horticulture in Brussels (1864), which constitutes the chronological milestone of this research.

Light through Time and Space

Chinese Confucianism, which emerged during the Axial Age, has had a profound influence on many intellectual and cultural movements in history, including the European Enlightenment. This article analyzes the influence of Confucianism on the European Enlightenment from four perspectives: human rights, a benevolent government, religion and nature. The humanist spirit propagated by Confucianism was similar to the views expressed by Enlightenment thinkers on reason and human rights and provided a powerful ideological weapon for Enlightenment thinkers to criticize religious theocracy and break through the darkness of the Middle Ages. During this process of learning and absorbing the humanist spirit of Confucianism, French Enlightenment thinkers developed the rational and critical spirit of the Enlightenment and paved the way for intellectual liberation. Today, the world is facing the new challenges of global climate change, artificial intelligence and genetic technology. In the context of these global problems, China and the West can learn from each other and join efforts to gather new ideological resources to carry out a new ideological enlightenment movement on a global scale and achieve sustainable development for all humanity.