Conversational Enlightenment

Traces the spread of the concept of conversation during the Enlightenment, including the project of politeness, the fine arts, philosophy and public opinion. The book narrates this triumph of conversational style and thought partly as a succession to the oratorical rhetoric that characterized the Renaissance and partly as the victory of the only mode of speech that recognized women as women, and not as imitation men. It also rewrites Jürgen Habermas' history of the public sphere as the history of rational conversation.

This volume explores the conventional opposition between Enlightenment and Postmodernity and questions some of the conclusions drawn from it.

Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory. While striving to resolve "dilemmas" occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls "intellectual co-optation." In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.

Preface This combined narrative dialogue and play is about the uncreated, unborn and undying transcendent Self of God-consciousness and Buddha-nature. It describes an odyssey of transcendent Consciousness Awakening and Remembrance, as viewed from transpersonal and primarily post-metaphysical Onliness Way of Enlightenment perspective. The conversational interaction between the two characters of this book, which concerns their shared journey of transcendental Nondual Spirit-as-Spirit Consciousness Realization, is primarily intended to be read as a narrative dialogue. However, it is also created and structured in play format, and is intended to be presented to an audience as a play. And herein lies a formidable presentation problem. As a play, it almost certainly has a very limited audience appeal. In relation to the current content tastes of people of a general audience, the play has no scenes of violence, gun-play, murder, fighting, battles, sex scenes, yelling, screaming, car chases, flying saucers, and no bad guys versus good guys, monsters, vampires, aliens or cyborgs. The play simply involves the quiet dialogue between two characters over a sixteen year period, set in various scenic locations. So, speaking from the more cynical and pessimistic side of egoic self, I would say, to borrow the phrase of the burly “Mr. T” of the old TV series called “The A Team”, “I pity the fool” who tries to present this play to a general audience. This would almost certainly be a disaster. On the other hand, I suspect that there is a small, or should I say very small, and select audience of people who would variously enjoy and appreciate this play, and derive useful meaning and insight from it. So, speaking from the more optimistic and supportive side of egoic self, I would praise and encourage anyone, any producer, director, cast and crew, who had the courage, chutzpah, and theatrical nerve and skills to present this play to any audience, selective or otherwise.

The phenomenon of substitution failure is a longstanding focus of discussion for philosophers of language. Substitution failure occurs when a change from one co-referential name to another (e.g. from 'Superman' to 'Clark Kent') affects the truth-value of a sentence. Jennifer Saul has shown that this can occur even in the simplest of sentences. She presents the first full-length treatment of this puzzling feature of language, and explores its implications for the theory of reference and names, and for the methodology of semantics.

This collection of essays brings together eighteenth-century scholars from a variety of disciplines, to discuss conversation in the eighteenth century as concept and practice. At the heart of the volume is a simple question: are eighteenth-century conceptualisations of the role and purpose of conversation still relevant or useful to scholars and thinkers today? This volume contains essays by leading scholars of the period as well as early career researchers, and answers a need for a broad-ranging discussion of the concept of conversation in the arts, social sciences and humanities. The long eighteenth century is a particularly fruitful starting point for work on this topic, since ideas about conversation permeated all types of writing in this period, from the early forerunners of scientific textbooks to philosophical dialogues. The collection covers an exceptionally wide range of long-eighteenth-century authors, artists, lawmakers, texts and works of art, and, although the focus of the volume is largely on eighteenth-century Britain, the volume takes note of the rich relationships between continental European thought and British intellectual life in the period, and of the influence of British ideas in the newly independent American republic.

The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned with what it meant to be human. This collection of essays traces the concept of ‘humanity’ through revolutionary politics, feminist biography, portraiture, explorer narratives, libertine and Orientalist fiction, the philosophy of conversation and musicology.

The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment movement has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine perspective. This highly original study, based on analysis of the correspondence and literary works of a group of educated Jewish women, demonstrates their intellectual proclivities, feminine awareness, and social activities, as well as their attitudes to marriage, traditional family frameworks, and religion. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to German Jewish history as well as to gender studies.