Enlightenment Shadows

Genevieve Lloyd presents a new study of the place of Enlightenment thought in intellectual history and of its continued relevance. She offers original readings of a range of key texts, which highlight the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers enacted in their writing—and reflected on—the interplay of intellect, imagination, and emotion.

The idea of the Enlightenment has become a touchstone for emotive and often contradictory articulations of contemporary western values. Enlightenment Shadows is a study of the place of Enlightenment thought in intellectual history and of its continued relevance. Genevieve Lloyd focuses especially on what is distinctive in ideas of intellectual character offered by key Enlightenment thinkers—on their attitudes to belief and scepticism; on their optimism about the future; and on the uncertainties and instabilities which nonetheless often lurk beneath their use of imagery of light. The book is organized around interconnected close readings of a range of texts: Montesquieu's Persian Letters; Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary; Hume's essay The Sceptic; Adam Smith's treatment of sympathy and imagination in Theory of Moral Sentiments; d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia—together with Diderot's entry on Encyclopedia; Diderot's Rameau's Nephew; and Kant's essay Perpetual Peace. Throughout, the readings highlight ways in which Enlightenment thinkers enacted in their writing—and reflected on—the interplay of intellect, imagination, and emotion. Recurring themes include: the nature of judgement—its relations with imagination and with ideals of objectivity; issues of truth and relativism; the ethical significance of imagining one's self into the situations of others; cosmopolitanism; tolerance; and the idea of the secular.

Shadows are holes in light. We see them all the time, and sometimes we notice them, but their part in our visual experience of the world is mysterious. In this book, an art historian draws on contemporary cognitive science, eighteenth-century theories of visual perception, and art history to discuss shadows and the visual knowledge they can offer.

David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision. In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live.

Charles Griswold has written a comprehensive philosophical study of Smith's moral and political thought. Griswold sets Smith's work in the context of the Enlightenment and relates it to current discussions in moral and political philosophy. Smith's appropriation as well as criticism of ancient philosophy, and his carefully balanced defence of a liberal and humane moral and political outlook, are also explored. This 1999 book is a major philosophical and historical reassessment of a key figure in the Enlightenment that will be of particular interest to philosophers and political and legal theorists, as well as historians of ideas, rhetoric, and political economy.

This work examines the intersection of science and politics in the work of Francois Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot, the principle architects of the optical revolution of early 19th-century France. Their disagreement over the optical accessibility of the world played out across a wide range of French culture.

A broad exploration of the collision and coexistence of classical and modernizing forces within tragic drama during the Enlightenment.

One of the most persistent, troubling, and divisive of the ideological divisions within modernity is the struggle over the Enlightenment and its legacy. Much of the difficulty is owed to a general failure among scholars to consider how history, philosophy, and politics work together. Rethinking the Enlightenment bridges these disciplinary divides. Recent work by historians has now called into question many of the clichés that still dominate scholarly understandings of the Enlightenment’s literary, philosophical, and political culture. Yet this work has so far had little impact on the reception of the Enlightenment, its key players, debates, and ideas in the disciplines that most rely on its legacy, namely, philosophy and political science. Edited by Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd, Rethinking the Enlightenment makes the case for connecting new work in intellectual history with fresh understandings of ‘Continental’ philosophy and political theory. In doing so, in this collection moves towards a critical self-understanding of the present.