Spinoza y el Spinozismo en la Ilustración Occidental: los últimos giros de la controversia

This article seeks to outline the main elements in the historiographical controversy over the significance of ‘Spinozism’ as an eighteenth-century Enlightenment category and the validity or otherwise of the concept of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ as well as the relationship between these two categories. Defining ‘Radical Enlightenment’ as the philosophical rejection of religious authority combined with a democratic tending system of social and political thought, and as a partly clandestine tradition that evolved in opposition to the moderate mainstream Enlightenment, it seeks to sketch in the main features both of the ‘negative critique’ broadly opposing this way of understanding the Western Enlightenment and the ‘positive critique’ that accepts this classification in broad outline.En el presente artículo se aspira a resumir los principales elementos de la controversia historiográfica acerca del significado de “Spinozismo” como categoría de la Ilustración del siglo XVIII y de la validez o no del concepto de “Ilustración Radical”, así como la relación entre ambas categorías. Al definir la “Ilustración Radical” como el rechazo filosófico de la autoridad religiosa, en combinación con un sistema de pensamiento social y político que propende a la democracia, y como una tradición en parte clandestina desarrollada en oposición a la corriente principal de la Ilustración, más moderada, el texto pretende bosquejar en sus rasgos distintivos tanto la “crítica negativa”, fuertemente opuesta a ese modo de entender la Ilustración Occidental, como la “crítica positiva”, que la acepta ampliamente

On History and Liberty: The ‘Revisionism’ of Bronisław Baczko

The ‘Warsaw School of History of Ideas’ is the name given to a ‘revisionist think tank’ which was led by the historian Bronisław Baczko from 1956 to 1968 in Communist Poland. This group reunited scholars like Leszek Kołakowski or Krzysztof Pomian around questions related to political believes, theological conceptions or utopian thought. Expelled from the University, B. Baczko left Poland and seek shelter in Geneva where he became a Professor of history of Ideas and historiography. In his new home, he developed an original vision on Enlightenment and the French Revolution

The reconfiguration of Natura and Ars in cartesian rhetoric and the epistemological reflections in the prize questions of the french academies

This article discusses the change in the relationship between natura and ars that occurred when Cartesian language theories penetrated conceptions of rhetoric in France during the 17th century. In part one, the article considers the reception of Descartes by the French universities and collèges in order to explore what I call the epistemic transfer between Aristotelianism and the new Cartesian philosophy. The focus then shifts to Bernard Lamy’s conception of rhetoric as presented in his principal work De l’art de parler (1675). Based upon the Cartesian theory of passions, Lamy’s book redefines rhetoric in a way that has been labelled in current research as a ‘grammar of affects’. The fundamentals of the ars rhetorica are thus substantially altered, however without eliminating the power of the rhetorical tradition. The third section turns to the prize contests of the French academies in the 18th century in order to show the extent to which the transformation of rhetorical theory affected the broader practice of eloquence. Moreover, the rhetorical prize contests demonstrate an explicit reflection on the diverging modes of knowledge production that are essential, on the one hand, to the exact sciences and, on the other, to the textual tradition. Particularly striking is the critique of scientific method that was developed by the defenders of rhetoric in the concours académique

The world is too large : philosophical mobility and urban space in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris

Too often associated with the tropes of exile, wandering, or nomadism in postmodern thought, philosophical mobility has been little studied in itself, except in connection with the singular travel practices of a Voltaire, a Denis Diderot, or a Jean-Jacques Rousseau (...)

Spinoza today: the current state of Spinoza scholarship

What I plan to do in this paper is to provide a survey of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy has been deployed in relation to early modern thought, in the history of ideas and in a number of different domains of contemporary philosophy, and to offer an account of how some of this research has developed. The past decade of research in Spinoza studies has been characterized by a number of tendencies; however, it is possible to identify four main domains that characterize these different lines of research: studies of Spinoza’s individual works, of its problematic concepts, from the point of view of the history of ideas, and comparative studies of Spinoza’s ideas

The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition [review of: Post-revolution nonfiction film: building the Soviet and Cuban Nations by Joshua Malitsky, 2013]

“The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition” Joshua Malitsky, Post-revolution nonfiction film: building the Soviet and Cuban Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013)

Les Lumières Écossaises et le roman philosophique de Descartes

The paper reconstructs the reception of Descartes's work by the Scottish Enlighteners, from Colin MacLaurin to Dugald Stewart. The Scots' image of Descartes was a byproduct of a scientific controversy; philosophical arguments were brought into the picture more as asides than as a primary focus of interest. As soon as the Cartesian physics withered away as a real alternative to Newtonian physics, only the philosophical arguments were left, with no memory of the context out of which they originated, and the focus of the discussion shifts from physics to the philosophy of mind and the theory of knowledge

Rousseau, la philosophie française du XVIIIe et du XIXe siècles et l'invention des États nations au XIXe. L'exemple de la Turquie d'Atatürk"

On tente de montrer à travers l'exemple de J-J Rousseau et des Lumières, mais aussi du positivisme de Comte, l'influence de la philosophie française des Lumières dans la constitution des États-Nations méditerranéens, en particulier de la Turquie moderne de Mustapha Kemal, lui-même francophone et lecteur de Rousseau

L'aube des Lumières dans les pays roumains

En y introduisant le concept de l'aube des Lumières, l'auteur propose une périodisation des Lumières dans les pays roumains qui remet en question la périodisation des Lumières chez les Grecs. La Frühaufklärung (1680-1780) s'avère une conjoncture de forces progressistes qui prônent la modernisation de l'appareil étatique, des institutions, de la langue et de l'éducation. L'auteur y distingue quatre périodes: 1. l'Église triomphante (1680-1710); 2. l'Absolutisme raisonné (1710-1730); 3. le Despotisme éclairé (1730-1780) et 4. l'Église militante (1695-1780). L'Aufklärung proprement dite ne commence qu'en 1780: elle aspire à réaliser en plus l'émancipation nationale et l'indépendance politique

Traum im Film und in der Literatur : eine Bibliographie

Inhalt: Filmbezogene Arbeiten Literaturbezogene Arbeiten In den zweiten Teil des vorliegenden Verzeichnisses ist eine thematische Liste von Manfred Engel eingegangen (http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/EUROL/kongresse/dream/dreamwelcome.htm). Ich danke Manfred Engel nicht nur für die Genehmigung, seine Liste verwenden zu dürfen, sondern auch für eine Fülle weiterer Hinweise. Dank an Bernard Dieterle und Ludger Kaczmarek