Regional Enlightenment in Transylvania: The educational reforms of Bishop Petru Pavel Aron, their influences and effects on the Uniate society in Transylvania in the Age of Enlightenment

The Transylvanian Enlightenment is a very contained phenomenon, yet fully fledged, attributed to a group of intellectuals in the last two decades of the eighteenth century known as the Transylvanian School. However, efforts towards Enlightenment appear much sooner, made possible by Uniate Bishop Inochentie Micu Klein’s ideas and especially through the actions of his successor, Petru Pavel Aron. With the financial help of the Habsburg Empire, particularly that of Empress Maria Theresa, Bishop Aron created schools, a typography and an intellectual circle that established the foundation for the Transylvanian School. Largely under-researched, the Bishop’s educational efforts will be examined in this study to argue that Enlightenment among the ethnic Romanian population appeared in Transylvania in a peripheral form forty years earlier than the Transylvanian School

Transnational knowledge transfer in the Enlightenment (c.1750-1790): the case of József Fogarasi Pap

The present thesis offers the first comprehensive study of the intellectual career of Transylvanian philosopher József Fogarasi Pap (1744-1784), analysing the context, influences, and reception of the metaphysical essays submitted by him to Enlightenment prize contests in the Dutch Republic and in Berlin. A contextual intellectual biography, this thesis combines a transnational methodology with a textual analysis of the essays, and highlights the importance of the prize essay qua genre in the institutionalisation and democratisation of eighteenth-century knowledge networks. Fogarasi Pap’s remarkable success in philosophical competitions serves as a case study for underscoring three arguments. Firstly, religious discourse did not belong to a separate religious Enlightenment, but was a consistent feature of early modern philosophy. Secondly, Fogarasi Pap’s eclectic negotiation of various ideas and influences was a common method employed by thinkers to answer prize competitions’ questions, representing an Enlightenment philosophical and literary genre. Lastly, the philosophical endeavours of Fogarasi Pap and his competitors must be understood in the context of an institutional framework of philosophical production, namely the societies and academies that sponsored the competitions. The first two chapters of the thesis follow the transnational knowledge networks of which Fogarasi Pap was a part: the Transylvanian Protestant peregrinatio academica, and the prize contests proliferating in eighteenth-century Europe. The following three chapters focus on four different essays submitted to three contests: the University of Leiden’s Legatum Stolpianum, the Haarlem-based Teylers First Society contest, and the Berlin Academy’s Speculative Class. Each chapter analyses the institutional context, Fogarasi Pap’s entries, and those of other competitors, in order to recover the intellectual microcosm of the everyday, mid-level, now unduly-forgotten practitioners of Enlightenment philosophy. Finally, in terms of thematic analysis, the thesis covers the broad spectrum of topics that represented the interests of eighteenth-century mainstream philosophy, from moral aesthetics, to the uniqueness of God, providence, and force of matter.</p