Intellectual History of the Enlightenment

The College of New Jersey (which later became Princeton University) provides an example of how Scottish philosophy influenced American higher education in an institutional context during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article compares the administrations of John Witherspoon (served from 1768 to 1794), Samuel Stanhope Smith (served from 1795 to 1812) and James McCosh (served from 1868 to 1888) at Princeton and examines their use of Scottish philosophy in restructuring the curriculum and reforming its institutional purpose. While presiding over Princeton during its most significant transitional moments, these philosophers of the Scottish School of Common Sense instituted different versions of moral education. Meanwhile, Witherspoon's legacy of balancing the interests of Evangelicalism and Scottish philosophy as Princeton's driving purpose influenced the creation and reception of nineteenth-century programmes of moral education. The broader question this article addresses is: how did the interconnecting points among Scottish philosophy, Calvinism and moral education inform notions of didactic Enlightenment at Princeton across a century?

During a transitional period of Scottish history, responses to the French Revolution in the 1790s significantly affected Enlightenment intellectual culture across Scotland and, in particular, its existence in Edinburgh. The emergence of powerful counter-Enlightenment interests—championed by Henry Dundas—sought to censure the diffusion of ideas and values associated with France's revolution. In doing so, they targeted all controversial philosophical writings and liberal values for censorship and, in turn, gradually crippled the unique circumstances that had birthed the Scottish Enlightenment. Alarmed by the effect counter-Enlightenment policies had on Scottish intellectual culture, Dugald Stewart professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University (1785–1810) countered this threat with a system of moral education. His programme created a modern version of Thomas Reid's Common Sense philosophy whilst advancing that the best way to prevent the adoption of supposedly dangerous political and philosophical ideas was examining their errors. The tensions between counter-Enlightenment policies and Stewart's system of moral education erupted in the 1805 election of John Leslie as professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University, but the Leslie affair was not an isolated episode. This controversy embodied tensions over ecclesiastical politics in the Church of Scotland, national secular politics, and Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. At the same time, Stewart believed the Leslie affair would determine the fate of not only Edinburgh University but also the Scottish universities’ entwined relationship with Enlightenment. This article examines how Dugald Stewart's prominent role in the 1805 John Leslie affair pitted counter-Enlightenment interests against those of an emerging generation of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Josephinism is a mixed blessing: Beacon of hope and unforgivable pitfall, the rational reform of the Habsburg realms was seen as the Empire's last genuine chance of survival as well as the seed of its destruction by nineteenth-century intellectuals and twentieth-century historians. Our introduction traces the production and usages of Josephinism, situates it in its various historiographical contexts and uses it as a touchstone to evaluate Enlightenment studies.   

Eduard Winter and Fritz Valjavec came from "German" settlement promontories in Central Europe and this imparted their work on Josephinism with distinct proclivities.

Both developed their conceptions in perceived situations of engulfment and struggle for survival. Winter, who started his career as a nationally conscious German Bohemian priest from Grottau/ Hrádek nad Nisou, was to enjoy skyrocketing success as chairholder at the Heydrich Foundation in Nazi-occupied Prague and reinvented himself as champion of German-Slavonic mutuality as professor in Communist East Germany after 1947. Young Winter combined pedagogical zeal and social awareness, he castigated the ossfied institutions Catholic church that neglected its national missions and thwarted modernist tendencies. Winter's Josephinism was a response to Habsburg liberal anticlericalism, Seeking to dispel the lingering prejudices about Josephinism, he showed that it was no berserk attack on the church, but embodied what he desired for the Catholicism of his day: A programme of social reform that was religious, national, and modernist.

Valjevec, from a Danube-Swabian background, grew up in Zagreb before living in Budapest and Munich. He chose the "people" (Volk) and its culture as the linchpin of history. This served two strategies of dissociation: Valjavec rebelled against desiccated "Geistesgeschichte" and conceptually emancipated his subject from the confines of statehood, a move that was beneficial both in the interwar period with its scattered settlement situation and after 1945 when he became a leading historian of the displaced "Volksdeutsche" who found shelter in the Federal Republic of Germany. Valjavec's reading of the Josephinian Enlightenment resulted in a paradox: Its culturally German trailblazers brought advancement to the less mature nations of East Europe, while Josephinism diluted national sentiment among the Germans of Austria, thus making them latecomers vis-à-vis the other "national revivals" in the Monarchy the emperor they worshipped had ignited.

This study complicates one part of the scholarly legend that Gottlob Christian Storr infused the Kantian letter with an Orthodox spirit. In §§17-18 of his DC, Storr positions Immanuel Kant’s physico-theological and moral arguments for rational belief in God within an argument for the divine authority of Scripture—on which he suggests the reliability of the book’s dogmatic statements rest. By foregrounding some versions of Kant’s arguments (while hiding others) and by illegitimately drawing biblical-theological conclusions from transcendental and limited-speculative premises, the scholarly story goes, Storr made it seem as if Lutheran Orthodoxy follows from Kant’s arguments for rational belief in God. I argue rather that Storr put Kant’s arguments in the mouth of reason—construed as a figure in a traditional Lutheran story of transformation. In this story—told from a post-transformation perspective—reason’s awareness of God is both transformed by an encounter with Word and it is a placeholder that makes a comparison between ‘pre’ and ‘post’ transformation visible. In this encounter with Word, reason comes to trust that the God who is able to help is also willing to help, and to trust that the God who reveals his willingness to help is also the divine Author of Scripture. Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s rational belief in a God who is able to see the secrets of our hearts and are cognitive symbolic, Storr is able (while keeping within the bounds of the Lutheran dogmatics genre) to (re)present them as symbolic summaries of Scripture (i.e., as dogmatic statements) that harmonize neatly with reason’s self-understanding. Storr does not cherry-pick the Kantian words that support his cause, but exploits the compatibility of Kant’s heuristic language with the Lutheran heuristic. And he does not cast methodological rigor aside so much as he incorporates Kant’s arguments into a Lutheran rule for hierarchically combining human- relative modes of argumentation and measures of reliability with divine or Scripture- relative modes and measures. While he owes much to sixteenth-century thinking, Storr answers a pressing question of the late eighteenth-century: how to reliably bring together multiple modes of argumentation and measures of reliability.

The current pre-dominant scientific paradigm connects the French Revolution with the radical Enlightenment initiated by Spinoza. Democratic republicanism, fostered by Spinoza in opposition to aristocratic-oligarchic republicanism, provided, mediated by Rousseau, and other thinkers, the intellectual background for the Revolution, or, at least, part of this background. This is what Jonathan Israel held for true also in the context of the 2017 ISIH conference. As such, this is an ideological paradigm, related to ideological foundations, i.e. foundations based on political theory, of the Revolution. I do not want to enter the lively discussion, pro and contra Jonathan Israel’s view, a debate that the British scholar has primed (since the early 1990s), and that is still ongoing.
In this paper, I argue that the Revolution, and the creation of the first-ever totalitarian State in modernity, needed, even more than ideological foundations, an epistemological basis grounded on metaphysics. Both Spinoza and Malebranche based their philosophy on Descartes. In this, they belonged to a rationalistic school of thought that included figures quite similar to that of Malebranche, like Arnold Geulinck (briefly mentioned in this paper), and, above all, Leibniz. If we concede – and this is not a foregone conclusion – that the French Revolution took place in a space and time in which Cartesian dualism was still one of the prevalent epistemological as well as ontological models – Malebranche’s thought might have played a major role, even in sheer political-ideological context, and later on in the context of policies more than in that of ideologies.

"El Sistema Colonial Develado" de Jean Louis Vastey.

Muy feliz de anunciarles que ya esta en la calle la primera traducción al castellano de "Le Système Colonial Dévoilé" (1814) la obra cumbre de Jean Louis Vastey el intelectual más importante de la revolución haitiana. La edición y el estudio preliminar a mi cargo. La traducción realizada por Laura Léger y el prólogo de Marlene Daut, máxima autoridad en la materia. Trabajo de edición de Javier Marín. Editado por Ediciones del CCC. Muchísimas gracias a tod@s ell@s por sumarse a esta aventura de recuperar a un imprescindible, olvidado, de Nuestra América.

De la contratapa

El manto de silencio impuesto sobre la Revolución de Haití ocluyó el protagonismo de miles de esclavos negros en la más radical de las revoluciones modernas y, consecuentemente, su singular significado político. De igual forma, condenó al olvido a una pléyade de intelectuales que, después de 1804, utilizaron la pluma para llevar adelante un furibundo ataque contra el orden colonial, racista y esclavista imperante en la época. Jean Louis Vastey (1781-1820) fue entre todos ellos el más destacado. Autor de una enjundiosa obra, asaltó como ningún otro la cosmovisión eurocéntrica y colonial, desnudando sus contradicciones, sus falacias y sus mitos. Apropiándose de la Ilustración y el cristianismo desde la perspectiva de las víctimas que se rebelaron en contra de sus amos y las potencias europeas, construyó una teoría crítica sincrética. En muchos sentidos, preanunció las principales conceptualizaciones de las corrientes panafricanas, anticoloniales, tercermundistas y poscoloniales que emergieron mucho tiempo después en Nuestra América y el Tercer Mundo. Vastey no sólo fue el principal exégeta del proceso haitiano sino un pionero del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano y periférico. Injustamente silenciado durante largas décadas, hoy Vastey vuelve. Con la primera traducción al castellano de Le Système Colonial Dévoilé (1814), una de sus obras más incisivas, nos proponemos restituirlo al sitial que se merece: el de un clásico que nunca debió haber sido olvidado.
http://edicionesdelccc.tiendas.coop/libros/sistema-colonial

The academic commemoration of Philip Melanchthon, humanist, reformer and 'teacher of Germany' (praeceptor Germaniae), occurred for the first time on a large scale in 1760, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. This article offers a first exploration of the bicentennial. It explores how Melanchthon's commemorators in central Europe positioned him as a hero of the early German Enlightenment, singling out and reinterpreting his labours for the 'improvement of humanity'. Shorn of context, divested of theological and ecclesiastical commitments, Melanchthon became the model scholar and the pride of Lutheran Germany, who transcended confessional particularities to instruct all of Europe.

Open Access. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/philip-melanchthon-and-the-age-of-enlightenment-notes-on-his-commemoration-in-1760/77774F438285AF54F8EC1935D3504A4F

El volumen "España y el continente americano en el siglo XVIII" es la edición de los trabajos presentados en el VI Congreso de la SEESXVIII y es publicado por Ediciones
Trea, que ya acoge un nutrido catálogo de títulos de referencia sobre el Setecientos español —entre ellas, las de las actas de los IV y V congresos, "La época de Carlos IV" (2009) y "Hacia 1812, desde el siglo ilustrado" (2013)—. El volumen articula los trabajos en un apartado de conferencias plenarias al que le siguen cinco bloques temáticos, e incluye un detallado prólogo, un imprescindible índice onomástico, pues el libro supera las mil páginas, y una sección final que ofrece una síntesis de cada uno de los artículos integrantes.

En 2014, el Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII conmemoró los 250 años del fallecimiento de Benito Jerónimo Feijoo con el congreso "Con la razón y la experiencia: Feijoo 250 años después". El resultado de dicha reunión académica es el volumen homónimo que recoge 36 trabajos organizados en 6 bloques temáticos y supone una puesta al día de la investigación feijoniana. En 2014 también publicaron la antología temática "Lidiando con sombras", a cargo de Elena de Lorenzo, Rodrigo Olay y Noelia García, que  presenta una cuidada introducción y una selección de fragmentos representativos de la totalidad del corpus de Feijoo.