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Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind. Diderot was the editor of the Encyclopédie, that Trojan horse of Enlightenment ideas, as well as a novelist, playwright, art critic and philosopher. His Letter on the Blind of 1749 is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature because it contradicts a central assumption of Western literature and philosophy, and of the Enlightenment in particular, namely that moral and philosophical insight is dependent on seeing. Kate Tunstall's essay guides the reader through the Letter, its anecdotes, ideas and its conversational mode of presenting them, and it situates the Letter in relation both to the Encyclopedie and to a rich tradition of writing about and, most importantly, talking and listening to the blind.
This volume is based on the 2004 series of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, one of the world's leading name lecture series. In it major figures in philosophy, political science, law, psychoanalysis, sociology, and literature address the challenges that displacement, asylum, and migration pose to our notions of human rights.
The keywords of the Enlightenment-freedom, tolerance, rights, equality-are today heard everywhere, and they are used to endorse a wide range of positions, some of which are in perfect contradiction. While Orwell's 1984 claims that there is one phrase in the English language that resists translation into Newspeak, namely the opening lines of that key Enlightenment text, the Declaration of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...', we also find the Wall Street Journal saying of the Iraq War that the US was 'fighting for the very notion of the Enlightenment'. It seems we are no longer sure whether these truths are self-evident nor quite what they might mean today. Based on the critically acclaimed Oxford Amnesty Lectures series, this book brings together a number of major international figures to debate the history of freedom, tolerance, equality, and to explore the complex legacy of the Enlightenment for human rights. The lectures are published here with responses from other leading figures in the field.
Marian Hobson's work has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of the European Enlightenment, and of Diderot and Rousseau in particular. This book presents her most important articles in a single volume, translated into English for the first time. Hobson's distinctive approach is to take a given text or problématique and position it within its intellectual, historical and polemical context. From close analysis of the underlying conceptual structures of literary texts, she offers a unique insight into the vibrant networks of people and ideas at work throughout Europe, and across disciplinary boundaries as diverse as literature and mathematics, medicine and music. In their translations of Hobson's essays, Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman present the primary sources in both the original eighteenth-century French and modern English, making the detail of these debates accessible to everyone, from the specialist to the student, whatever their academic discipline or interest.
An accessible and authoritative new history of French literature, written by a highly distinguished transatlantic group of scholars This book provides an engaging, accessible, and exciting new history of French literature from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, from Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre to Samuel Beckett and Assia Djebar. Christopher Prendergast, one of today's most distinguished authorities on French literature, has gathered a transatlantic group of more than thirty leading scholars who provide original essays on carefully selected writers, works, and topics that open a window onto key chapters of French literary history. The book begins in the sixteenth century wi...
Throughout Europe, the exercise of justice rests on judicial independence by impartiality. In Reason and Fairness Ulrike Müßig reveals the combination of ordinary judicial competences with procedural rationality, together with the complementarity of procedural and substantive justice, as the foundation for the ‘rule of law’ in court constitution, far earlier than the advent of liberal constitutionalism. The ECHR fair trial guarantee reads as the historically-grown consensus of the functional judicial independence. Both before historical and contemporary courts, justice is done and seen to be done by means of judgements, whose legal requirements combine the equation of ‘fair’ and ‘legal’ with that of ‘legal’ and ‘rational.’ This legal determinability of the judge’s fair attitude amounts to the specific (rational) European idea of justice.
This book examines the career and publications of the French architect Julien-David Leroy (1724–1803) and his impact on architectural theory and pedagogy. Despite not leaving any built work, Leroy is a major international figure of eighteenth-century architectural theory and culture. Considering the place that Leroy occupied in various intellectual circles of the Enlightenment and Revolutionary period, this book examines the sources for his ideas about architectural history and theory and defines his impact on subsequent architectural thought. This book will be of key interest to graduate students and scholars of Enlightenment-era architectural history.
Leading political theorists demonstrate the transformative potential of de-centering Western traditions in the field of political theory.
"If the past is indeed a foreign country, then how can we make sense of its richness and difference, without approaching it on our terms alone? 'Pre-histories' and 'afterlives', methods that have emerged in recent work by Terence Cave, offer new ways of shaping the stories we tell of the past and the analyses we offer. In this volume, distinguished contributors engage in a dialogue with these two new critical methods, exploring their uses in a range of contexts, disciplines, languages and periods. The contributors are Terence Cave, Marian Hobson, Anna Holland, Neil Kenny, Mary McKinley, Richard Scholar, Kate E. Tunstall, and Wes Williams."
The question of the relation of Martin Heidegger’s thought to politics has been a subject of controversy since the 1930s, when he became an advocate of the National Socialist regime in Germany. This volume addresses this question in a unique format, as a dialogue among leading Heidegger scholars. That dialogue begins with an exchange between Gregory Fried and Emmanuel Faye about Faye’s contention that Heidegger’s work represents nothing short of “the introduction of Nazism into philosophy.” At stake are issues such as what Heidegger himself understood Nazism to be, whether a thinker’s life and actions define the meaning of his work, the enduring threat of fascism, and the nature of rationality and philosophy itself. Richard Polt, Matthew Sharpe, Dieter Thomä, William Altman, and Sidonie Kellerer join the conversation, with responses from Fried and Faye.