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Author: Martin Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2004-07-22
Total Pages: 725
ISBN-13: 0415215757
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Draws together the work of thirty-nine leading international experts on the European Enlightenment (c1660-1800) to offer informed, comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of this period as both an historical epoch and a cultural formation".--BOOKJACKET.
Author: James MacGregor Burns
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-10-29
Total Pages: 434
ISBN-13: 1250024900
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explores history’s most daring and transformational intellectual movement, the European and American Enlightenment. In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World. They transformed thought, overturned governments, and inspired visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to life the revolutionary leaders who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, created the modern world. Burns traces the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment to men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same principles have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab world, in the former Soviet Union, and in China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead, and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns’s exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions. Praise for Fire and Light “With this profound and magnificent book, Burns takes us into the fire’s center. . . . Essential for deciphering the challenges of the world we will live in tomorrow.” —Michael Beschloss, New York Times–bestselling author of Presidential Courage “James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America—for better and for worse—what it is.” —Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of Revolutionary Summer “[A] captivating tale. . . . Briskly and beautifully told. . . . Superb.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Larrie D. Ferreiro
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
Published: 2011-05-31
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 0465017231
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDescribes the early 18th-century expedition of scientists sent by France and Spain to colonial Peru to measure the degree of equatorial latitude, which could resolve the debate between whether the earth was spherical or flattened at the poles.
Author: Neil Safier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-11-15
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13: 0226733564
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPrior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.
Author: Peter James Stanlis
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published:
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9781412822206
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTwo centuries after Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, his name and reputation stand alongside Locke, Montesquieu, and Hume - the other still-cited grand political thinkers of the eighteenth century. For those great nations that have fallen into what Burke called "the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow," the work of Burke supplies that sense of order, justice and freedom the present age seems to require. This volume by Peter Stanlis has grown out of almost four decades of studying Burke. Today, Professor Stanlis is called by Russell Kirk "the leading American authority on the political thought of the great conservative reformer." The book is divided into three categories: Burke on law and politics; Burke's criticism of Enlightenment rationalism and sensibility; and Burke's theory of revolution and critique of the English revolution of 1688. Stanlis' reasons' for linking Burke to the English Revolution rather than the later, and admittedly more decisive American and French Revolutions of his own time, is that for Burke, that earlier event was the normative pivot for judging how to make important changes in civil society. Indeed, even in his writings on the contemporary revolutions of his time,. Stanlis reminds us that Burke interpreted revolutionary events in France and Americas through the prism of the bloodless Revolution of 1688.
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2018-02-13
Total Pages: 578
ISBN-13: 0698177886
DOWNLOAD EBOOKINSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Author: John M. Owen IV
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-01-17
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0231526628
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLargely due to the cultural and political shift of the Enlightenment, Western societies in the eighteenth century emerged from sectarian conflict and embraced a more religiously moderate path. In nine original essays, leading scholars ask whether exporting the Enlightenment solution is possible or even desirable today. Contributors begin by revisiting the Enlightenment's restructuring of the West, examining its ongoing encounters with Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. While acknowledging the necessity of the Enlightenment emphasis on toleration and peaceful religious coexistence, these scholars nevertheless have grave misgivings about the Enlightenment's spiritually thin secularism. The authors ultimately upend both the claim that the West's experience offers a ready-made template for the world to follow and the belief that the West's achievements are to be ignored, despised, or discarded.
Author: Hugh Trevor-Roper
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-06-29
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 0300139349
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe historical philosophy of the Enlightenment -- The Scottish Enlightenment -- Pietro Giannone and Great Britain -- Dimitrie Cantemir's Ottoman history and its reception in England -- From deism to history: Conyers Middleton -- David Hume, historian -- The idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire -- Gibbon and the publication of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire 1776-1976 -- Gibbon's last project -- The romantic movement and the study of history -- Lord Macaulay: the history of England -- Thomas Carlyle's historical philosophy -- Jacob Burckhardt.
Author: Kim Sloan
Publisher:
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Enlightenment was a period of intense activity devoted to discovery and learning about the natural world, the past and other civilizations. Classification, collecting and deciphering were all important stages on the way to understanding the world and its inhabitants. The King's Library was built to house the books donated from the royal libraries of King George II and his grandson King George III, and they epitomize the interest in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in scholarship and study. Aimed at the general reader and relevant to many academic diciplines, this book explores the ways people acquired new information, organized their ideas and reached their conclusions.
Author: John Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 169
ISBN-13: 0199591784
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.
