Description Deserves as much credit as any source for bringing the political implications of Kant’s Critique of Judgment into contemporary discourse. Despondent over the perceived failure of the French Revolution, Schiller asks, “Why are we […]
Tag Archives: 18th century
“Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society, 1640–1790”
Description Shows how Kant wrote his Critique of Judgment as a synthesis of English theories of “taste” and civil society and German theories of “aesthetic.” Writers since Hobbes have used theories of art to advance […]
Emile, or on Education
Description Outlines a program for educating children according to the precepts of Nature. Heavily influenced by Locke’s philosophy of human understanding, this 1762 treatise argues that parents should pursue a “negative education”: avoid formal schooling […]
The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
Description Explores Enlightenment optimism about the perfectibility of mankind by looking at efforts to educate and “civilize” children. Chapters consider reactions to so-called “wild children”; utopian pedagogical schemes (including efforts to apply Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, […]
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
Description Captures the complicated attitude towards science during the Enlightenment. A man is suffocating a bird in an air pump, while (most of) his audience looks on in wonder and fear. Shows that scientific demonstrations […]
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and His Wife (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze, 1758-1836)
Description Reveals the gendered division of labor in many scientific households. Antoine, seated, is at work on a chemistry treatise; his wife, Marie-Anne, takes a break from her drawing board to look over his shoulder. […]
Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings
Description Brings together a collection of Du Châtelet’s writing and shows that she was much more than Voltaire’s mistress; she was a philosophe in her own right. This volume not only provides a good introduction […]
“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne.”
Description Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny’s important novel (Lettres d’une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted […]
The Great Cat Massacre
Description Translated into 18 languages to date, this work is delightful read and also gets one thinking about the many ways in which we impose our own cultural assumptions, inaccurately, on previous eras; very useful […]
Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France
Description Vila’s study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose. Creator Vila, Anne Publisher Johns Hopkins, 1997 […]