Title: Enlightenment or Illumination: The Spectre of Conspiracy in Gothic Fictions of the 1790s
Abstract:What is enlightenment? In the twentieth century, scholars have found the term ‘the Enlightenment’ a convenient designation for the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, although there has be...What is enlightenment? In the twentieth century, scholars have found the term ‘the Enlightenment’ a convenient designation for the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, although there has been little agreement between different scholars, disciplines and national traditions about what the term might mean. In his landmark study The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, first published in German in 1932, and belatedly translated into English in 1951, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) defined the Enlightenment as ‘a value-system rooted in rationality’, whose history was bounded by the lives of two philosophers, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In Cassirer's intellectual history, the term ‘Enlightenment’ denotes the major movement in the history of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe, defining the modernity of the period, championing rationality over faith and superstition, reason and liberty over custom and tyranny, science over religion. Yet in the period itself, the term ‘Enlightenment’ was almost unknown: the Oxford English Dictionary suggests the term was not used in English in the modern sense until the 1860s, when it was derived from a translation of the German Aufklärung.Read More
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-08-13
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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