Johann Michael Sailer was a Catholic theologian and philosopher whose career spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Still relatively unknown outside of Catholic historiography, ...Sailer was a major contributor to the Catholic Enlightenment, and a significant touchstone for the Catholic revival movement. This essay explores his contribution to the Catholic reception of Kantian philosophy and, more specifically, analyzes how Sailer offered a critique of everyday reason for people "as they are". This critique stressed the deeply constitutive role of everyday experience in the formation of reason and evolved as part of a broader concern to secure the foundations of popular Enlightenment.
Two Austrian Dominicans, Albert Tschick and Franz Poschinger, belonged to Freemasonry in the 1780s. Although their shared interest in the Enlightenment led them to join, they took different paths as ...members of the association. The article outlines the brief biographies of the two Friars Preachers, sketches their development as Enlightenment preachers, and presents the Masonic period of their lives in the context of the history of Austrian Freemasonry. It contributes to a more nuanced view of the relationship of the Catholic clergy and the Friars Preachers to Freemasonry in the eighteenth century.
This article seeks to establish a comparative analysis of the reforms to the study of natural law in Coimbra, Seville, and Santiago de Chile. The main goal is to find differences and similarities in ...the implementation of legal educational reforms in the Catholic legal culture at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this context, we argue that the introduction of the theory of modern natural law in these three areas can be understood as a transatlantic and supra-confessional process of intellectual communication, which is a phenomenon typical of the Catholic Enlightenment. Although we suggest that there was a common bond, we also propose that our cases must be understood in the local and circumstantial contexts in which particular needs prevailed. To historicise the differentiations and similarities, it is necessary to consider the roles of the Catholic legal tradition, the common heritage of the ius commune, the confessional fragmentation of Europe, the effects of the revolution of modern science, modernisation projects, and the Iberian-American revolutions. Comparative research in Seville, Coimbra, and Santiago de Chile makes it possible to explore the transnational history of natural law and the law of nations not only in the field of educational legal reforms but also in their political projections. Thus, we also examine the political-cultural dimension of the confrontation/cooperation of Protestant natural law with the bureaucratic challenges and institutional transformations of the Iberian monarchies at the end of the eighteenth century.
A partir del análisis de la Carta Pastoral (1769) que el obispo de Barcelona Joseph Climent incorpora a la segunda edición castellana de Las Costumbres de los israelitas (1771), en este artículo se ...discute acerca de los conceptos: Ilustración católica y catolicismo ilustrado. Con este motivo, se repasan, a su vez, otras cuestiones de primera importancia para situar la existencia, que aquí se afirma, de una Ilustración católica hispana. La aceptación de una versión catolizada de la denominada «sociedad comercial» y de su motor esencial, el amor propio, que habrá de caracterizar dicha Ilustración católica, se irá desenvolviendo a partir del estudio de las diferentes posiciones acerca del lujo que un núcleo de intelectuales destacados del momento recogerá en sus obras.
The Viennese Enlightenment began with a delay and then proceeded at an accelerated pace. The hurried and soon blocked process of adjustment led to peculiarities of Austrian culture. Based on the ...economic, political, social, medial and cultural conditions, the book presents exemplary debates and writings of this period and contextualizes them historically.
Die Wiener Aufklärung setzte verzögert ein und verlief dann beschleunigt. Der eilige und bald wieder abgewürgte Ausgleichsprozess führte zu Besonderheiten österreichischer Kultur. Ausgehend von den wirtschaftlichen, politischen, sozialen, medialen und kulturellen Rahmenbedingungen stellt das Buch exemplarische Debatten und Schriften dieser Zeit vor und kontextualisiert sie historisch.
Although works on religious, specifically Catholic, and more specifically Jansenist, contributions to the Enlightenment abound, the contributions of the Jesuits to the Enlightenment have remained ...relatively unexplored since Robert R. Palmer initially identified affinities between Jesuit thought and the emergence of the French Enlightenment as long ago as 1939. Accordingly, this introduction and the essays contained within the pages of this special issue revisit and further explore ways in which the individual Jesuits contributed to broader patterns of European intellectual and cultural history during the age of Enlightenment. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue investigate different aspects of an important question: to what extent were some Jesuits (at time, despite themselves, and at times, even against the grain of the order's official positions) unlikely contributors to the Enlightenment? This question of whether one might speak of a specifically Jesuit Enlightenment is complicated by the still unsatisfactory scholarly consensus regarding the definition of the Enlightenment. But, growing scholarly attention to the nature of Catholic Enlightenment, and to the continuities linking eighteenth-century preoccupations to the controversies of the seventeenth century have further underscored the need for greater attention to Jesuit contributions to the Enlightenment itself. In this introduction, rather than considering the Enlightenment as a series of transformative and largely eighteenth-century debates rooted in the middle or late seventeenth century, I suggest that Jesuit engagement with the Enlightenment is best understood if the Enlightenment is more firmly anchored somewhat earlier in the culture of late Humanism-a culture that was first weaponized then chastened within the crucible of the European Reformations.
This article evaluates the early career of the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) and the impact that it had on other Jesuit scholars of the first decades of the eighteenth century. It argues ...that Hardouin's historical criticism-a response to skeptical critiques of the certainty of knowledge-pushed other Jesuit writers to consider new epistemological arguments and use new philosophical tools. In this way, Hardouin's career helped motivate French Jesuit engagement with the ideas and sensibilities of the Enlightenment.
The specific political culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its changes, leading to state reforms by the end of the 18th century, require a methodological approach, which would allow ...understanding the flow and interconnectedness of the ideas between wider European and smaller local contexts. Arguing that entangled history approach allows understanding peripheral contexts better, the article presents specific aspects of the Polish-Lithuanian Enlightenment creating the context for conceptual change in political thinking. The context specific details are presented with the analysis of Vilnius University related discourse showing that the Enlightenment ideas were used to achieve certain goals of local improvement.
Abstract
While classical sources including Aristotle, Cicero and Boëthius addressed different notions of probability, medieval contributions to probability (other than epistemic probability) seem ...rather scarce. The situation changes during the Second Scholasticism with the post-Tridentine debates on "probable opinion" in moral theology and the introduction of "moral necessity" and "moral implication" (tied to the ideas of frequency, stochastic processes, and propensity) in the debates on compatibilism and theological optimism. The eighteenth-century transformation of scholastic philosophy was marked, among other characteristics, by a gravitation towards the early modern scientific revolution. In his Philosophia Pollingana ad normam Burgundicae, the renowned moral theologian Eusebius Amort (1692-1775) addressed the basic issues of probabilistic logic from the philosophical, logical, and mathematical points of view in an attempt to synthesise earlier scholastic conceptual analyses of probability and probabilistic epistemic logic with the cutting-edge mathematical calculus introduced by Jacob Bernoulli.