Follower of Malebranche, H.S. Gerdil is one of the greatest Eighteenth-Century Catholic philosophers. His Dissertation on the incompatibility of the principles of Descartes and Spinoza (1760), the ...subject of this article, highlights, thanks to an analytical examination of the texts, the irreconcilability between the two metaphysical perspectives. But the dissertation is not only a defense of Cartesianism against the accusation of closeness to Spinozism made by Leibniz and others – an accusation that for the author is denied by Spinoza’s own Epistolary – it is also a recapitulation of Gerdil’s philosophical apologetics. This is characterized by a skilful use of Descartes’ philosophy to contrast all forms of materialistic monism, whether they derive from Spinoza, Locke or Leibniz. Against these philosophies Gerdil does not use the Aristotelian scholasticism but the philosophy of Descartes, considered the true champion of Modern philosophy. By clearly separating Descartes from Spinoza, Gerdil also constructs a narrative of philosophical modernity different from the one made by Voltaire in the Lettres philosophiques and accepted by the manifestos of the Lumières. The modèle anglais is replaced with the defense of the relevance of Cartesianism and its usefulness in contrasting the Eighteenth-Century materialistic and atheistic philosophies, presented as a corruption of Descartes’ genuine principles, the only ones to guarantee the coexistence of philosophy with religion.
Joaquín de Yrizar Moya (1793-1878) es un representante peculiar de la Contrailustración. Nacido en una familia guipuzcoana de élite, durante su larga vida experimentó una profunda evolución ...ideológica: liberal exaltado en su primera juventud, se distanciaría de los principios ilustrados mientras adoptaba tesis cada vez más conservadoras hasta abrazar el carlismo. Militar y matemático de formación, escribió varias obras sobre el origen de las lenguas, las naciones o los mitos, y publicó opúsculos contra las que él consideraba ser derivas materialistas de la modernidad. Sus textos revelan la nostalgia por una sociedad confesional y jerárquica, pero, al mismo tiempo, sostienen que el conocimiento del pasado puede contribuir al progreso, entendido este como una realización de los planes de la Providencia. Esta visión del progreso aúna elementos aparentemente contradictorios, mostrando las diversas lecturas que este concepto pudo adquirir en la primera sociedad liberal.
In the biographies of David Hume, Horace Walpole's name has been memorialised as the author of a forged letter assuming the identity of the King of Prussia. However, in the letter, Walpole's scorn ...was directed against not only Rousseau, but also other French philosophes and, possibly, even Hume. Walpole drew a line between himself and the 'pedants and pretended philosophers', although he sometimes blurred the distinction between the two by considering an author or 'man of letters' synonymous with a 'philosopher'. Walpole broached his lifelong stricture on modern pretentious philosophers to Hume in one of his letters, just after the Concise Account was published. Walpole's thorough contempt for French philosophers appeared to Hume as a Rousseauian, anti-philosophical stance. In his reply, Hume attempted to advocate his thesis of intellectual improvement and moral cultivation. Meanwhile, in another letter written around the same time, Hume kept away from Turgot's sanguine view of human progress. The distance that Walpole maintains between himself and the philosophers-through the Hume-Rousseau affair-casts a long shadow on his evaluations of Hume and his historical works, and leads to their differing assessments of the standpoint of philosophers in the age of lumières.
Described as the most widely read and influential serious writer of the twentieth century, George Orwell remains relevant in our own era of contested media. He continues to attract a large ...readership. This book is about Orwell’s post-war cultural moment c. 1948. Taking his Diaries of the time as inspiration, together with his famous final novel, 1984 (published 1949), and treating them as contiguous texts, Brian May considers the gaps, equivocations, and contradictions in Orwell's message and asks what Orwell would have written next. But 1948 is more than a work of literary criticism: rather, it balances critical discussion with creative intervention, being one-half literary-critical commentary, and one-half fictional departure – a novella titled “From the Archives of Oceania,” which quotes, parodies and pastiches Orwell's Diaries, offering a possible prequel. Together these elements offer a resource for the reader to interrogate anew such difficult issues as Orwell's sexism and anti-Semitism; to explore the tensions between various intertwining strands of thought that cast Orwell as both realist and idealist, Puritan and individualist; and to better understand Orwell's curious affection for the natural world. 1948 will appeal to all readers and critics of Orwell, but also to students of dystopian fiction, "revisionary" fiction and "reception study," which highlights the audience’s contribution to an artwork's meaning.
Isaiah Berlin and other representatives of historicism have made the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment into opposite cultures. The Counter-Englightenment is a criticism of the ...Englightenment from within, so in many respects they overlap. However, with regard to perceptions of time they contradict each other. The times of the Enlightenment lean heavily toward chronology and can be labeled as "empty," whereas the time perceptions of the Counter-Enlightenment can be called "incarnated" and are identical with historical times. As a consequence the differences between the two temporalities lead necessarily to differences in synchronization.
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 examines how Texan Revolutionaries portrayed the Texas Revolution as a struggle for modernity. In particular, numerous Anglo-Texans created a narrative in which they cast Santa Anna at ...the helm of a counter-enlightenment restoring Ancien Régime values. The Revolutionaries drew upon the discourse of the Mexican politician and Texas co-founder Lorenzo de Zavala. This article contests the portrayal of the Texas Revolution as a White and Anglo movement. This manuscript contributes to the historiography by examining Zavala's influence on the language of the Texas Revolution. Together, Zavala and the Texas Revolutionaries accused Santa Anna of fighting for monarchy and aristocracy. Furthermore, Texan revolutionaries argued the imminent restoration of Catholicism threatened their cherished liberties and freedoms. This was all the while Anglo-Texans portrayed their secession as a struggle for reason, virtue, and happiness. This analysis primarily utilizes the Mirabeau Lamar Papers to discern the sentiments and expressions of numerous individuals involved in the Texas Revolution. The following study contributes to the lacuna in the history of ideas in the Texas Republic. Furthermore, this article links Texas to the broader historiography of Atlantic Revolutions.
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