Band 1. Moderne aus dem Untergrund -- Band 2. Clandestine Vernunft.

Prekäres Wissen handelt nicht von den großen Themen der Metaphysik und Epistemologie, sondern von Randzonen wie der Magie und der Numismatik, der Bibelinterpretation und der Orientalistik. Es geht nicht nur um Theorien, sondern auch um Furcht und Faszination, nicht um die großen Forschergestalten, sondern um vergessene und halbvergessene Gelehrte. Es ist ein Buch voller spannender Geschichten, eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit und zugleich der ambitionierte Versuch, den Begriff des Wissens selbst im Zeichen des" material turn", des" iconic turn"und der (...) Kommunikations- und Informationsgeschichte neu zu denken. (shrink)

Das Buch versteht sich zugleich als Begriffsgeschichte von "Selbsterhaltung" in der Renaissance und als Rekonstruktion der Philosophie Bernardino Telesios (1509-1588), der den Begriff erstmals zum Zentrum neuzeitlicher Naturphilosophie und Ethik gemacht hat. Telesios Denken wird aus internen Entwicklungen der aristotelischen Philosophie und der galenischen Medizin verständlich gemacht, und es wird gezeigt, wie seine "defensive Modernisierung" zugleich zum Katalysator für spekulative philosophische Entwicklungen am Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts wird: bei Bruno, Patrizi, Stelliola und Campanella. Denn anders als in der als "Beharrung" (...) gedachten conservatio sui nach Descartes geht es in der Begriffsentwicklung der Renaissance um Sensualität, Ähnlichkeit und Lebenswärme. (shrink)

This edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “De ente et uno” (“On being and the one”) offers for the first time a key text for the reformation of metaphysics in Renaissance philosophy in German translation. The Latin text is added. The detailed introduction and careful commentary reveal the guiding points Pico has set with this work.

Drawing on new manuscript sources, this volume offers seven contributions on Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the most significant biblical critic in eighteenth-century Germany, as well as an eminent Enlightenment philosopher, a renowned classicist ...

El socinianismo, o más ampliamente el antitrinitarismo, fue comparado muchas veces con el islam: tanto la herejía cristiana como la religión musulmana rechazan la doctrina de la Trinidad y consideran que Jesús fue tan solo un profeta y no un dios. De hecho, hay numerosos vínculos históricos entre las dos corrientes. Desde Miguel Servet, el Corán y las escrituras islámicas tuvieron un gran impacto en la crítica emergente sociniana. Los antitrinitarios intentaron establecer una genealogía histórica que iba desde el primer (...) cristianismo de los ebionitas hasta el presente, pasando por el islam (que preservó la verdadera idea monoteísta). A menudo los antitrinitarios adquirieron sus conocimientos de las obras mucho más ortodoxas de los arabistas cristianos, que incluían, por ejemplo, traducciones de pasajes sacados de la crítica a San Pablo de al-Qarafi. Además, algunos escritores atrevidos, como Aubert de Versé, propusieron incluso un enfoque histórico-crítico para el texto del Corán basándose en el modelo de la crítica histórica del Antiguo Testamento de Richard Simon. (shrink)

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in the (...) late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

Der Sammelband führt den Begriff der Spätrenaissance-Philosophie für diejenigen intellektuellen Strömungen in Deutschland bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts ein, die sich als Erben der- vor allem italienischen- Renaissance fühlten und dennoch deren Spekulationen mit lutherischer oder reformierter Schulmetaphysik amalgamierten. In dreizehn Fallstudien wird von namhaften Forschern die ganze Breite dieses Prozesses in Metaphysik und Anthropologie, Ästhetik und Ethik, Philologie und Religionsphilosophie beschrieben.

Jakob Friedrich Reimmann stands between Baroque and Enlightenment. He is one of the major representatives of early 18th century historia litteraria, that forgotten discipline which set out to be a history of education, science and the book, and which Reimmann himself applied systematically to a whole range of subjects and cultures. His oeuvre may be seen as typifying the tensions emerging between an inherited faith in providentially ordained history and a new skeptical/hypothetical scientific culture.

The intellectual Huguenot Refuge is one of the most important movements in Early modern Europe. This volume provides new information about one of its centres: about Berlin, and on the extremely important role Huguenot scholars played disseminating Enlightened thought.

When authors act by either publishing or non-publishing their texts, they sometimes use a language of gestures. These gestures can assist to position the author in the intellectual field. In this way some German eighteenth-century philosophers who thought against the grain of mainstream rationalism withdrew from the public sphere, using the image of the Egyptian god Harpocrates, who puts his index finger to his lips—a symbol for maintaining silence. In a sense one can thus label this kind of quietism as (...) “harpocratism.” The essay examines the imagery and contextualizes it in three case studies from the years 1720-50. Moreover, it explores its sources in political as well as antiquarian and hermetic discourses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay serves as a model for defining intellectual positions not so much by their content, but rather by their practices of symbolic distancing from others, of building identities in emotional communities, and of shaping free zones of inquiry where they could flourish. (shrink)

In this introduction to the fourth part of an ongoing symposium on quietism, Perl, the editor of the sponsoring journal Common Knowledge, remarks on a new question raised in this latest grouping of articles. Can there be such a thing as a “mezza voce quietism”? Can there be activist quietists or quietist activists or active teachers of quietism without self-contradiction? Perl takes Gandhi and “passive resistance” as his own test case, concluding that Gandhi was a teacher of quietism and that (...) satyagraha was a type of moral education directed at those (first the South Africans, then, more momentously, the British in India) whose spirits were imperiled by their self-confident certainty and whose manners were spoiled by their indelicacy and intrusiveness. (shrink)

The contribution explores the demands that arise when, instead of speaking of »intellectual history« or »history of ideas«, one proposes using once again the term »Geistesgeschichte« – to be sure, in a methodologically revised form. In that case, it is argued here, the synthetic claims that inhere in the concept »Geist« understood as a singular term would have to be reformulated in a manner keyed to contemporary assumptions. The essay makes several recommendations how that could occur.

As a member of the Illuminati Order, Karl Leonhard Reinhold wrote an – hitherto unknown – expert report about an internal manuscript on “The development of the forces of our mind” in January 1785. The manuscript had outlined a materialist theory of sensations and a conception of the interplay of the drives of pleasure and self-preservation. Reinhold, being in his early Kantian phase, criticized the materialism of this theory. In his own development, however, Reinhold returned soon to the topic of (...) the drive of pleasure (in his. (shrink)