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Chapter nine focuses on Cassirer’s tenure as rector at the University of Hamburg during the academic year of 1929–1930, which represented one last attempt to carry on Warburg’s vision of a humanist Hamburg. Yet when Cassirer assumed his post Warburg had died and he faced political conditions vastly different than those in 1928, including fierce nationalism, anti-Semitism, and antirepublicanism from the students. Within these institutional constraints, Cassirer tried to create a reception for a Weimar festival and ceremonial culture and presided over two university events at which he promoted—albeit to no avail—his unique brand of “cosmopolitan nationalism.” In contrast to the portrait of Cassirer as a non-political “Mandarin” intellectual, I argue that classic work, The Philosophy of Enlightenment, published in 1932, should also be read as a sublimated political critique.

This chapter, which examines Ernst Cassirer's views about the Enlightenment proposed in his book The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, proposes three ways by which to defend Cassirer against criticisms on his thoughts about the Enlightenment. These include mentioning the fact The Philosophy of the Enlightenment is a philosophical work and not a historical book, recontextualizing Cassirer in his time and highlighting his unrivalled grasp of the Enlightenment, its mood, its joys, and its intellectual climate.

This chapter focuses on ‘race’ and ethnicity in relation to crime and criminal justice. It looks at the difficulties involved when collecting data about ‘race’, arguing that this is a social construct influenced by historical, social and political contexts that attach particular labels to particular groups of individuals at particular points in time. It also examines other issues including institutional racism, racist victimisation, and knowledge claims arising from Black, Asian and ethnic minorities, and how these need to be legitimised when a scientific paradigm holds sway within policy-making circles. Moreover, this chapter explores how the application, and predominance, of a (social) scientific approach to ‘race’ is problematic when viewed from a perspective that actively engages with, and acknowledges, the harms caused under the guise of Enlightenment philosophy. Finally, it considers the issue of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.

A close reading of the somewhat fraught relationship between Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann reveals further aspects of the incarnational metaphor. Particular attention is given to the way both writers differ in their use of literary citation. Whereas Kant employs language as a speaker, Hamann employs language as a listener.

This chapter ties the zombie's African spirituality to the existential crisis that the living dead often embodies in contemporary narratives. The chapter begins by providing some useful history on what it surmises are the origins of the zombie in the Nzambi Mpungu region of the lower Congo, with a figure called “Nzambi.” The chapter compares this African conceptualization of spiritual truth to Enlightenment Rationalism, wherein truth comes from within the self, whereas in empirical scientific method, truth likewise comes from without the thinking subject. The chapter then shows how the zombie myth transitions from incarnating God-as-truth to dramatizing scientific truths in the post-nuclear age. Engaging with Existentialist philosophy, the chapter shows how the zombie myth comes to stand for an encounter with the other, and thereby with knowledge that can only come about through this encounter. En route, the chapter weaves into the narrative some categorizations of the permutations of the zombie myth that have developed since its migration into cinema and popular culture. This classificatory system, including categories like zombie-drone, tech-zombie, and bio-zombie, is spelled out in detail at the end of this chapter.

This chapter summarises the themes of the book, which focus on religion and spirituality in popular culture and policy arenas as well as within the academy. The first section examines the notion of secularism in relation to contemporary Western society. The second part considers the emergence of social scientific disciplines within the context of modernity and Enlightenment philosophy, exploring how the values underlying social scientific inquiry might serve to marginalise religion and spirituality. The last part is comprised of reflections on social science research methodologies when researching religion and spirituality. In addition to reviewing the dominant themes of the book, the chapter also concludes that the volume is able to explore the current theoretical underpinnings of various social science disciplines and link these to the development of research approaches and the resultant ways in which religion and spirituality have been marginalised from these approaches. It has provided a space to explore the complexities for researchers who are negotiating with the voices of faith communities and how social science research frameworks can respectfully and critically work with these communities, specifically on issues of identity, difference, and representation.

This paper focuses on Herder’s contribution to the development of philosophical anthropology by seeing Herder’s philosophy as a response to recent discoveries in medicine and physiology. The major impulse came from Haller’s discovery of the irritability of muscle and sensibility of nerves, which challenged philosophical and theological dogmas about the existence of an immaterial soul and its ability to cause what the mind perceives as voluntary motion. It blurred the traditional division of labor between the physician investigating the body and the philosopher and theologian studying the soul. The chapter will explore how Herder makes creative use of Haller’s concept of irritability as a way of demonstrating a neo-Aristotelian account of the soul as pervading and informing the entire body.

This chapter reviews current philosophical approaches to animal advocacy by focusing on the competing methodologies of rights, utilitarianism, welfare, and animal studies. The first three methods comprise the vast majority of the thinking behind animal advocacy today and are based, in one way or another, on Enlightenment philosophy, and each deploys a different method for bringing animals into the circle of protection. Rights-based strategies move a limited catalog of rights out into the world of (some) animals; utilitarianism advocates animal protection based on the animals’ ability to suffer; and welfare orients advocacy toward animals as a function of human sympathy. The chapter argues that each of these methods is limited in its ability to truly serve animal advocacy, and instead calls for a different approach, one based not solely in rights or sympathy but in the revolutionary power of love many of us feel toward animals.

This chapter examines the transformation of international law from justifying slave trade to ultimately suppressing it. It argues that the key player in the international abolition movement was Great Britain. At first, British merchants were early participants in the slave trade, second only to the Portuguese in terms of volume of slaves shipped. But by the late eighteenth century, attitudes toward the slave trade in Britain began to change. Historians agree that British abolitionism arose out of a combination of factors, including economic changes, Enlightenment philosophy, and religious revival movements. Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Britain continued the practice of seizing foreign slave ships. In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, Britain triggered a sea change in the status of the slave trade under international law. Time and again, British diplomats would remind other nations that they had agreed by treaty to suppress the slave trade.

The chapter provides a survey of the history of the figure of the “man born blind” or what the author calls the hypothetical blind man in the theories of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Diderot. These representations rely on an over-determined, one-to-one analogy between the eyes of the sighted man and the hands of the blind man. If the sighted theorists are assumed to be “all eyes,” the hypothetical blind man is “all hands.” The chapter goes on to put representations in conversation with biographical and autobiographical accounts of actual blind people from the eighteenth century until the present, with particular attention to their treatment of their own conceptualization of visual phenomena, imagination, and dreams.