Vincenzo Ferrone
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691175768
- eISBN:
- 9781400865833
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691175768.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
In this book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical ...
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In this book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical interpretations of the era have long been hopelessly confused, the author makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was—and why it is still relevant today. The book explains why the Enlightenment was a profound and wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped Western identity, reformed politics through the invention of human rights, and redefined knowledge by creating a critical culture. These new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and understood. Featuring an illuminating afterword describing how the author's argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, the book provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history.Less
In this book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical interpretations of the era have long been hopelessly confused, the author makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was—and why it is still relevant today. The book explains why the Enlightenment was a profound and wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped Western identity, reformed politics through the invention of human rights, and redefined knowledge by creating a critical culture. These new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and understood. Featuring an illuminating afterword describing how the author's argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, the book provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history.
Olivier Roy
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- June 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190099930
- eISBN:
- 9780197520710
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190099930.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, European Union
As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism, and immigration, this book interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really ...
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As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism, and immigration, this book interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really pose threats to the continent's ‘Christian values’? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of decline, the book challenges the significance of secularized Western nations' reduction of Christianity to a purely cultural force relegated to issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and equal marriage. It illustrates that, globally, quite the opposite has occurred: Christianity is now universalized and detached from national identity. Not only has it taken hold in the Global South, generally in a more socially conservative form than in the West, but it has also ‘returned’ to Europe, following immigration from former colonies. Despite attempts within Europe to nationalize or even racialize it, Christianity's future is global, non-European, and immigrant, as the continent's Churches well know. The book represents a persuasive and novel vision of religion's place in national life today.Less
As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism, and immigration, this book interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really pose threats to the continent's ‘Christian values’? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of decline, the book challenges the significance of secularized Western nations' reduction of Christianity to a purely cultural force relegated to issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and equal marriage. It illustrates that, globally, quite the opposite has occurred: Christianity is now universalized and detached from national identity. Not only has it taken hold in the Global South, generally in a more socially conservative form than in the West, but it has also ‘returned’ to Europe, following immigration from former colonies. Despite attempts within Europe to nationalize or even racialize it, Christianity's future is global, non-European, and immigrant, as the continent's Churches well know. The book represents a persuasive and novel vision of religion's place in national life today.
Andrzej Piotrowski
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816673049
- eISBN:
- 9781452945835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816673049.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural Theory and Criticism
This book maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most ...
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This book maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most nuanced processes of negotiations and ideological exchanges. According to the text, material structures enable people to think in new ways—distill emerging or alter existing worldviews—before words can stabilize them as conventional narratives. Combining design thinking with academic methods of inquiry, the book traces ancient to modern architectural histories and—through critical readings of select buildings—examines the role of nonverbal exchanges in the development of an accumulated Western identity. Operating from the assertion that buildings are the most permanent record of unself-conscious beliefs and attitudes, it discusses Byzantium and the West after iconoclasm, the conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Eastern Europe, the rise of the culture of consumerism in Victorian England, and High Modernism as its consequence. By moving beyond the assumption that historical structures reflect transcendental values and deterministic laws of physics or economy or have been shaped by self-conscious individuals, the book challenges the traditional knowledge of what architecture is and can be.Less
This book maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most nuanced processes of negotiations and ideological exchanges. According to the text, material structures enable people to think in new ways—distill emerging or alter existing worldviews—before words can stabilize them as conventional narratives. Combining design thinking with academic methods of inquiry, the book traces ancient to modern architectural histories and—through critical readings of select buildings—examines the role of nonverbal exchanges in the development of an accumulated Western identity. Operating from the assertion that buildings are the most permanent record of unself-conscious beliefs and attitudes, it discusses Byzantium and the West after iconoclasm, the conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Eastern Europe, the rise of the culture of consumerism in Victorian England, and High Modernism as its consequence. By moving beyond the assumption that historical structures reflect transcendental values and deterministic laws of physics or economy or have been shaped by self-conscious individuals, the book challenges the traditional knowledge of what architecture is and can be.
Eileen H. Tamura
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252037788
- eISBN:
- 9780252095061
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252037788.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This introductory chapter provides an overview of Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara's life. From his youth and until World War II, Kurihara pursued a path that he believed would enable him to live the ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara's life. From his youth and until World War II, Kurihara pursued a path that he believed would enable him to live the American life, as envisioned in the Progressive Era phrase, “the promise of American life.” He enrolled in schools that offered a quality, Western-oriented education. He also embraced Christianity—the essential source of Western cultural identity at the time—endured anti-Japanese hostility directed at him, and fought as a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Great War. This dogged pursuit of a place for himself as an American in the face of jarring discouragements enabled Kurihara to absorb Western modes of thinking and behavior. As a result, he was able to navigate his way in two cultural worlds, European America and Japanese America.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overview of Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara's life. From his youth and until World War II, Kurihara pursued a path that he believed would enable him to live the American life, as envisioned in the Progressive Era phrase, “the promise of American life.” He enrolled in schools that offered a quality, Western-oriented education. He also embraced Christianity—the essential source of Western cultural identity at the time—endured anti-Japanese hostility directed at him, and fought as a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Great War. This dogged pursuit of a place for himself as an American in the face of jarring discouragements enabled Kurihara to absorb Western modes of thinking and behavior. As a result, he was able to navigate his way in two cultural worlds, European America and Japanese America.
Vincenzo Ferrone
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691175768
- eISBN:
- 9781400865833
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691175768.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter examines two major phenomena that had a profound influence on the Late Enlightenment: the sudden and momentous politicization of the Republic of Letters, and the gradual move towards ...
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This chapter examines two major phenomena that had a profound influence on the Late Enlightenment: the sudden and momentous politicization of the Republic of Letters, and the gradual move towards neonaturalism in all fields of knowledge. Over the course of more than a hundred years, the Enlightenment had evolved into a cultural revolution directed against the Ancien Régime, culminating in the significant transformation of Western identity. The crisis of the Ancien Régime arose in step with the Late Enlightenment, setting off a process of cultural hegemony that has rarely been witnessed in any other time or place. The chapter considers how the actual enthronement of man and all his faculties as preached by the Encyclopédie and by Enlightenment humanism went hand in hand with the emergence of the new paradigm of a natura naturans.Less
This chapter examines two major phenomena that had a profound influence on the Late Enlightenment: the sudden and momentous politicization of the Republic of Letters, and the gradual move towards neonaturalism in all fields of knowledge. Over the course of more than a hundred years, the Enlightenment had evolved into a cultural revolution directed against the Ancien Régime, culminating in the significant transformation of Western identity. The crisis of the Ancien Régime arose in step with the Late Enlightenment, setting off a process of cultural hegemony that has rarely been witnessed in any other time or place. The chapter considers how the actual enthronement of man and all his faculties as preached by the Encyclopédie and by Enlightenment humanism went hand in hand with the emergence of the new paradigm of a natura naturans.
Stacy Alaimo
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816621958
- eISBN:
- 9781452955223
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816621958.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
The first chapter considers domestic space as the defining container for the Western “human,” a bounded space wrought by delusions of safety, fed by consumerism, and fueled by nationalist fantasies. ...
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The first chapter considers domestic space as the defining container for the Western “human,” a bounded space wrought by delusions of safety, fed by consumerism, and fueled by nationalist fantasies. It advocates instead, by way of poetry, science fiction, and landscape art an ethics of inhabiting that revels in the pleasure of becoming with that radical otherness known as “nature.”Less
The first chapter considers domestic space as the defining container for the Western “human,” a bounded space wrought by delusions of safety, fed by consumerism, and fueled by nationalist fantasies. It advocates instead, by way of poetry, science fiction, and landscape art an ethics of inhabiting that revels in the pleasure of becoming with that radical otherness known as “nature.”