Author Archives: James Schmidt

About James Schmidt

Professor of History, Philosophy, and Political Science Boston University

Adorno on Kant and Enlightenment (in 1959)

Posted on June 1, 2014

Over the last decade or so, the publication and translation of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France have led to a broader reconsideration of how his work ought to be understood. But, unless I’ve missed something, the publication … Continue reading →

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Light, Truth, and Caricature (without Consolation): Regarding James Gillray

Posted on May 26, 2014

A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism — “Magna est Veritas Praevalebit” was the first work by the great eighteenth-century London caricaturist James Gillray to catch my attention. As chance would have it, I encountered it in precisely the same … Continue reading →

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Hans Blumenberg on Light & Truth, with Some Thoughts on Eighteenth-century Frontispieces

Posted on May 18, 2014

There’s no good reason why it took me so long to get around to reading Hans Blumenberg’s Paradigms for a Metaphorology — a 1960 contribution to the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte that has been available in translation since 2010.1 I’d read … Continue reading →

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Culture & Civilization: The First English Translation of Mendelssohn’s Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?” (Part II)

Posted on April 20, 2014

As should be apparent by now, my collection of hobby horses includes an interest in old translations of now-familiar texts.1  The interest is not entirely idiosyncratic, nor is it entirely irrelevant to my labors in that open-ended field known as the … Continue reading →

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Review of Samuel Fleischacker, What is Enlightenment?

Posted on March 27, 2014

My review of Samuel Fleischacker’s What is Enlightenment? (Routledge, 2013) has now been published on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  Readers of this blog will likely find Fleischacker’s work of interest and my comments on it somewhat predictable.  I can only hope that, like Tristram … Continue reading →

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Moses Mendelssohn, “On Enlightening the Mind”

Posted on March 18, 2014

The text that follows is the first English translation of Moses Mendelssohn’s 1784 response to the question “What is enlightenment?” The anonymous translation appeared in 1800 in the second volume of The German Museum, a short-lived journal edited by the … Continue reading →

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The First English Translation of Moses Mendelssohn’s Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”: Part I

Posted on March 17, 2014

Last summer I wrote a series of posts on the choices involved in translating Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” into English. Attempting something similar for Moses Mendelssohn’s answer to the same question, which appeared three months before … Continue reading →

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