Author Archives: James Schmidt

About James Schmidt

Professor of History, Philosophy, and Political Science Boston University

Tracking the Reception of Kant’s Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”

As Dan Edelstein once observed, scholars have gotten into the habit of using Kant’s 1784 to the question “What is enlightenment?” as a convenient “one-stop shop for defining the Enlightenment.”1 There is a tendency to assume that because Kant was … Continue reading

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A Note on a Recently Published Letter from Isaiah Berlin on the “Counter-Enlightenment”

Having concluded a series of posts on the history of the concept of counter-Enlightenment, I’d planned to move on to other things. But, in the immortal words of Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull … Continue reading

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Isaiah Berlin & the “Counter-Enlightenment”: A Reassessment (Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” — Conclusion)

Since the middle of October I have been attempting to trace the history of the concept “counter-Enlightenment.” I set out on this venture convinced that Zeev Sternhell’s account of the history was wrong and confident that the sketch that I … Continue reading

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Turning One

A year ago, I accidentally launched Persistent Enlightenment. I’d been playing around for quite some time with the idea of using WordPress as a way to store research notes and, as part of the experiment, had set up a private blog called … Continue reading

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William Barrett, Lionel Trilling, and the “Residual Legatees of the Enlightenment” (Fabricating the Counter-Enlightenment Part V)

In the June 1949 issue of Partisan Review, William Barrett — a professor of philosophy at New York University and an associate editor at Partisan Review — closed a series of exchanges with the literary critics Richard Chase and Lionel … Continue reading

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Charles W. Morris on Empiricism and the Counter-Enlightenment (Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” Part IV)

The month-long hiatus since my last post can, in part, be attributed to the flood of papers that arrived in the wake of my discussion of English uses of the term “counter-Enlightenment” between 1908 and 1942 and the ensuing holiday … Continue reading

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“Counter-Enlightenment” in English (1908-1942) (Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” Part III)

The two previous posts in this series examined nineteenth and early twentieth-century German uses of the term “Gegenaufklärung” and argued, contra Zeev Sternell, that the term does not seem to have been generally adopted as a convention for referring to … Continue reading

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