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Friedrich Gedike on the Origin of Christmas Gifts (1784)

The Berlinische Monatsschrift is best known as the place of publication of Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” Readers of this blog are likely to know it as well as the place where the question that Kant … Continue reading

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Dan Edelstein on Enlightenment Scholarship and Dirty Quantification

While I continue to dig my way out my various other obligations, readers should check out Dan Edelstein’s “Enlightenment Scholarship by the Numbers: dfr.jstor.org, Dirty Quantification, and the Future of the Lit Review”, now available at Republics of Letters.  Smart stuff … Continue reading

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Ernst Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 1)

Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932) is one of the handful of books that everyone who works on the Enlightenment must, at the very least, pretend to have read. In contrast, the entry Cassirer wrote for the first edition of … Continue reading

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Will Thomas on Simon Schaffer and “Enlightened Automata”

Apologies for the uncharacteristically long hiatus between posts:  the resumption of teaching and the need to discharge a few other claims on what Kant would have classified as the “private use” of what counts as my “reason” have kept me from … Continue reading

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The Soldier, the Citizen, and the Clergyman, with a Postscript on Professors: Kant on Private Reason (Part II)

My previous post examined how Kant distinguished “public” and “private” uses of reason and discussed the differing ways in which he drew this contrast. This one will focus more narrowly on the three examples he offered: an officer following orders … Continue reading

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Kant and the “Private” Use of Reason

Readers of Kant’s little essay on the question “What is enlightenment?” have long recognized that the distinction between “public” and “private” uses of reason is both central to its argument and rather odd. Those perplexed by the distinction are in … Continue reading

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Rights, “Unalienable” or “Inalienable”?: A Concluding Philological Postscript

[This version has been revised since it was initially posted;  see below] Since my posting of Bentham’s critique of the “Declaration of Independence” last Thursday, traffic on this blog has increased dramatically. While I appreciate the attention, I suspect that it will … Continue reading

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