-
Follow on RSS
-
Recent Posts
- A Note on the Anniversary of my Favorite Dream
- A Postscript to “What Was Theodor Adorno Doing in Thomas Mann’s Garden”
- The Source List for the 1790 Table of Usages of the Term “Aufklärung”
- The Word “Enlightenment”: A German Table of Usages from 1790
- The Making and the Marketing of the Philosophische Fragmente (Part II)
- Adorno
- Anti-Jacobin Review
- anti-jacobins
- Arendt
- Begriffsgeschichte
- Bentham
- Berlinische Monatsschrift
- Blumenberg
- Boston
- Cassirer
- Counter-Enlightenment
- Culture Industry
- Declaration of Independence
- Dialectic of Enlightenment
- Diderot
- Edmund Burke
- enlightenment
- Epicurus
- Exile
- Exile Studies
- Foucault
- George Adler
- German Museum
- Habermas
- Hamann
- Hans Blumenberg
- Hegel
- History of Concepts
- Horace
- Horkheimer
- Isaiah Berlin
- James Gillray
- Jefferson
- John Quincy Adams
- Kant
- Koselleck
- Light
- Lionel Trilling
- Locke
- Los Angeles
- MacIntyre
- Melville
- Modernity
- Moses Mendelssohn
- Music
- Ngrams
- Nietzsche
- OED
- Pagden
- philosophy
- Pocock
- politics
- Popper
- rants
- religion
- reviews
- romanticism
- Schmitt
- scientism
- T. S. Eliot
- Thomas Mann
- translation
- Virgil Thomson
- Voltaire
- Whittaker Chambers
- William Barrett
- Wokler
Blogroll
- 18th Century Religion, Literature, and Culture
- Boston 1775
- Box 3, Spool 5
- Creative Communities, 1750-1830
- Crooker Timber
- Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog
- Defoe's Review
- Ether Wave Propaganda
- Foucault News
- Habermasian Reflections
- Justin Erik Halldór Smith
- PhiloBiblos
- Political Theory – Habermas and Rawls
- Prochronisms
- Progressive Geographies
- Public Domain Review
- Public Reason
- Republic of Letters
- Sapping Attention
- Stockerblog
- Taking Note
- The Long Eighteenth
- The Philosopher's Stone (Robert Paul Wolff)
- Waggish
-
Persistent Enlightenment by James Schmidt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
“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
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Counter-Enlightenment, History of Concepts, Isaiah Berlin
2 Comments
Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” — Part II: German Uses 1875 – 1925
The first post in this series examined Zeev Sternhell’s claim that Nietzsche “probably invented” the term Gegenaufklärung and noted that (1) Nietzsche’s one use of the term is difficult to reconcile with the subsequent usage of the term that we … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Counter-Enlightenment, History of Concepts
4 Comments
Kant on “Paradoxical Thinking”
Various commitments have conspired to delay the next installment of my discussion of the history of the notion of “counter-enlightenment.” But in the course of my reading, I came across a quote from Kant’s lectures on anthropology that casts a … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
The Fading of “True Enlightenment” (Another Wildcard Search)
Apologies for the uncharacteristic flurry of activity on this blog, but Google’s addition of wildcard searches to the Ngram (and some tweaks in how it displays the data) has allowed me to take a quick look at a few issues … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
Enlightenment and Ngram Wild Card Searches
A link on my Twitter feed this morning alerted me to Ben Zimmer’s article in the Atlantic on a new (and welcome) feature that Google has added to the Ngram: wild card searches. Naturally, I thought I’d try it out with … Continue reading
Fabricating the “Counter-Enlightenment” — Part 1: Nietzsche’s Role
When asked “Who invented the word ‘counter-Enlightenment?” Isaiah Berlin replied I don’t know who invented the concept …. Someone must have said it. Could it be myself? I should be somewhat surprised. Perhaps I did. I really have no idea.1 … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Counter-Enlightenment, History of Concepts, Isaiah Berlin, Nietzsche, romanticism
9 Comments
Ironic Enlightenment? Voltaire, Fussell, and the Neverending End of the Age of Irony
Readers of this blog may have noted a certain slackening of activity. The explanation is simple enough: September arrived and, with it, the opening of the fall term (or, as one of my more jaded friends likes to call it, … Continue reading
Securing the Borders: On the Genealogy of Scientism (Part II)
Leon Wieseltier’s response to Steven Pinker’s rejoinder to Wieseltier’s earlier attempt to defend the humanities from the depredations of what he terms “scientism” prompted me, in my previous post, to offer a few thoughts on the history of this peculiar … Continue reading
On the Genealogy of “Scientism” (Part I)
Last Monday I flew back from two weeks in Spain, where I interrupted my research on pintxos long enough to attend the Sixteenth International Conference on the History of Concepts. On Tuesday, I staggered into my first class, which — … Continue reading
Reviews Revisited: Klaus Epstein on Fritz Valjavec
One of the great benefits of journal archives such as JSTOR and Project Muse is that it is possible, while searching for a particular article, to stumble across something that you didn’t know existed. In a way, it’s a bit … Continue reading
Persistent Enlightenment 