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Persistent Enlightenment by James Schmidt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Whose Buttock? Which Enlightenment? – Thoughts on Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters
Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013) is perhaps the most ambitious account of the period published by a major commercial press since Peter Gay’s two-volume survey from the 1960s. Like Gay, Pagden’s … Continue reading
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Tagged MacIntyre, Pagden, philosophy, religion, reviews, Voltaire
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Making Sense of “Aufklärung” – Translating Kant, Part III
I began this series of posts more or less as a lark, thinking that I’d look at how my fellow translators of Kant’s response to the question “What is enlightenment?” handled the opening sentence. But this exercise turned out to … Continue reading
Kant for Kids (Notes on a Survivor)
Tracing the reception of Kant’s phrase “selbstverschudeten Unmündigkeit” (“self-incurred immaturity” is the current consensus on how to translate it), I stumbled on one of those things that reminds us about the books, and the worlds, we have lost: This peculiar … Continue reading
Translating Kant on Enlightenment: Two Nineteenth-Century Translations
As sketched last week, my plan had been to consider nine different translations of Kant’s essay on the question “What is Enlightenment?” and see how the translation of the crucial terms in essay’s opening sentence changed over the last two … Continue reading
Wieseltier on the Barricades
As an aspiring curmudgeon (and damn, it takes a lot of effort), I’d like to like Leon Wieseltier’s Brandeis commencement address — I mean, it’s really cranky and curmudgeony. But there are some things that even a would-be curmudgeon can’t … Continue reading
The Words We Have Lost: Translating Kant on Enlightenment
What might have been the most famous words ever written about the Enlightenment go like this: “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.” The problem, however, is that the author of these words — Immanuel Kant (of … Continue reading
Poetry After Auschwitz – What Adorno Didn’t Say
At the beginning of April, while participating in the defense of an elegant and insightful dissertation on Osip Mandelstam, I stumbled over one of those statements that Adorno never said, but which lots of people think he did: namely, that … Continue reading
Revisiting the “Enlightenment Project,” Inspired by Anthony Pagden and Armed with Some Ngrams
I turned in the last of my grades for the semester at the start of the week and was reminded, once again, that if April is the cruelest month, May — at least for academics — must be the kindest: … Continue reading
How Isaiah Berlin Revised the “Two Concepts” (A Concluding Philological Postscript)
Having finished my three posts on the exchange of letters between Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, I’m ready to reward myself by rolling around in the some of the nGram catnip that I’ve been accumulating. But there’s one bit of … Continue reading
Berlin & Popper on Liberty & Enlightenment (Part III – Berlin’s Response)
I’ve devoted two previous posts to Karl Popper’s comments on Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 inaugural lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” as laid out in his letter to Berlin of February 17, 1959. This post will focus on Berlin’s response in his … Continue reading
Persistent Enlightenment 