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Persistent Enlightenment by James Schmidt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Tag Archives: Ngrams
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
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
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
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
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
Why It Wouldn’t Have Mattered if Isaiah Berlin used Ngrams
I’d been planning on posting the final part of my discussion of the exchange of letters between Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper on liberty and enlightenment, but various commitments have conspired to delay my posting of that discussion until later … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, History of Concepts, Isaiah Berlin, Ngrams
6 Comments
Pursuing the “Shallow Enlightenment” (Part I: Nineteenth-Century Trash-Talk)
In my efforts to make sense of the various pejoratives hurled at the Enlightenment, the one whose depths I’ve yet to plumb is (oddly enough) “shallow.” The term surfaces in a number of places and there’s a lot to be … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Cassirer, History of Concepts, Ngrams, OED, romanticism
1 Comment
If Adorno had an Ngram
I’ve never been good at speculating on what earlier thinkers would have said about later developments. This was driven home to me several years ago when someone who’d bought an audio book on the Enlightenment that I’d been recruited to … Continue reading
Further Thoughts on “the Enlightenment,” the OED, the History of Concepts
Last week’s post ended with some misgivings about the distinction Koselleck drew between the “history of concepts” and the “history of words.” Admittedly, the distinction seems plausible enough: since concepts can be designated by a number of different words (e.g., … Continue reading
The Enlightenment, the OED, and the History of Concepts, with Ngrams
In the fall of 2010, the online Oxford English Dictionary revised its entry for “Enlightenment.” Since 1891 the definition had read as follows: 1. The action of enlightening; the state of being enlightened …. [I]mparting or receiving mental or spiritual … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Begriffsgeschichte, Hegel, History of Concepts, Ngrams, OED
7 Comments
Persistent Enlightenment 