Products>Debates, Controversies, and Prizes: Philosophy in the German Enlightenment

Debates, Controversies, and Prizes: Philosophy in the German Enlightenment

Publisher:
, 2024
ISBN: 9781350348660
Be the first to rate this.

Ebook

Ebooks are designed for reading and have few connections to your library.
See Inside

$103.50

Payment plans available in cart

Overview

This volume brings together a series of cutting-edge studies on significant controversies and prize essay contests of the German Enlightenment. It sheds new light on the nature and impact of the philosophical debates of the period, while analyzing a range of pressing philosophical questions. In doing so, it focuses on controversies and prize competitions as conditions for the advancement of knowledge and the staking out of new philosophical terrain.

Chapters address not only the rich content of the questions but also their wider context, including the theoretical framework of the debates and their institutional support and aims. Together they demonstrate how these debates created a rallying point and generated momentum for sustained philosophical argument and engagement in the Enlightenment era. The collection offers novel perspectives on the major role played by the Berlin Academy both within the German Enlightenment and across Europe more broadly. Through the introduction of several understudied but key figures such as Johann Heinrich Abicht, Leonhard Cochius, Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval, and Guillaume Raynal, it deepens our understanding of the richness and complexity of the period.

Arranged in three parts – natural law and history, metaphysics, and anthropology – the essays provide fascinating new material on areas such as the problem of language, the emergence of psychology, colonialism, and the origins of aesthetics for the wider study of the intellectual milieu in eighteenth-century Germany and beyond.

A collection of essays on the significant controversies and prize essay contests of the German Enlightenment.

Presents new perspectives on how philosophy was practised in the German Enlightenment

Features cutting-edge studies on some hitherto neglected Enlightenment thinkers

Includes chapters from a diverse range of scholars of Enlightenment philosophy

Introduction, Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet (University of Bucharest, Romania) and Christian Leduc (University of Montreal, Canada)

Part I: Natural Law and History
1. The Presumption of Goodness and the Controversy over Christian Wolff’s Cosmopolitanism, Andreas Blank (Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
2. The Duties of the Historian – Raynal’s Failed Prize Question, Gesa Wellman (University of Wuppertal, Germany)

Part II: Metaphysics
3. A Negative Monadology: Condillac’s Answer to the Berlin Academy Prize Competition, Christian Leduc (University of Montreal, Canada)
4. Between Optimism and Anti-optimism: Prémontval’s “Middle Point”, Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
5. The Scandal of the Jugement of the Berlin Academy against Samuel König, Ursula Goldenbaum (Emory University, USA)
6. On Progress in Metaphysics: Responses to the Berlin Academy’s 1792/1795 Prize Essay Question, Stephen Howard (KU Leuven, Belgium) and Pavel Reichl (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Part III: Anthropology
7. Aesthetics as Apolaustic: Baumgarten and the Controversy over Sensitive Pleasures, Alessandro Nannini (University of Bucharest, Romania)
8. Drives, Inclinations and Perfectibility: Leonhard Cochius and the Preisfrage for 1767/1768, Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet (University of Bucharest, Romania)
9. The Origin of Language as an Anthropological Topic: The 1771 Prize Question of the Berlin Academy, Gualtiero Lorini (Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Italy)
10. The Philosophical Context of the 1773/1775 Preisfrage: Johann Georg Sulzer on Knowledge and Sensibility, Daniel Dumouchel (University of Montreal, Canada)

Index

This collection opens up for us the stunning scope and quality of the philosophical debates that arose around the prize essay competitions of the Berlin Academy in mid-eighteenth-century Prussia. In doing so, it reveals the extent to which philosophical controversy in general was a major driving force of the early German Enlightenment.

Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet is Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of the Romanian Academy and at the University of Bucharest, Romania.

Christian Leduc is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montreal, Canada.

Reviews

0 ratings

Sign in with your Logos account

    $103.50

    Payment plans available in cart