The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much (SVEC, January 2010) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0729409902 ISBN 13: 9780729409902

Publisher: Voltaire Foundation, 2010

Synopsis

Historians of eighteenth-century thought have implied a clear distinction between mystical or occult writing, often termed ‘illuminist’, and better-known forms of Enlightenment thinking and culture. But where are the boundaries of ‘enlightened’ human understanding?

This is the question posed by contributors to this volume, who put forward a completely new way of configuring these seemingly antithetical currents of thought, and identify a grey area that binds the two, a ‘Super-Enlightenment’. Through articles exploring the social, religious, artistic, political and scientific dimensions of the Super-Enlightenment, contributors demonstrate the co-existence of apparent opposites: the enlightened and the esoteric, empiricism and imagination, history and myth, the secretive and the public, mysticism and science. The Enlightenment can no longer be seen as a sturdy, homogeneous movement defined by certain core beliefs, but one which oscillates between opposing poles in its social practices, historiography and even its epistemology: between daring to know, and daring to know too much.

About this title

About the Author

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and, by courtesy, History at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of 'On the Spirit of Rights' (Chicago, 2018). He is also active in the field of digital humanities, notably through the "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project.

Edition details

• Publisher: Voltaire Foundation
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0729409902
• ISBN 13: 9780729409902
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Edelstein Dan