A translation into English of the work of late German Enlightenment thinker Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823), best known for his interpretations of Kant and whose writings on theoretical philosophy were significant for the development of philosophy after Kant. Roehr prefaces the translation with an approximately 150-page analysis of the relevant moral, religious, political, and philosophical thought of the German Enlightenment. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Immanuel Kant's "critical philosophy" is rightly renowned for its criticism of the metaphysical pretensions of reason unaided by experience. It therefore seems ironic that, within a single generation, some of Kant's most important followers argued that th

The first account of the German Catholic Enlightenment, this book explores the ways in which 18th-century Germans reconceived the relationship between religion, society, and the state.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) stands as a key figure in German intellectual history, a bridge joining Luther, Leibniz, and German idealism. Despite his well-recognized importance in the history of thought, Lessing as theologian or philosopher of religion remains an enigmatic figure. Scholars refer to the "riddle" or "mystery" of Lessing, a mystery that has proved intractable because of his reticence on the subject of the final conclusions of his intellectual project. Toshimasa Yasukata seeks to unravel this mystery. Based on intensive study of the entire corpus of Lessing's philosophical and theological writings as well as the extensive secondary literature, Yasukata's work takes us into the systematic core of Lessing's thought. From his penetrating and sophisticated analysis of Lessing's developing position on Christianity and reason, there emerges a fresh image of Lessing as a creative modern mind, who is both shaped by and gives shape to the Christian heritage. The first comprehensive study in English of Lessing's theological and philosophical thought, this book will appeal to all those interested in the history of modern theology, as well as specialists in the Enlightenment and the German romantic movement.

A revisionist account of the effects of the Enlightenment process on German Benedictines which contributes to a better understanding not only of monastic culture in Central Europe, but also of Catholic religious culture in general.

This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present. In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions. Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

For most of the eighteenth century the best minds in Europe took up the task of providing a foundation for human life and human society in which individual fulfillment was to be achieved within a rational public order. When it became apparent that this task was based on an illusion—the separation of self and world—and was thus doomed to failure, however, that insight and the consequent crisis were forgotten and repressed. After 1815 all parties, reactionary and liberal, chose to proceed as if we had achieved what we knew, somewhere, we could not carry off. To secure that false confidence the challenges of the late Enlightenment had to be silenced and its doubts swept under the carpet. This book concerns a founding act of bad faith and of willed blindness, the self-forgetting of the rootlessness and the falsity of the basic presuppositions of the modern world, that have haunted that world from its birth. Enlightenment Interrupted takes the metaphysical arguments of the idealists seriously. Its methodological foundation is the belief that in every era there are deep structures of thought and experience that define the range of theoretical and political possibilities available. The great achievement of the post-Kantian generation was to critique and ultimately to move beyond the self-world dichotomy at the heart of Western thought. This can be seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment project of subjecting everything to the test of reason, but it was also part of a larger cultural movement that found expression in Romanticism, in an openness to Indian and other non-Western thought, and in the political and social experimentation of the French Revolution. What followed in the post-Revolutionary years was not a development of those tendencies to openness and egalitarian, common process but a retreat to the opposition of self and world and a drastic reduction in intellectual and social possibilities. This is one source of the collective impotence that sees the twenty-first century in a lockstep march to disaster.