Poets, painters, philosophers, and scientists alike debated new ways of thinking about visual culture in the “long eighteenth century”. The essays in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture demonstrate the extent to which Goethe advanced this discourse in virtually all disciplines. The concept of visuality becomes a constitutive moment in a productive relationship between the verbal and visual arts with far-reaching implications for the formation of bourgeois identity, pedagogy, and culture. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, the contributors to this volume examine the interconnections between aesthetic and scientific fields of inquiry involved in Goethe’s visual identity. By locating Goethe’s position in the examination of visual culture, both established and emerging scholars analyze the degree to which visual aesthetics determined the cultural production of both the German-speaking world and the broader European context. The contributions analyze the production, presentation, and consumption of visual culture defined broadly as painting, sculpture, theater, and scientific practice. The Enlightened Eye promises to invest new energy and insight into the discussion among literary scholars, art historians, and cultural theorists about many aspects of visual culture in the Age of Goethe.

Spinoza in Germany presents fifteen newly commissioned essays by a distinguished set of international experts examining the legacy and influence of Spinoza on German thought in the long nineteenth century. The focus on Spinoza's influence illuminates both the nature of his philosophical contribution, as well as novel aspects of the philosophical lineage from idealism to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and beyond. The chapters are at the cutting edge of research on modern German thought, not only concerning canonical figures like Herder, Kant, and Marx, but also thinkers whose importance has since been neglected such as Salomon Maimon and Lou Salom?.

There can be little doubt that without Spinoza, German Idealism would have been just as impossible as it would have been without Kant. Yet the precise nature of Spinoza's influence on the German Idealists has hardly been studied in detail. This volume of essays by leading scholars sheds light on how the appropriation of Spinoza by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel grew out of the reception of his philosophy by, among others, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Maimon and, of course, Kant. The volume thus not only illuminates the history of Spinoza's thought, but also initiates a genuine philosophical dialogue between the ideas of Spinoza and those of the German Idealists. The issues at stake - the value of humanity; the possibility and importance of self-negation; the nature and value of reason and imagination; human freedom; teleology; intuitive knowledge; the nature of God - remain of the highest philosophical importance today.

We are inundated with game play today. Digital devices offer opportunities to play almost anywhere and anytime. No matter our age, gender, social, cultural, or educational background—we play. Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 is the first book-length work to explore how the modern discourse of play was first shaped during this pivotal period (approximately 1770-1830). The eleven chapters illuminate critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play as evident in the work of major authors of the period including Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Pestalozzi, Jacobi, Tieck, Jean Paul, Schleiermacher, and Fröbel. While drawing on more recent theories of play by thinkers such as Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott, Jost Trier, Gregory Bateson, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Henricks, and Patrick Jagoda, the volume shows the debates around play in German letters of this period to be far richer and more complex than previously thought, as well as more relevant for our current engagement with play. Indeed, modern debates about what constitutes good rather than bad practices of play can be traced to these foundational discourses. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Looking to contexts ranging from premodern Spain and Italy to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, and America, the contributors to this volume explore the ways the political and intellectual aspirations of successive historical presents have repeatedly reshaped the forms and narratives of Jewish cultural memory.

A powerful history that shows anti-Judaism to be a central way of thinking in the Western tradition. This incisive history upends the complacency that confines anti-Judaism to the ideological extremes in the Western tradition. With deep learning and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to the history of the West. Questions of how we are Jewish and, more critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world. The thrust of this tradition construes Judaism as an opposition, a danger often from within, to be criticized, attacked, and eliminated. The intersections of these ideas with the world of power—the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, the German Holocaust—are well known. The ways of thought underlying these tragedies can be found at the very foundation of Western history.