The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment is a collection of essays which deal with the influence of Ibn Tufayl, a 12th-century Arab philosopher from Spain, on major European thinkers. His philosophical novel, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, could be considered one of the most important books that heralded the Scientific Revolution. Its thoughts are found in different variations and to different degrees in the books of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Kant. But if Ibn Tufayl's fundamental values, such as equality, freedom and toleration, which the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had adopted as theirs, paved the way to the French Revolution, they certainly marked the end of the age of reason in southern Spain and the rest of the Islamic world. Ibn Tufayl's philosophy was appropriated, subverted, or reinvented for many centuries. But the memory of the man who wrote such an influential book was buried in the dust of history. The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment reexamines Ibn Tufayl's momentous book and its continued influence over contemporary philosophy. This intriguing book will appeal to those interested in comparative literature and religion.

The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment is a collection of essays dealing with the influence of Ibn Tufayl, a 12th-century Arab philosopher from Spain, on major European thinkers. Had Edward Said known about the impact of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan on Europe throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, he might have reached different conclusions in his book Orientalism.

The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment is a collection of essays which deal with the influence of Ibn Tufayl, a 12th-century Arab philosopher from Spain, on major European thinkers. His philosophical novel, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, could be considered one of the most important books that heralded the Scientific Revolution. Its thoughts are found in different variations and to different degrees in the books of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Kant. But if Ibn Tufayl's fundamental values, such as equality, freedom and toleration, which the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had adopted as theirs, paved the way to the French Revolution, they certainly marked the end of the age of reason in southern Spain and the rest of the Islamic world. Ibn Tufayl's philosophy was appropriated, subverted, or reinvented for many centuries. But the memory of the man who wrote such an influential book was buried in the dust of history. The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment reexamines Ibn Tufayl's momentous book and its continued influence over contemporary philosophy. This intriguing book will appeal to those interested in comparative literature and religion.

From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed that progress and the betterment of the human condition was inevitable. Inside you will read about… ✓ The Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment ✓ Engaging With Religion ✓ Morality in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Society in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Science and Political Economy ✓ The Enlightenment and the Public ✓ Print Culture and the Press Philosophies of the Enlightenment gave birth to the disciplines of political science, economic theory, sociology and anthropology, the disciplines that still form the basis of how we understand life in the 21st century. A bold attack on the Church, the State and the Monarchy, the Age of Enlightenment was a direct challenge to the status quo that sought freedom for all.

"The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.

One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.