Our correspondent at The Economist reviews what looks to a provocative new book by Philipp Blom, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.
Blom sets his book around the happenings of an exceptional Parisian salon — that of Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach — who hosted the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Denis [...]
Tags:A Wicked Company·atheism·Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach·commonsense dualism·counter-Enlightenment·David Hume·Denis Diderot·enlightenment·godless·magical thinking·materialism·mechanistic·Parisian salon·Phillipp Blom·Rousseau·soul beliefs·Voltaire
In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx famously observed that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Nowhere is this more true than in Germany, where the mass of history is heavy and sometimes suffocating.
With this in mind, the recent furor over Thilo [...]
Tags:18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte·adultery·Arabs·Craig Martin·dead generations·enlightenment·execution·Fremdarbeiter·German Muslims·Germany·honor killings·integration·Islamist·Karl Marx·Koran·Matthias Matussek·nightmare·pre-Enlightenment·radical Islam·Religion Bulletin·separatist Islam·stoning·terrorism·Thilo Sarrazin·tradition·Turks·weltanschauung
In the New York Times Science section, Rachel Donadio reports on a museum in Florence that treats Galileo as both a “secular” and “religious” saint; the curators thus commingle two concepts (the secular/religious) that were being developed during the Renaissance and which reached fruition during the Enlightenment:
The Galileo case is often seen starkly as science’s [...]
Tags:beatification·Catholic Church·Christianity·cosmology·enlightenment·essentializing·excommunication·Florence·Formations of the Secular·Galileo·Gallileo Museum·Genealogies of Religion·heretic·Islam·Naturalization·Rachel Donadio·relics·religious·Renaissance·saint·secular·Talal Asad·William Conolly
This is the question asked by Philip Goldberg in a recent article in which he boldly answers yes: “Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws. The same can be said for Buddhism, which derives from the same Vedic roots.”
Setting aside for a [...]
Tags:ahistorical·Buddhism·C.W. Huntington·critique·eastern religions·elites·empiricism·enlightenment·essentializing·Gregory Schopen·Hinduism·intellectuals·Jonathan Z. Smith·Philip Goldberg·reconstructed Buddhism·Religion and Other Products of Empire·Richard Horsley·Robert Sharf·science·social construction·The Zen of Japanese Nationalism·Vedic·Western consumption·Zen Buddhism
