This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the (...) ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life. (shrink)

This article highlights the importance of new research on women philosophers and addresses some methodological issues to be taken in consideration. The thesis presented here is that through this new line of research it is possible to analyse the close connection between philosophy, politics and institutions. The paper opens with a critique of the assumption that philosophy has until recently been the exclusive property of men, giving the example of some forgotten women philosophers who lived in Hegel's time. After considering (...) the risk of ghettoization inherent in Women's Studies, the author closes by showing how the reconsideration of women philosophers can help to question the methodology and the status of philosophy in general, and in particular to question the philosophical canon. The text serves as an introduction to a special issue of the Hegel Bulletin dedicated to women philosophers in Hegel's time. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

German Romanticism is commonly associated with nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism. Against this standard picture, I argue that the early German romantic author, Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) holds a decidedly cosmopolitan view. Novalis’s essay “Christianity or Europe” has been the subject of much dispute and puzzlement ever since he presented it to the Jena romantic circle in the fall of 1799. On the basis of an account of the philosophical background of Novalis’s romanticism, I show that the image (...) of the Middle Ages sketched in “Christianity or Europe” plays a symbolic role and should not be taken as a literal description of the historical past or as a blueprint for the future. Rather, the romantic picture of medieval Europe serves to evoke poetically the ideal of a cosmopolitan re-unification of humanity. (shrink)