In this thesis, I examine the radical political views and activism of Thomas Beddoes, a late eighteenth century chemist and physician. A multifaceted man, Beddoes corresponded with many of Britains leading industrial and intellectual lights, especially members of the Lunar Society, had a brief career as an Oxford lecturer, devised air delivery apparatus with James Watt, and wrote extensively to distribute useful medical knowledge to the public and argue for medical reform, all the while attracting the ire of the government and scientific community for his outspoken, radical, republican politics. <br><br> I track Beddoes career as a Friend of Liberty, set within the context of the British reform movement, from 1792, when he began involving himself publicly in agitation, to 1797, when the death-knell of the British reform movement sounded and the French Revolution seemed to have utterly failed. In doing so, I seek to determine to what extent Beddoes was a radical, a revolutionary, and a fifth-column threat to the British, whether or not his ideology was in any regard the product of his science, and what the nature of his radicalism and the lineage of his ideas can tell us about the intellectual culture of his era. <br><br> I conclude that Beddoes fiery rhetoric belies an otherwise moderate and pacific approach to political change, based in British Enlightenment ideas rather than emerging science. The republic, rather than a goal to be achieved through violent overthrow, was simply the only logical organization for a society of innately equal citizens, a fact he believed obvious to the enlightened mind. He defended the French Revolution while he could still cast it as a moderate endeavor led by rational men, but, like so many of its early British supporters, grew disillusioned as France descended into mob violence and the tyranny of Robespierre. Following the Priestley Riots of 1791, he harboured deep fears of a sans-culotte-like British mob, which threatened not only the Church and King, but the interests and liberty of those men like Joseph Priestley and James Watt who were generating valuable knowledge and industry around him. <br><br> My analysis supports Roy Porters theory of a unique British Enlightenment, a social fermentation which emphasized Lockean personal liberty, improvement, and private property (which evolved into the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith and David Hume), and which was, critically, defensive of liberties already gained. Beddoes constellation of political, religious, scientific, and economic influences reflect the characteristic Englishness of the enlightenment culture around him, distinct particularly from France, and helps illustrate the links between scientific and political ideas in the late Enlightenment.

Emma Nordin: Emilie Du Châtelets analys av lycka: Upplösning av polemiken mellan illusion och förnuft. Uppsala universitet: inst. för idé- och lärdomshistoria, C-uppsats, höstterminen, 2012.   The 18th century is a time period known for its battle with superstition, illusion and falseness. With the Torch of Reason the philosophers of the time were set on vanquishing everything untrue and lead mankind into what they themselves called the Enlightenment. Happiness had moved from Heaven to Earth in science, truth and pleasure. But is it that simple? This essay will analyze and discuss the French philosopher Emilie Du Châtelet’s concept “illusion”, something she did not encourage people to vanquish, but to nourish and cherish. Her ideas of illusion did not only contradict the ideas of many of her contemporaries and predecessors, but the associations the word has today as well. Unlike many others she did not consider illusion as falseness that eliminated reason, on the contrary, only with the two combined could one be truly happy. Du Châtelet argued for the apparent oxymoron: conscious illusion. She showed how this worked in happy occasions such as love, hopes of glory and something as simple as a visit to the theatre. She did not construct these definitions and reasoning in a vacuum, but in constant debate with predecessors such as Spinoza and Hobbes and her contemporaries such as La Mettrie and Rousseau. This essay will show that the relationship between reason and illusion during the Enlightenment was more complicated than one might think and that Du Châtelet argues for a fully functioning and necessary combination of illusion, happiness and reason. Illusion was not necessarily something the philosophers of the Enlightenment saw as something oppose to, or even threatening to, their flickering Torch.

In this thesis, I examine the radical political views and activism of Thomas Beddoes, a late eighteenth century chemist and physician. A multifaceted man, Beddoes corresponded with many of Britains leading industrial and intellectual lights, especially members of the Lunar Society, had a brief career as an Oxford lecturer, devised air delivery apparatus with James Watt, and wrote extensively to distribute useful medical knowledge to the public and argue for medical reform, all the while attracting the ire of the government and scientific community for his outspoken, radical, republican politics. <br><br> I track Beddoes career as a Friend of Liberty, set within the context of the British reform movement, from 1792, when he began involving himself publicly in agitation, to 1797, when the death-knell of the British reform movement sounded and the French Revolution seemed to have utterly failed. In doing so, I seek to determine to what extent Beddoes was a radical, a revolutionary, and a fifth-column threat to the British, whether or not his ideology was in any regard the product of his science, and what the nature of his radicalism and the lineage of his ideas can tell us about the intellectual culture of his era. <br><br> I conclude that Beddoes fiery rhetoric belies an otherwise moderate and pacific approach to political change, based in British Enlightenment ideas rather than emerging science. The republic, rather than a goal to be achieved through violent overthrow, was simply the only logical organization for a society of innately equal citizens, a fact he believed obvious to the enlightened mind. He defended the French Revolution while he could still cast it as a moderate endeavor led by rational men, but, like so many of its early British supporters, grew disillusioned as France descended into mob violence and the tyranny of Robespierre. Following the Priestley Riots of 1791, he harboured deep fears of a sans-culotte-like British mob, which threatened not only the Church and King, but the interests and liberty of those men like Joseph Priestley and James Watt who were generating valuable knowledge and industry around him. <br><br> My analysis supports Roy Porters theory of a unique British Enlightenment, a social fermentation which emphasized Lockean personal liberty, improvement, and private property (which evolved into the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith and David Hume), and which was, critically, defensive of liberties already gained. Beddoes constellation of political, religious, scientific, and economic influences reflect the characteristic Englishness of the enlightenment culture around him, distinct particularly from France, and helps illustrate the links between scientific and political ideas in the late Enlightenment.

Scholarly accounts of the history of civic virtue in the modern era have with few exceptions been wholly secular, discounting, ignoring, or even outright rejecting the role religious thought has played in shaping the civic tradition. In this dissertation, I focus on the influence of religion on the civic tradition, specifically in the eighteenth century in Scotland and America. I examine the ways in which the religious traditions of each nation shaped the debate surrounding the viability of civic virtue, the place of religious virtues among the civic tradition, and the tensions between using religion to promote civic virtue while protecting individual religious liberty. In the Scottish Enlightenment, I examine the influence of Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense philosophy and Adam Ferguson’s providential theology. In the American Founding, I contrast the New England religious tradition exemplified by John Witherspoon and John Adams with the public religious tradition advocated by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. This work demonstrates not only that religion influences the civic tradition, but also that this influence is neither monolithic nor self-evident. In order to understand how religion shaped this tradition, it is necessary to take into account that different conceptions of religion produce different understandings of what it means to be a good citizen.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Greifswald, 1924. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 222-223).

Version commerciale de : Habilitationsschrift : Philosophie : Trier : 1980. / Bibliogr. p. 324-334.

This original play, a full-length drama in two acts, is the story of the last 18 months in the life of Emilie du Châtelet. It explores the relationship between Emilie and Voltaire, who was her lover for 15 years. Theirs was a romance of not only the heart, but also of the mind, as they shared their passions for science, philosophy and intellectual discourse. Emilie was an extraordinary woman, writing what is still the definitive French translation and commentary on the work of Isaac Newton. This play introduces her to a modern audience; a woman who for centuries was relegated to a footnote in her more famous partner’s biography, she can now be discovered and celebrated for her own self. / February 2016

This report offers an analysis of the ways in which two eighteenth century georgic poems, John Dyer’s The Fleece and William Cowper’s The Task, mediate evangelical and imperial practices. Through an inquiry into the recent critical intersection between Kevis Goodman’s media focused research into the georgic and Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s similarly inflected inquiry into the Enlightenment, this report suggests that the didactic, agricultural musings of Dyer and Cowper betray a deep engagement the consequences of imperialism and the execution of Britain’s dawning evangelical charge. / text

Die kulturwissenschafdiche Behandlung der Aufklärung, wie sie in den letzten Jahren verstärkt zu beobachten ist, führe ich im Wesentlichen auf drei unterschiedliche und nicht zusammenhängende Grunde zurück. Der erste ist eine weltweite Umorientierung der Forschung im Bereich der Literaturwisscnschaften, der zweite liegt in einer Befreiung vom philosophisch-normativen Potential des Begriffs selbst und der dritte hat etwas mit der Einbeziehung von Medien aller Art zu tun.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal