enlightenment

Modern brutality, which found its culmination in using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against humanity, is the dark side of the principal teachings of the Enlightenment. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment, blaming religion as the main source of violence, removed God from the center of Western political and social thought to replace it with human. Although they were not conscious of the outcomes of their philosophy, in the course of time, it made modern societies more power-hungry and less accountable for their actions. To investigate this issue, relying on Theodor Adorno and other critics, the rudiments of the Enlightenment will first be analyzed. Then, looking at the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article investigates the way in which militarization, and its peak, the atomic bomb, became an unintended outcome of the Enlightenment. In the next step, we will discuss the reactions of American Churches to the bomb to examine how differently a God-centered perspective may act against using or proliferating WMD. This leads to the role that the belief in God may play in increasing the sense of accountability in man’s social and political behavior. The article concludes that based on historical evidence, there is no indication that a human-centered model is more immune from violence than a God-centered one.  

The age of enlightenment is a turning point in the movements of Neo-Classicism toward Romanticism. This period emerges after preparing the ground for the decline of neoclassicism in the first half of the eighteenth century in the areas of art, literature, etc. in Europe. It is considered as the beginning of a period of art and literature consisting of artistic creativity and intuitive perception. Three main principles of "unity of time", "unity of place", and "unity of subject" based on which the classical literature was founded become subject to change and transformation. England, Germany, and France were the primary manifestation points of this movement in European literature. Although the role of the literature of ancient east in the foundations of the characteristics of "Romanticism" and pre-romanticism cannot be overlooked, the social grounds of the emergence of this age can be summarized in the longings for change of society, getting tired of old criteria in the fields of art and literature, tendency toward platonic thoughts, and escape from modernity and inclination toward logical thoughts in the works of "Kant" and "Rousseau".

This article revisits Foucault's articles and intenne»s on the Iranian revolution. It retieius them in l(ght qf the foll01ving two contentions: (t) Foucault's interpretation ef Kant's essqy on '1J7hat is Enlightenment?'1 and his article "Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution n that evolve into Foucault's notions of critique and modernity and in conjunction uitb this, (iz) his other 1vorks such as Mrulness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, The Order qf Things etc. that lead Foucault to the idea that T,Western modernity generates a conflict betiueen the 'other' and the 'same'. This becomes the basis for him to reject tWestern modernity and embrace the Iranian revolution as an alternative to T-Western modernity. These ideas are very much implicit in Foucault's indirect engagement nsth the Iranian revolution. Th01 become more evident in Foucault's JPritings on the Iranian revolution, though his account o] it seems to stand outside the narrative qf T-17estern modernity. U;7hether Foucault is rzght or ivrong in his perceptions ef the Iranian revolution is altogether a d/ffirent question.

''Philosopl!J of History" is one of the Jpecijic terms of the modern age and enlightenment era which has been raised in the philosophical scientific Jpace of eighteen century. This new approach to history based on the human knowledge of things and relation between tbem, and since 1mderstcmding the external things and accidents means fry a priori mode/ of knower, so "tbe history "finds an suqjective aspea and now it would be asked how can to apply this new mean of history to another tradition or even current evolutions? A11d is it possible to definite another sort of Philosophy of history or no?

The discovery of the motives behind human actions turned into a controversial issue among philosophers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While supporters of libertarianism maintained that human actions stemmed from an inner will, the Necessitarians, on the other hand, believed human actions were an effect of previous external causes. David Hume, however, came up with a middle-way solution for this dispute which he named his Reconciling Project. This comparative study aims to discover the concept of the Reconciling Project in the works of Alexander Pope. To achieve this the article would elaborate upon Hume’s thoughts on the theme mentioned above expressed in the eighth chapter of his book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding entitled Of Liberty and Necessity. It would trace it to the works of Pope by analysing Pope’s views in Essay on Man and his notion of The Ruling Passion. It would be argued and concluded through a comparative method that Hume’s thoughts had found their way into the works of Pope, and both thinkers found human instincts as the real motive behind human actions. Through an intertextual analysis, it would also be concluded that this was either the direct effect of Hume's thoughts on Pope or that both figures were influenced by the same intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment, and secularisation.

In this essay, I want to address two main aspects of the arguably central topic of Kant's treatise on Enlightenment, namely maturity: these concern the notion of the freedom of thought (Section I) and the idea of emancipation that is conveyed by maturity, the fact that it involves a process of growing up to become a citizen (Section II). Freedom of thought denotes the idea of self-agency which all human beings possess in principle whereas emancipation points to the fact that maturity is something that is not a matter of course, neither in individual cases nor for society at large. Maturity is not a natural disposition that one either possesses or not but must be developed. This means that not all human beings are de facto mature always, everywhere and all of the time. That this situation is not something that is in principle unalterable can be demonstrated by way of assessing Kant's apparent views on women's presumable minority 'according to sex'.