The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity

Enemies of the Enlightenment:
The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity
by Darrin M. McMahon

# Paperback: 288 pages
# Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (July 18, 2002)

History has often overlooked the men and women who resisted the triumphal progress of Western society toward Reason: spiritual Luddites, it seems at first glance, hoping to smash the ideological machinery of atheism and democracy. But in this sophisticated deconstruction of conservative opposition to the Enlightenment, McMahon, a fellow in history at NYU, re-envisions intellectual history from 1750 to 1830 as an ideological dialectic foreshadowing the culture wars of our own time and helping to define modernity. As McMahon shows, many Catholics saw Voltaire and his ilk as harbingers of degenerate hedonism, a diabolical menace to church, state and family. These anti-philosophes accused their enemies of practicing the very intolerance they condemned, and were convinced that danger lurked in philosophic fanaticism. Their horrified voices, audible from the mid-18th century on, became louder as the Enlightenment gathered momentum. Unable to stop the French Revolution, their protests seemed prophetic to many when idealism turned to terror. The ghost of Counter-Enlightenment ideology has been conspicuous in more recent times in Spain, Italy and Latin America, just as the specter of leftist violence has been repeatedly invoked. McMahon's argument is deeply versed in recent scholarship; his prose is polished, and the book is illustrated with compelling examples of visual propaganda (notably, Voltaire caught in flagrante delicto). While this title lacks the mass appeal of Simon Schama's Citizens or other narrative-oriented histories of the revolution, its relevance to conservative-liberal tensions in the U.S. make it worthy of broad intellectual discussion.

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Copleston - History of Philosophy, Volume 6: Enlightenment to Kant

History of Philosophy, Volume 6
From French Enlightenment to Kant
by Frederick Copleston S.J.

# Paperback: 528 pages
# Publisher: Image (December 1, 1993)

Conceived originally as a serious presentation of the development of philosophy for Catholic seminary students, Frederick Copleston's nine-volume A History Of Philosophy has journeyed far beyond the modest purpose of its author to universal acclaim as the best history of philosophy in English.

Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit of immense erudition who once tangled with A.J. Ayer in a fabled debate about the exiatenceof God and the possibility of metaphysics, knew that seminary students were fed a woefully inadequate diet of theses and proofs, and that their familiarity with most of history's great thinkers was reduced to simplistic caricatures. Copelston sets out to redress the wrong by writing a complete history of Western philosophy, one crackling with incident and intellectual excitement - and one that gives full place to each thinker, presenting his thought in a beautifully rounded manner and showing his links to those who went before and to those who came after them.

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Descartes's Method of Doubt

Descartes's Method of Doubt
Janet Broughton
Princeton 240 pp.

Descartes thought that we could achieve absolute certainty by starting with radical doubt. He adopts this strategy in the Meditations on First Philosophy, where he raises sweeping doubts with the famous dream argument and the hypothesis of an evil demon. But why did Descartes think we should take these exaggerated doubts seriously? And if we do take them seriously, how did he think any of our beliefs could ever escape them? Janet Broughton undertakes a close study of Descartes's first three meditations to answer these questions and to present a fresh way of understanding precisely what Descartes was up to.

Broughton first contrasts Descartes's doubts with those of the ancient skeptics, arguing that Cartesian doubt has a novel structure and a distinctive relation to the commonsense outlook of everyday life. She then argues that Descartes pursues absolute certainty by uncovering the conditions that make his radical doubt possible. She gives a unified account of how Descartes uses this strategy, first to find certainty about his own existence and then to argue that God exists. Drawing on this analysis, Broughton provides a new way to understand Descartes's insistence that he hasn't argued in a circle, and she measures his ambitions against those of contemporary philosophers who use transcendental arguments in their efforts to defeat skepticism. The book is a powerful contribution both to the history of philosophy and to current debates in epistemology.

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