Category: Uncategorized
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The Enlightenment Index
The main figures that populate our historical accounts of the Enlightenment are human—be they enemies of Enlightenment, such as the priest or the tyrant, or defenders like the philosophe or Aufklärer. [3] But in Kant’s essay, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784),…
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Enlightenment, Some Assembly required
The main figures that populate accounts of the Enlightenment are human–be they enemies of Enlightenment, such as the priest or the tyrant; defenders such as the philosophe or Aufklärer; or intellectuals socially assembled in coffee houses or salons, exercising opinion…
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Academic Inequality
When people talk about inequality these days, they typically mean economic inequality, disparities in income, assets, or other financial measures. But inequalities come in other forms as well, and the academy is home to some of the more entrenched and…
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Quit Lit: An Interview on Anti-Education
With the 50th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities approaching, one might be surprised by the continuing debate over the humanities’ relevance in higher education. One camp argues they are foundational to a rounded education; another says professional degrees…
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Sacred Reading: From Augustine to the Digital Humanists
When Max Weber suggested in 1917 that the world had been disenchanted, he meant that modernity was best understood by the expansion of “technical means” that controlled “all things through calculation.” The real power of these technical means lay not…
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Uneasy in Digital Zion
During the summer of 2014, two Cornell University scholars and a researcher from Facebook’s Data Science unit published a paper on what they termed “emotional contagion.” They claimed to show that Facebook’s news feed algorithm, the complex set of instructions…
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In 1869, at the age of twenty-five, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer…
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The Enlightenment Index
It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book that has understanding for me, . . . surely I do not need to trouble myself. —Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?’” The main figures…
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How the Philologist Became a Physician of Modernity: Nietzsche’s Lectures on German Education
In January of 1869, Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a peach of a job—a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel. Nietzsche was just twenty-four and far from completing his dissertation, but the university’s standards for employment were looser…
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Epistemo-technics, Peter Leithart on “Organizing Enlightenment”
Published in First Things, 4.16.15 “In his Organizing Enlightenment, Chad Wellmon explains how the modern research university was a response to a crisis of “information overload.” The Enlightenment saw an explosion of new knowledge and research. The Enlightenment empire of erudition was a…
Chad Wellmon 