What is Enlightenment?

Catalog description

The question "What is the Enlightenment?" was posed for an essay competition in a journal, the Berlin Monatsschrift in 1784. At that point, French and English philosophers had already considered new ways of thinking, inventing the modern individual and the modern citizen (in contrast to a state's subject). German responses to this question were written by an established philosopher (Immanuel Kant), a Jewish resident of Berlin (Moses Mendelssohn), as well as concerned readers of recent philosophical treastises. In our course, we will consider this question by exploring this early discussion and the formation of Enlightenment thought in Europe and specifically Germany, including the German-Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), but also trace the historical transformation of this discussion, including Theodor W. Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944/1947) and more recent criticism.