Literature and Science :
An Interdisciplinary Approach.
General Books on the Enlightenment:
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Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Cassirer was himself a philosopher (investigating Kant, symbolic meanings, and totalitarian states) who wrote one of the first and most enduring treatments of 18th-century philosophy. This is an English translation of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, first published in 1932.
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Fitzpatrick, Martin, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, and Iain McCalman, eds. The Enlightenment World. London, New York: Routledge, 2004.
This text has informative essays on a wide range of Enlightenment topics. The volume reflects the social and cultural turn of Enlightenment studies, although there is also an opening section on “intellectual origins.”
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Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
The first of two landmark volumes that set out an Enlightenment that was anticlerical and liberal, inspired by the classics and by scientific cosmopolitanism. Originally published in 1966 (New York: Knopf).
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Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom. New York and London: Knopf, 1996.
Provides a social history of the period and gives background on the philosophes. Originally published in 1969 (New York: Knopf).
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Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Argues that Spinoza lay at the heart of early Enlightement radicalism. The second volume, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) continues the story into the first half of the 18th century.
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Kors, Alan, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Like Fitzpatrick, et al. 2004, this covers a wide variety of topics. More extensive than Fitzpatrick, et al., the treatment here is nevertheless similarly intellectual, social, scientific, and cultural in its treatment.
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Robertson, John. The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
The introduction is a superb treatment of approaches to the Enlightenment and to the question of whether the Enlightenment as a term or concept has any meaning.
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Yolton, John, Pat Rogers, Roy Porter, and Barbara Stafford, eds. The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
A good collection of essays by leading scholars on a wide range of topics. These are intended for reference rather than interpretation, so the reader will find information about authors and subjects, useful for those starting out and needing more information about individuals or topics mentioned in other texts.