دانلود مقاله ترجمه شده تاریخ فکری و زبان

Abstract

The Enlightenment was the planting ground for the “history of ideas”, both literally and substantively. The phrase itself passed from the work of J.J. Brucker, a small preliminary study of Platonic ideas, to Giambattista Vico, in his “New Science”(storia dei idee), and then to the neo-Eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin and his followers.1 The eighteenth century was also the time of the invention of “cultural history”(Kulturgeschichte), “history of the human spirit”(“histoire de l’esprit humain”), and its later products in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.2 All of this formed the distant background for the scholarly field called “history of ideas” by Arthur O. Lovejoy in the twentieth century and the study of “intellectual history”, which has increasingly succeeded it with the more recent “cultural” and “linguistic” turns in the human sciences. For a long time, of course, the Enlightenment was (pace D’Alembert and many of the philosophers who followed) associated more especially with the rise of Newtonian natural science, mathematical philosophy, the search for a “universal language”, and the notion of progress, which in turn was associated with the current idea of an “Enlightenment project”. This aspect of the history of the Enlightenment has been continued by scientific positivism and skepticism recently celebrated by Jonathan Israel and others. Modern digital technology and its social accompaniments have, for good or for ill, reinforced this interpretation of the mathematical Enlightenment heritage. By the time of Newton, the “mechanization of the world picture” was complete, and between the times of Descartes and Kant philosophy also came under its spell. For Descartes, the structure of philosophy was exclusively logical, and Kant’s view of reason was so “pure” that he envisaged an “a priori history of philosophy” culminating in his own “critical philosophy”.