Isaac de Pinto (1717–1787) and the Jewish problems: Apologetic letters to Voltaire and Diderot

Isaac de Pinto was an active financier, economist and homme de lettres. Descending from a Jewish family of Portuguese origin, he lived in Amsterdam, Paris and London. Throughout his life, he enjoyed close relationships and made regular contact with important figures of the European Enlightenment.The main purpose of this article is to show that the concern with the Jewish problems, namely those relating to the difficult economic situation of the Portuguese nation in Amsterdam in the second half of the eighteenth century, is a key factor in explaining the ongoing moral and apologetic dialogues that Isaac de Pinto maintained separately with Voltaire and Diderot.     

The French Enlightenment attempts to create a philosophy without reason: the case of Diderot and the effect of Helvétius

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the “Age of Reason”. By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind’s functions to the single faculty of sensation and so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper reconstructs this attempt. In doing so it again engages critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist, it provides a historical case study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity, and it uses this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service which the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity.     

Between Fantasy and Philosophy: Saʿdi,Translator of Voltaire’s Zadig

Zadig ou la Destinée opens on a preface supposedly written by Sadi (sic), who seems to suggest he is the translator of the story which is to follow. The article will investigate the role played by Voltaire’s reference to Sa?di in Zadig as an Oriental prop for the narrative’s exotic setting, but also, more importantly, as participating in its philosophical content. Travelers’ accounts had brought growing interest in Persia, and Sa?di would not have been unfamiliar to an educated public; the Orient more generally became an experimental space for Enlightenment thought. Playing on the notion of the translator as cultural bridge, the article examines the uses Voltaire makes of Sa?di in Zadig and whether these correlate to the eighteenth-century French reader’s perceptions of the Iranian poet.     

Tragic Elements in Calderón's La Dama Duende

Abstract

Ricardo Landeira. El género policíaco en la literatura española del siglo XIX. Universidad de Alicante, 2001. 142 pp.

Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, eds. Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xii + 316 pp. $39.95.

Madeleine Dobie. Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism. Stanford University Press, 2001. xiv + 234 pp. $49.50.

Daniel Murphy. Vicente Aleixandre's Stream of Lyric Consciousness. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001. 263 pp. $43.50.

Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxii + 367 pp. $59.95 cloth; $21.95 paper.     

PINKER AND PROGRESS

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long‐term decline in person‐on‐person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread of a cultural pattern of self‐restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism. For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad‐news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold‐War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter‐Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti‐Communism.