Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault

In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant's response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant's response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine - using Jürgen Habermas’ work as a case in point - the tension between readings that use Kant's answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant's response, sketched an approach to Kant's text that offers a way of reframing Venturi's distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment.     

HMQS Mosquito: the rediscovery and identification of Queensland's first warship

In 2009, the remnants of Her Majesty's Queensland Ship Mosquito, a 2nd‐class torpedo‐boat built in 1883, were relocated. Purchased by the colonial government of Australia in response to heightened tensions between Great Britain and Imperial Russia, Mosquito was assigned to Queensland's capital, Brisbane, where it had a largely uneventful career. Following removal from active duty it was stripped and abandoned on the foreshore of a tributary of the Brisbane River. This paper discusses Mosquito's historical background, and chronicles the rediscovery of the vessel, and the archaeological investigation and identification of its remains. © 2010 The Author