The Enlightenment, which followed bitter religious wars, was concerned the question of how to have public conversations (including disagreement) where the validity of arguments is centered.
Enlightenment was very concerned with limits of rationality too.
Relevant today! 1/
(background: I am listening to this very interesting podcast.
Concern with how to argue well in all sorts of domains: politics, religion, art, etc.
Enlightenment authors were concerned with wider education of the public, and public discourse. 2/

bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0…
Karen O'Brien mentions that J-J Rousseau, who argued that women ought only to be educated so they could be more useful to men was actually going against the grain, the emerging Enlightenment consensus was on women's education as important for women. 3/
This depended on the thought that rationality doesn't depend on gender (and relatedly, in some Enlightenment authors who fought against slave trade etc) on race, as well as on social position (learning should be available to a wider audience, e.g. in encyclopedia). 4/

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More from @Helenreflects

4 Sep
🧵on Marie Anne Lavoisier, mother of modern chemistry. Her husband Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was central to chemical revolution & discovery of role of oxygen in chemical processes.
Marie Anne's contribution is less well-known.
This painting of them recently was in the news 1/
The painting (by J-L David) was in the news for a peculiar reason.
Conservators found out the painting was edited: originally Marie Anne wore a hat! And there were no scientific instruments on the table. I'll come to reasons for these edits in a bit 2/
news.artnet.com/art-world/hidd…
What is less known is that Marie Anne was a chemist in her own right. She worked together with her husband in the lab, making meticulous notes of experiments. She even translated works in early chemistry for him from English (Antoine could not read English) 3/
Read 14 tweets
30 Jul
A counterfactual question that's hard to evaluate but here goes anyway: if Lynn White Jr is right, then without Christianity would our environmental crisis now be less severe (climate change, habitat loss, species loss, collapse of entire groups of organisms)?
Lynn White Jr was a Christian his entire life! He wrote trenchant critiques about how Christians were co-responsible for the ecological crisis.
He believed St Francis of Assisi would be a good role model (here's my pic of St Francis, model: @BlakeHereth1)
Here is the fascinating history of Lynn White Jr giving the talk that would eventually end up as "The historical roots of our ecological crisis".
chesapeakequarterly.net/V15N3/main1/
Read 4 tweets
30 Jul
Yay! We can submit to @UncannyMagazine again, they reopen soon. I've backed this project because I love the magazine--you can still support it. Also, if you pledge a lot @Wiswell will write a blogpost on a horror movie of your choice!
kickstarter.com/projects/lynne…
Mini thread of my fav Uncanny stories:
uncannymagazine.com/article/badass… by @raecarson
The Thing about ghosts by Naomi Kritzer 2/
uncannymagazine.com/article/the-th…
Read 7 tweets
9 Jun
I'm going to do a thread on Bernard De Fontenelle's Plurality of Worlds (1686), a series of dialogues between a Marquise and a philosopher that offers a startling and disorienting vision of a myriad of inhabited worlds 1/
I recommend listening to this subtle performance of Marin Marais' Voix Humaines while you read this thread, performed by Brandon Acker and Craig Trompeter 2/
We have dialogues over five evenings between a philosopher and a Marquise. At the time that de Fontenelle wrote, it was unusual to have a woman feature in a philosophical dialogue. Women were commonly thought to be inferior to men (in virtue, physical ability, intelligence) 3/
Read 38 tweets
7 Jun
Castiglione's Courtier (1528) is such a fun read. Highly recommend (I read it in my teens, but now I am a trained philosopher and I can appreciate it even better). So lively and full of zest, with engaging characters in philosophical dialogue, all at the hip court of Urbino.
Also, there are so few philosophical books in Etiquette anymore (the chief topic of the Courtier, though it also deals with philosophy of gender, political philosophy, and even philosophy of sports). I can only think of Amy Olberding's Wrong of Rudeness as a recent example. 2/
If you look at past philosophy, you can find a huge literature on Etiquette, for example
* The Analects
* The Xunzi
* Erasmus' Good manners for children
* Castiglione's book of the courtier
* Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(among many others). 3/
Read 4 tweets
8 May
I suppose the audience for this is quite niche, but I'm going to go ahead and summarize a very early hard SF story namely Kepler's Somnium (Dream).
Background Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) was a German Renaissance astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician. 1/
He is wrote the Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae in which he formulated heliocentrism (based on Copernicus, but with elliptic trajectories). Now, heliocentrism was a total game changer because it opened the possbility to a plurality of worlds 2/
To get a sense of how radical and shocking, one reason heliocentrism faced such difficulty is that we would expect a parallax among the fixed stars. Since we don't that must mean the cosmos is truly enormous, and the stars very far away. Copernicus' reply: it is simply so. 3/
Read 20 tweets

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