During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, self-styled ‘Enlighteners’ famously created an image of their times as an ‘Age of Reason’, an image that research on this period has tended to accept uncritically. In the imaginaire of both these historical actors and many of the scholars who have studied them, it was a period when ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosophical ideas’ took centre stage as the drivers of ‘enlightened’ change. It is all the more surprising that the history of the academic discipline of logic, a traditional subbranch of philosophy, is a subject largely neglected in Enlightenment studies.
My project investigates the place and significance of logic within various enterprises for religious and social reform, which are generally regarded as the Enlightenment’s core concern. In particular, I look into the mobilisation of this discipline in the framework of religious controversies and debates over the social role of scholars in selected milieus of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a comparative perspective, I consider representatives of all three confessions of Western Christianity (Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed). The project aims to show how, within the universalist Enlightenment rhetoric, logic was intended to function as an important instrument for the overcoming of religious difference and social tension in the name of ‘reason’. At the same time, if one questions this instrument’s exlusive claim to (uniform) rationality, it turns out to be a subtle mechanism for the legitimation of particular theological, institutional, and sociocultural concerns.
- Zornitsa L. Radeva
