The Enlightenment, Volume 1 by Peter Gay

Together the two men did more than virtually any other to define the Enlightenment for the twentieth century.' -Darrin M. 'This fine new re-edition of Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment gives us two classics in one: Cassirer's own seminal statement of the evolution of eighteenth-century philosophy, and a concise and moving foreword by an intellectual sympathizer, Peter Gay, amongst the greatest historians of our time.

In portraying Enlightenment philosophy as a process, not a doctrine, Cassirer not only undermines all those caricatures of the Enlightenment that still flourish within and without the academy he also shows the force it can have for renewing philosophy itself.' -Susan Neiman, author of Moral Clarity His classic study of Enlightenment philosophy has not been surpassed. 'In 1932, Cassirer's warning against dismissing Enlightenment thought as shallow went tragically unheard, but it is as timely as ever. He also argues that Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century. In a new foreword, Peter Gay considers The Philosophy of the Enlightenment in the context in which it was written-Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved.

Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world. In this classic work of intellectual history, Ernst Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, Volume 1 by Peter Gay