Category Archives: Rationalism

At a cheap card table in a South Market loft, Craig Newmark sat with friend and fellow web enthusiast Anthony Batt, mulling over what to call his newest web venture. It was the 1990s in San Francisco, when rent was affordable and the internet relatively new. Newmark, a round-faced software engineer, had just launched an email list that alerted his friends to local events in the city. In keeping with his tendency to take things literally, he floated San Francisco Events as a top contender for its name.

Batt was getting impatient; the list already had an unofficial name used by its recipients. Just call it Craigslist, he told his friend. And so it was.

Nearly three decades later, the mailing list has morphed into one of the most popular classified advertisement websites in the U.S., with a presence in more than 70 countries. Despite making a killing off its success, Newmark refused to monetize the site except through a handful of minimal revenue streams. He still retains a sense of frugality unique among his fellow tech entrepreneursbesides multiple streaming service subscriptions and a modest collection of Simpsons figurines, his largest luxuries include hiring a plant sitter when hes out of town.

A self-described nerd, Newmark has the requisite thick-rimmed glasses and affinity for science fiction. But the Craigslist founder is more likely to be found discussing the ideals of democracy than toying with Perl. Hes explored a varied range of political philosophies, ethical frameworks and social codes over the years, but his passions have stayed centered on how to safeguard the U.S. and its citizens against misinformation and harassment. Since retiring from Craigslist in 2018, he has become a crusader for cybersecurity protections, trustworthy journalism and veteran support.

Now, at 70, hes preparing for his next stage in life by giving away his sizable fortune. His donations to date havent been insignificant by any means. But its time to get serious, according to Newmark. My big mission, simply stated, is to help and protect the people who help and protect our country, he told Observer.

Newmarks initial interest in philosophical concepts was shaped during his childhood in Morristown, New Jersey, where he grew up in a lower middle-class Jewish household. His mother was a housekeeper. His father, an unsuccessful salesman of both meat and later insurance, died of lung cancer shortly after Newmark turned 13. I may have had a normal childhood with friends until my fathers death, said Newmark, who only recently considered how that loss may have catalyzed subsequent social dysfunction.

He grew isolated, getting into fights with other children in middle school, and was labeled a troubled child. Sent to the school psychiatrist, Newmark endured a series of ineffective talking sessions, failed attempts to interest the sixth grader in birdwatching and chess, and a marginally successful trip to Newark Airport in his counselors VW Bug to watch jets take off.

It didnt help that he was resolutely nerdyhe wore pocket protectors unironically and was a member of the debate team. And Newmark wasnt afraid to be pedantic. He called jocks Neanderthals and once attempted to report a gym teacher for abuse after being ordered to run laps, according to Mark Hashizume, a classmate at Morristown High School. Newmarks slight intellectual arrogance during this time was likely a sort of defensive mechanism, according to his old friend.

Newmark and Hashizume became fascinated by Ayn Rand and Objectivism, joining a school group the latter jokingly called The Selfish Cluba reference to the theory of selfish rationalism. With copies of Rands pamphlets and subscriptions to the libertarian Reason magazine, we would just hang out in the classroom and talk about philosophy and exchange ideas, Hashizume told Observer. Newmark once made a pilgrimage to the city to meet Murray Rothbard, a protege and eventual opponent of Rands. But the dalliance with libertarianism didnt last too long. Contact with the real world in any form has a tendency to get rid of delusions, said Newmark.

Something that stuck with him, however, were his Sunday school lessons. To this day, Newmark refers to the teachings of Mr. and Mrs. Levin, a Lithuanian couple who survived the Holocaust, as his ethical guidepost. Their mantras of treat people like you want to be treated and know when enough is enough were reinforced by the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, who Newmark came across in 1988 when he found a recording of Various Positions. That tape is a big part of the liturgy that affects me, he said.

After graduating from Case Western Reserve University, he worked for IBM as a programmer in Boca Raton, Detroit and Pittsburgh for 17 years. Newmark was still dealing with social challenges, often told by colleagues to pick his battles more carefully. I would correct people if they made relatively minor technical mistakes, and sometimes I would correct them in front of others, he said. His favorite manager told Newmark his sense of humor was his only saving grace and that he had a lot of room to grow. He was right, said Newmark, adding that he now realizes he lacked a basic understanding of social etiquette.

In the early 90s, Newmark left IBM behind for a position with Charles Schwab in San Francisco and found himself immersed in a community connected by the early roots of the Internet. It was a relatively nascent concept and one ripe with possibilities. Craig and I were both really excited to be at this birthplace of the web, said Batt, who met Newmark on The Well, one of the earliest online message boards, where the two bonded over their excitement for the newly invented World Wide Web.

At the time, computer enthusiasts were a small community, one that was optimistic about how technology could change society, Batt told Observer. He and Newmark attended get-togethers in Victorian apartments across San Francisco, parties where people gathered around computers to look at web pages and discuss articles from the recently launched Wired magazine. Excitement over the unexplored possibilities took on an almost religious fervor. We were evangelizing the web in a way that was earnest, said Batt. People approached the emerging digital domain with an emphasis on tikkun olam, according to Newmark, referring to a Hebrew term that translates to repairing the world.

Newmark also attended the Berkeley Cybersalon, a monthly gathering started by media consultant Sylvia Paull. More than 100 people would cram into Paulls house to discuss the impact technology had on some aspect of our society, whether it was education, music, literacy, security, she told Observer. Paull described Newmark as a straightforward personality who uses humor to soothe otherwise blunt remarks. If he sees a contradiction or someone aggrandizing their accomplishments, hell undercut what they say in a witty way, she said, to make them laugh, while realizing theyre showing off or falsifying something.

Newmark initially created Craiglist to aid friends in San Francisco looking for events, places to stay or available jobs. He was adding new people to the list constantly. He was just so friggin diligent, said Batt. It grew in popularity, and the listserv became a website in 1996. By the end of the following year, the website was getting around one million page views per month.

Fans of the site urged Newmark to stop running it with volunteers and turn it into a real company. I would go to events and VCs and bankers wanted to throw billions at me if I would do the usual Silicon Valley thing and monetize heavily, said Newmark. But he decided to monetize minimally, charging for a select portion of posts like job openings and broker apartment advertisements, because making money was his second priority. The first was still making the world a better place. Craigslist onboarded Americans in the tens of millions onto the Internet. Thats a good thing.

Craigslist was officially a private for-profit company in 1999, with Newmark as CEO. But that didnt last long. By the end of the year, people helped me to understand that as a manager, I suck, said Newmark. To do a good job of this stuff, you have to have charisma, or what I understand the kids call rizzIm using that in the broad sense, not the romantic sense, he said. Whatever charisma is, Im kind of charisma negative.

Newmark often self-deprecates in this manner, occasionally with a wry smile. He is very discreet; he doesnt like public attention, said Paull of her longtime friend. She recalled visiting him during Craigslists early days in his shabby office in a house out in the Avenues of San Francisco, where he introduced her to Jim Buckmaster, the computer programmer Newmark hired as CEO in 2000. This is the person who really runs the place, not me. I just handle customer service, he told her.

It wasnt a jokeafter ceding power, Newmark did take a customer service role at Craigslist, which he held for more than a dozen years. I liked the continual sense I was getting that Craigslist mattered, that it helped people with real life, he said of the job. But I saw things that I will never unsee. Hed created one of the worlds most popular websites, where users sold everything from motorcycle parts to cactus plants. However, the site also became a platform for prostitution. In 2010, more than a dozen attorneys general wrote an open letter to the company requesting its adult services section be taken down to prevent instances of sex trafficking. Later that year, the section was permanently closed.

Despite receiving public backlash for its perceived inaction, Craigslist had actually been quietly working on related issues with law enforcement agencies. In 2015, Newmark accepted an award from the FBI for the websites collaboration in preventing human trafficking. It had been offered five years prior, according to Newmark, who said he regrets not accepting it earlier to diffuse misinformation. Lets just say there were some mental health issues. Im still suffering from some traumatic stress, he said. The stress of running something large and public that interacts with thousands of people every day was real.

Craigslist also faced accusations that it played a role in the decline of newspapers by taking away lucrative revenue from traditional classified advertisements. At a 2005 convention for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, panelists displayed a photo of Newmark while discussing the industrys crisis, and he was labeled a newspaper villain as recently as 2018. For years I was waiting for someone to look at the actual numbers, he said, pointing to findings from Danish analyst Thomas Baekdal that suggest websites like Craigslist had no measurable impact on the newspaper industry.

Newmark officially left Craigslist five years ago, but his focus on revolutionizing society has only become more spirited. Through Craig Newmark Philanthropies, he has channeled millions of dollars to organizations working to promote trustworthy journalism, strengthen cyber civil defense and raise up veterans. The company needed my help less and less, and I became progressively useless, he said. I found I could do more, and more good, for people by focusing on philanthropy.

This wasnt a surprise to old friends like Paull, who recalled Newmarks enduring interest in keeping scammers off Craigslist and his longstanding passion for upholding democratic ideals. He could have been a lawyer, hes really a constitutionalist, she said.

Newmarks philanthropic engagement with journalism was largely inspired by lessons he learned in history and civics in high school. I was taught that a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy, he said. I could see an immune system not working, and I decided I needed to play a role. He reached out to industry leaders like Jeff Jarvis to figure out what that role could look like. Newmark was particularly interested in how to regain public trust and fend off disinformation through good journalism, according to Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New Yorks Graduate School of Journalism. Trust is the new black was one of his lines, he told Observer.

After Jarvis introduced Newmark to the schools then-dean, Sara Bartlett, the Craigslist founder gave the program a $20 million donation. In an homage to Newmarks nerdy roots, the 2018 endowment was celebrated with promotional materials like plastic pocket protectors emblazoned with the schools new name: The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Hes since funded numerous media publications like the Markup and the Guardian, in addition to giving multi-million-dollar gifts to the journalism schools at Columbia and Howard University.

On the cybersecurity side, Newmark has kept an eye on the field since the 1970s when he became interested in natural language processing, a branch of artificial intelligence. Ive been paying intermittent attention through the decades, until the point where I finally got seriously involved, he said. In 2017, Newmark began to hear about information related warfare originating from our adversaries overseas in conversations with veterans, journalists and occasionally law enforcement. It took a while, but it finally registered that we were a country at war, and that everyone needed to play a part, maybe in proportion to their ability to help.

Newmark has funded numerous organizations combating ransomware operations and educating civilians in cybersecurity literacy. Its a big deal, because ransomware destabilizes businesses here in the U.S., which is a matter of national security, he said. And beyond that, ransomware gangs, lets say in Russia or North Korea, appear to be a part of the way they attack our country and how they financially support themselves.

Meanwhile, veterans issues have struck a chord with Newmark since high school, when he witnessed returning service members being verbally mistreated. I was completely naive back then about politics, but I could see that this was really unfair, he said. In 2013, he was named a consultant, or nerd-in-residence, at the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Its no coincidence that much of Newmarks giving has a patriotic bent. He evolves to meet the needs of the moment, but all keeping in the through line of citizen security, Vivian Schiller, director of the nonprofit Aspen Institute and Newmarks former philanthropic advisor, told Observer. Newmark, who refers to himself as an Eisenhower baby and a nerd, 1950s style, says he grew up during a time when patriotism was the norm. Now, a lot of people who use that word lets say theres room for improvement. But he still believes in the conceptmost of his philanthropy efforts focus not only on protecting people but specifically American citizens. First, we need to protect the Republic, he said.

The one outlier in Newmarks philanthropy is pigeon rescue, toward which he estimates hes donated upwards of $50,000. He fell in love with the birds back in the 1980s and today regularly places food and water out for local pigeons in the garden of his Manhattan home. A frequent visitor nicknamed Ghost Faced Killer is a regular presence on Newmarks social media profiles. Normally pigeons mate for life and are monogamous, however weve observed Ghost Faced with at least several different ladies, he said, There are a lot of pigeons visiting these days which share some of his distinctive plumage.

Ghost Faced is the favorite of both Newmark and his wife, Eileen Whelpley. The two married in 2012, putting an end to the Craigslist founders difficult, and at times literally painful, dating life. In the 1970s, after taking a ballet and jazz class to meet women, Newmark suffered a hernia, passing out when told hed need surgery.

Despite Newmark being a major philanthropist, the total sum of his fortune has long been shrouded in mystery. Hes never publicly revealed his net worth, which Bloomberg in 2020 estimated at $1.3 billion. I want to keep the focus on giving nearly all my money away to worthy causes, not how much Ive made, said Newmark. I wish everyone who has been as fortunate as I have been would do the same.

Looking at Craigslists finances doesnt offer much clarity, as the privately-owned company doesnt disclose its revenue numbers. But regardless of the exact figure, Newmarks giving makes it clear that his wealth is substantialearlier this year, he pledged $100 million each to both cybersecurity initiatives and veteran support. Theres more to come, according to Newmark, who plans to give away virtually everything hes earned during his lifetime. His next gift might be directed toward the Craig Newmark School of Journalism, which the philanthropist hopes to someday make tuition-free. The more I share power and money, the more effectively I can fulfill my mission, he said.

Reaching personal milestones has also reinvigorated his democratic ideals. Hitting 70 and facing some recent health issues reminded me that I have a limited amount of time to be effective, said Newmark, who recently underwent minor heart surgery. A nerds got to do what a nerds got to do. Normal people arent getting the job done.

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Craig Newmark Retired from Craigslist. Now He Wants to Save ... - Observer

Jeff Sharlet has spent two decades covering the intersection of extreme Christian nationalism and the far-right. In his new book,Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, he gives snapshots of a country rapidly devolving into a Christian fascism state. He captures the rage, the despair, the dislocation, the alienation, the aesthetic of violence, and the magical thinking that are the foundations of all fascist movementsforces that are now coalescing around the Trump-led Republican Party. The bizarre conspiracy theories and buffoonish quality of many who lead and embrace this movement, such as Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, make the use American fascists easy to ridicule and dismiss. But Sharlet implores us to take them seriously as an existential threat to what is left of our anemic democracy.Jeff SharletjoinsThe Chris Hedges Reportto discuss his new book and the rising tide of Christofascism threatening our democracy.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Adam Coley

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

(singing)

Chris Hedges:

Jeff Sharlet has spent two decades covering the intersection of extreme Christian nationalism, what I have defined as Christian fascism, and the far right. In his new book, Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, he gives us snapshots of a country rapidly devolving into a Christianized fascist state. He captures the rage, the despair, the dislocation, the alienation, and the aesthetic of violence as well as the magical thinking that are the hallmarks of all fascist movements, a fascist movement that is coalesced around the Trump-led Republican Party.

The bizarre conspiracy theories and buffoonish qualities of many who lead and embrace this movement such as Republican representative Lauren Boebert make the term American fascism easy to ridicule and dismiss, but Sharlet implores us to take these Christian fascists seriously as an existential threat to what is left of our anemic democracy.

Joining me to discuss his new book is Jeff Sharlet. So, Jeff, Im going to have to skip your first chapter, which is gorgeous. Everyone has to buy the book and read it on Harry Belafonte. Just really moving and beautifully written. Of course, Belafonte being this amazing figure. The book is really snapshots from around the country. I find your insights into Trump supporters extremely prescient. I think because of your experience covering the Christian right, those I called Christian fascists over a decade ago in my book, and I think you do use the word fascist now in a way that perhaps you didnt then.

But I just want to begin with because you make a distinction between Trumps first run and his second run that I found particularly fascinating. His first run drawn from Norman Vincent Peales the Prosperity Gospel. I think Norman Vincent Peale married him and Ivana Trump. For those who dont know, this is the very well-known, unfortunately, Presbyterian, Im Presbyterian preacher, who argued that if you are right with God, you would be blessed in material ways, extremely popular, especially with the rich like the Rockefellers.

But lets begin with the evolution, because the evolution I thought was really sharp and of course, very frightening. But lets talk about the first Trump and his congregants. I think you in one point even may even call it the Church of Trump and whats happened the second time around and where were moving.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah, I think from the first rally I went to was an early 2016 in Youngstown, Ohio, which is, of course, a town just absolutely destroyed, a steel town just decimated and there was a big crowd as the airplane hangar. And the first thing I noticed and would realize was a staple was while the press, which was all penned up, they all agreed to stay in a little metal cage basically so that they can be used as like a prop in Trumps passion play was twiddling their thumbs. He was introduced by one of the most right-wing preachers Id ever heard, just a local preacher, but a very, very militant guy. And Ive heard a lot of right-wing preachers.

And in fact that this was a staple of this and it was a sort of a combination of that kind of wrath of God. But also, at this particular, or I think it was at this No, it was a different rally. Black preacher who often introduced him would say, I dont see Black, I dont see white. The only color I see is green.

And I would listen to the people around me talking about while they waited for his plane, Trump Force One to come in. Remember, this is not a president. Hes coming in his own presence and we talk about all the gold with it. The plane was literally heavy with gold. And I realized that what was happening here was this appeal to the prosperity gospel.

When Trump says, Were going to win so much youre going to get tired of winning. He wasnt saying that, Im just like you. He was saying like prosperity gospel preachers always do. Look at my blessings. Look at my airplane, my riches, my beautiful suit. I am obviously more blessed than you. But by falling behind me, falling into my wake, you can partake that blessing, too.

And you raised Norman Vincent Peale, who he referred to as his preacher, we make a lot of Trumps irreligiosity, but of course, I think were confusing religiosity with piety. Hes certainly impious. But he grew up really fascinated by Billy Graham on television as a charismatic figure and Norman Vincent Peale, the power of positive thinking. He described Norman Vincent Peale as part of his holy trinity of mentors his father, Fred, from when he learned toughness, Roy Cohn, the legendary Red Scare warrior from whom he learned cunning.

And Norman Vincent Peale, you could argue from whom he learned bullshit that the point is the sale. Norman Vincent Peale boiled the gospel down to a salesmans manual. And he carried that forth. And thats what was happening in 2016, I think was really was he was saying, Vote for me and youll get a piece of the riches. Youre going to get some of the gold. Youre playing, too, will be heavy with this precious cargo.

Chris Hedges:

In that sense, he really replicates the role of a mega preacher completely who is idolized, who cant be questioned on the root to physical prosperity. But the second time Trump runs, which you also cover, you say the whole landscape has changed in a much darker way. How did it change?

Jeff Sharlet:

Well, by 2020, of course, were into the pandemic. Youre going to win so much you get tired of winning, we cant really go with that. There was the aborted slogan tag, Keep American great, but MAGA just worked so well that he stuck with that. But it was darker in the sense of he had been using conspiracy theories.

And I think whats fascinating with that kind of narrative world that he was creating, was winking at, hes a little bit like a drug dealer who starts using his own supply. And I write in the book of a particular interview with Laura Ingraham in, I think it was in 2019 actually, no, the summer of 2020 and talking Laura Ingraham is doing what the right-wing press did for him, which was always to kind of take his words, broadcast them, but also channel them into some kind of reason.

And he was resisting it, sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, looking very uneasy, talking about dark forces, men in black uniforms circling in the plains above him right now. Hes using the present tense. And you could see Laura Ingraham trying to reel him back saying, By dark forces, you must mean Obamas people. And hes like, No, no, I mean people. You dont know who they are. I cant tell you the name.

And hes no longer winking at the conspiracy theories hes trafficked in. I think hes sort of fallen into the abyss. And that kind of conspiracy thought was so definitive of the rallies I would go to where theres always a lot of blood and gore in the rhetoric of a Trump rally. And thats been one of the failings of the press and not really addressing that. They would just ignore those stories.

But now, he would go on at length about decapitations and disembowelment and bad ombres as he put it, creeping in through windows. Lots of this sort of horrible horror movie kind of rape fantasies and things that he knew that he couldnt even tell you about. And it struck me as a kind of modernized Americanized bastardized gnostic gospel, Gnosticism. And I know that youve read deeply in this literature.

But just to boil it down in the simplest sense, an idea that theres an elect or a small group initiates who have secret knowledge and whats on the surface isnt real. And in fact the actual God you see isnt real. Theres a deeper power behind that. And of course, Gnosticism even has its own variation of the deep state, the bureaucracy that gets in the way of the truth. I dont think Trump actually believed QAnon, but he believed in this kind of Gnosticism, this secret knowledge that you obtained not through rationalism but through a kind of mystic connection. And of course, this starts to sound a lot like fascism, which it is.

Chris Hedges:

Gnosticism is the heretical or was the early church to find it as a radical, these various gospels that could get very fantastic, but it was based on secret knowledge and initiants had this secret knowledge that others didnt have. I think youre dead on when you describe this as a kind of form of modern Gnosticism.

And just to go back the earlier iteration of Trump is that he would say these outrageous things, particularly to the press you write about this, who are kind of caged off and he would call in essence for violence against the press or they should be But then say it was just a joke. But he doesnt do that in the second time around. It changes.

Jeff Sharlet:

No. He still does it. Its the joking not joking method and he still does it. And I think we encounter it all the time and a lot of our colleagues in the press are like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football, but Lucy keeps holding and they just keep going up in the air every time. I mean, even the second time around, there was a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, so-called sweetest place on Earth, where the streetlights are actually shaped like Hersheys kisses. And it was a very violent speech, but none of that was reported. The takeaway was he says, Four more years, maybe eight more years, 12 more years. Oh, Im joking. Or maybe Im not.

I think when you compare them before to a megachurch preacher, I think for a lot of secular folks, theres an imagination of these preachers as pious and proper as opposed to the reality. And I think you make this very good point of the mini cults of personality that a megachurch preacher can create in his own ecosystem in which outrageousness, lies, winks, funniness, hypocrisies, all that becomes a part of the performance and it becomes in a way sort of sacralized so that if Trump says one thing at one rally and then kind of contradicts himself at the next, and that happens and people will hear it.

Youd meet people whod gone to 50, 60, 100 rallies. They were like deadheads traveling around the country. Theres all kinds of little sex and cults that have their own ideas about what happens at the rally that travel around. They would hear those differences and yet they would not hear it as evidence of falsehood, but as evidence of truth. They would say, Theres something deep here. This is a signal. This is an invitation for me to consider.

And I think now this is really hard for anyone who after Trump to really reckon with is to say theyre experiencing that as a kind of intellectually stimulating encounter. Theyre being asked to participate in meaning-making as they understand it. Meaning-making that is submissive to the great man, the great leader, but they are not passive receivers. They experience themselves as more engaged than they do otherwise in politics. That is in no way, I dont want anyone to hear that as like saying, Oh, youre saying that Trump has something of value? No, no. The meaning that hes making is horrific, but it is a collective project.

Chris Hedges:

Well, Hannah Arendt makes this point that its not about truth or reality or consistency. Its about catering to the emotional needs of the moment. So, you can completely contradict what you said even the day before, as long as youre catering to those emotional needs. Were going to get into fascism, which of course I agree with you. I think it is the right word and I think people have to begin to use it. But first I want to talk about, I know this again was extremely thoughtful. You talk about the call, the snake and the bullet, so explain.

Jeff Sharlet:

So, one of the things again that I feel like you hear this phrase sometimes, pundits use this, theyll say something [inaudible 00:14:11], theyll say, Its just theater. And I always get very confused by that as a person who loves the arts. What do you mean just theater? Theater is powerful. Theater, theres no such thing as just theater. Its theater. And yes, Trump did theater, he did performance, and yet so often, these bits, these skits that he would do, sometimes thered be comedy skits. Hed do multiple voices moving around the stage.

And the first campaign, three that would show up pretty reliably where the call, the snake and the bullet. And the call was he would do both sides of a phone call with a company that he was just going to call when he becomes president, This is how were going to handle sending jobs overseas. Hell just call them up and he would play out the whole phone call and the crowded cheering because hes telling off the boss just the way they wish they could.

The snake, he takes actually a song originally written by a Black civil rights activist. Its a little poem and he would take it out and very sort of elaborately unfold the paper, although he didnt need it, he had it memorized. And its about inviting a snake in a woman who picks up a snake who cries for help. She picks up the snake and the snake bites her and the snake scolds her and says, You knew what I was.

To him, this is a metaphor for what is happening by immigrants coming to the United States. We let immigrants in and then they bite us. And that would always be accompanied with a kind of litany of martyrs. He would name these individuals, usually white individuals who had been killed by undocumented people of color and a fair number of people in the crowd knew those names. Although I think we talk about it later, I think the age of martyrs really came post January 6th.

But then the bullet, the bullet is just an astonishing piece of work. Hes talking about the Muslims and they chop off heads and hes imitating chopping off the heads and hes imitating putting people in cages and lighting them on fire. But hes got a solution, General Black Jack Pershing in the Philippines in the 19th century.

Now, the history here is its not history. This didnt happen, but what he says happened, and he acts it out, he plays it out is that he had 50 Muslim rebels, prisoners of war. And he takes 50 bullets and he dips them in blood and Trump mimes it out, swishing it around in pig blood, pig blood. Theyre going to shoot the Muslims with pig blood soaked bullets and then he shoots 49 of the prisoners kills them. Trump acts it out. The crowd is cheering. Theyre ecstatic. And its not righteous violence. Its ecstatic lustful violence. Its pleasure.

And you say, Caters to the emotional needs. I think thats one of the really key things is he works across a lot of emotions that politicians dont normally address. He leads one bullet and he gives it to the last prisoner and he says, Take that back to your people and tell them that thats what Ill do.

And this was a whole performance and the crowd would like it so much. Hed say, You want to hear it again? And theyd say, Yes, and he would perform it again. And the press meanwhile would be sitting there saying, Well, lets see, did he say anything about policy or did he indicate anything about appointments and so on, because theyre dismissing all that as just theater. Thats not just theater. That is the substance of Trumpism.

Chris Hedges:

I want to ask about martyrs. You write quite a bit. In fact, you go kind of in search of the history of Babbitt, who was killed on January 6th. Talk a little bit about Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, writes about the importance of martyrs to a new movement like Hassell was to the Nazi party.

And you were writing about how they reinvented her, particularly I think she was in her 30s, but then her age keeps dropping I think until shes 16. But that also Canetti said that these martyrs, its a fictional narrative. They have to be the most innocent, the most pure, and that these movements need that these martyrs to essentially initiate their followers into these campaigns of violence. Talk about that and then I want to begin to talk about Christian fascism.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah, I think thats well put. I think if we understand Trumpism theologically, we can see the first campaign as the prosperity gospel, the second as the gnostic gospel. And what were in now, and I would argue since January 6th, were in the age of martyrs. And thats a big step as you said, for initiating people into that kind of violence.

I think Trump had been trying to cultivate that beforehand, but none of these victims of undocumented people were just well known enough to work. And then on January 6th, Ashli Babbitt, this 30 something year old white woman, blonde hair, southern California, military veteran wearing a Trump flag like a cape and an American flag backpack tries to lead a charge through a broken window. And they would famously say she was unarmed, she was not. Theres the evidence photo of her knife on my cover of the book. She was very clearly there for combat and her own writing and what she understood she was going to do to storm the capitol.

And we see the hands of a police officer, a Capitol Hill police officer shooter. And theyre the hands of a Black man. And as soon as I saw that, I said, Well, thats one of the oldest stories in American history. Thats the lynching story. A Black man who kills an innocent white woman. Thats the story of Birth of a Nation, first movie ever screened in the White House, 1915, white woman fleeing a Black man who leaps to her death. And thus, the heroes who in the movie literally are the Ku Klux Klan, who ride in to action.

And so, it starts happening that day and Id had one idea for the book, but on January 6th I sort of had to throw out a lot of stuff and make room because I said, Im going to watch this martyr to myth in form and in action and we start to see flags, the Black flag, a white silhouette of Ashli, a drop of red on her neck where the white woman has been killed. Actually, she was shot in the shoulder. Proud boys give these out as challenge coins. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? Trump finally starts using, even though he knows. He knew who shot Ashli Babbitt, but the idea was everyone who is his enemy shot Ashli Babbitt. And so, she becomes a martyr.

And I like what you say very much about initiating into violence. Now, I think of one man who was arrested. I think his name is Garret Miller. And hes kind of a comic story when the FBI show up at his house, hes wearing a T-shirt that has a picture of the capitol on January. It says, January 6th, I was there. And it just seems like a doofus. But what they were arresting him for was he had been planning online a vengeance killing for Ashli, who he imagined as a little girl. And they always sort of, not only would they say she was younger than she was, theyd say she was smaller than she was.

The same time, she did double duty because she was a military veteran. So, shes therefore the stabbed in the back, which is an old fascist ploy, too. They were stabbed in the back. We would righteously win. But traitors in our midst, a cop mowed her down. I dont think shes the end stage martyr of Trump. I think theres a way in which you can understand her and him understanding her as keeping the cross warm until he can hoist himself up there, which he now has, which is what we saw on display in the courtroom.

Chris Hedges:

Well, he hasnt done it. Weve done it for him.

Jeff Sharlet:

Thats true. Thats true. He knew we would do it. Yeah.

Chris Hedges:

Its a terrible conundrum because he should have been charged for all sorts of crimes probably from the first day of his presidency under the emolument clause. But as you point out, it plays completely into his own martyrdom or his own sense of martyrdom and the sense of martyrdom of his supporters. So, we watch now in the trial in New York, its just a big campaign event.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah, I think, was it the eve of which of the indictments? I cant remember. Its now become so regular. Once you go to a Trump rally, its a little bit like Hotel California. You can never leave. You can never get off the email list, the text list. You can cancel as much as you want. Theyll keep coming five, 10 a day.

But the eve of the first or second indictment, he sends this fundraising email and says, Dear friend, this may be the last time Im able to write to you. And its got this air of, Its a noble thing I do, and I couldnt help but think of Some listeners will remember from their high school reading a Tale of Two Cities and Sydney Carton bravely going off to [inaudible 00:23:58]. Its a Christ move, right? He emphasizes that, right? Im the only thing standing between them and you. Theyre doing this to me because theyre coming after you. I mean, yeah, he got a slow pitch and he knew how to hit it.

Chris Hedges:

I want to talk about fascism. I think both you and I feel that thats an appropriate word to describe this movement. Trump has embraced what I would call the fascistic ideology of the Christian nationalists or the Christian right. But of course, its face doesnt look like past iterations of fascism. Fascism always cloaks itself in national symbols, of venerated national symbols and venerated national mythology.

And one of the things that, and you point this out in the book, Im just going to read a little passage, because of course it cant embrace the race purity that was very much part of particularly of German fascism. You write, The purification project of the old fascism has also been proved too extreme to be practical for a nation in which the rightest ascendancy can contend for the loyalty of a third of Latinx voters. This time, white supremacy welcomes all. Or, at least, a sufficient veneer of all to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and Muslim bans and kung flu and Black crime and replacement theory somehow do not add up to the dreaded r-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in reverse, against white people.

So, lets begin to talk about what this new fascism looks like. I certainly saw its genesis within Christian fascism, the Christian right, but the full-blown flower of fascism in Trump does have differences with the traditional Christian right. You know the Christian right very well. And your book, The Family is a great work on it. So, Ill let you go from there.

Jeff Sharlet:

Well, first, I want to give you credit for that early book, American Fascist. And around the same time I was writing The Family, theres actually a chapter in the family called the F word. The F word is fascism. Im writing about this. The Family is this kind of very elite Christian nationalist group based in Washington but international and they hold something called the National Prayer Breakfast. On the surface, theyre quite banal. Within, theyre quite extreme.

And in the post World War II years, they actually went around and recruited former Nazi war criminals, senior war criminals. So, thats about as close to fascism as you can get. But what they would say to those guys is essentially, you have to switch out your loyalty to the frere and give it over to the father. And I argue then, and I was wrong, and I write this in the new book, I was wrong to argue against the word fascism. I wasnt saying its not as bad. I said, theres more than one kind of baton in the sun.

But I said fundamentalism I thought then was a kind of break on fascism because in American Christian right, Christian national and whatever you want to call it, they werent ever going to go for that cult of personality. They wouldnt switch out Jesus. And I think you rightly argued, no, the cult of personality was there and every significant church around the pastor that they adopted that kind of power and Trumps move was to consolidate it nationally.

And to strip away some of the respectability politics that still lingered around it. The idea of American political life has always been noble, but now we have the open celebration of violence. You go to a Trump rally in 16 or 20 or now, and as you say, theres that moment where he points to the press and the pen and he says, Theyre the enemy of the people. Theyre scum. And the whole crowd turns around and they fly bulk birds in the air and theyre screaming and theyre having this pleasure thinking about the violence theyre going to commit.

Very first Trump rally I went to, one of the very first people I met there, nice old sort of hippie grandparent couple, a lot of turquoise jewelry and nice people and theyre talking. And then Gene, the husband says, I want to get a hold of a protester and beat the crap out of him so I can get on TV.

And his wife looks at him as if I think shes going to rebuke him, this is too much. She says, Oh, Gene. And she sort of melts into him and then she leans over to me and uses language I dont think she used often like this. Shes whispering because she knew she was being naughty and smiling and she was speaking about Hillary Clinton and she says, Dont she look like shed been rode hard and put up wet.

And that combination, I think of it as theres a great German historian of the right, Annika Brockschmidt. We did a discussion about this, about militant eroticism. This idea of violence as a kind of sexual pleasure, a kind of lust, a kind of authenticity and truth. You know you want to do it. You know you want to hit them.

Trump says, Wait. One of the things he says, You know you want to hit him and I want you to hit them. Itll feel good. I think this changes things. I think, too, its worth talking about. I know youve thought a lot about this, that fascism in 2023 is not fascism in 1936. America is not Germany and that was a regime. This is still right now a movement. It doesnt have anywhere near full control, but its mutating and its changing rapidly, and thats one of the things.

Another historian Id refer people to is Anthea Butler, great short book called White Evangelical Racism. Shes a church historian. And she writes about the promise of whiteness and the promise of the whiteness and the way it can seduce even Black folks into thinking, I can be part of this power.

And every time I go to some far right event, whether its a Trump rally or a militia meeting, I come back and my nice liberal friends. They just assumed that it was all white and it never is. And I try and tell them. Theres a church, a militia church in Omaha, Nebraska in the book, more diverse than any church around here where I live in Vermont, about a third people of color and a full on civil war church.

They look forward to civil war. They are armed. They are ready. Bring it on. They are fairly openly white supremacists. They preach relentlessly against Black Lives Matter as a metaphor for Blackness itself. And yet, theyve drawn in. Fascism has gravity. Fascism has power. And if we recognize it as such, it shouldnt be that surprising to us that this iteration in America in 2023 is not quite the same racial purity project as happened in Germany 1933.

Chris Hedges:

I think you made the point that its defined more by feelings or the embrace of what they describe as white victimization. So, as long as you embrace that, it doesnt matter what color you are.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. And in fact, actually in the martyr role that Trump uses of people killed by undocumented folks, he often talks about a young, very promising Black football player. And in a sense, bringing this guy in under the umbrella of whiteness. But this is the same guy whos telling a story. He likes to tell a story of this is sort of the twisted rape fantasy that I spoke of.

Imagine youre a traveling salesman, he says. And youre thinking, Traveling salesman? Is there such a thing who goes around knocking on doors selling Bibles anymore. But imagine youre traveling salesman in your way and your pretty blonde wife is at home asleep and a bad ombre comes up and he opens a window and he crawls in.

And the crowd is just, theyre thrilling to it the way you do to a horror movie, but its charged with a perverse sexuality, which is the rape of the white woman, which is a fantasy being twisted into the mind, I think, of white supremacy, and yet hes making that available to a broader sense.

Im not going to go out there and argue the absurd that Trump is ever going to win any significant or hes going to win a significant number of Black votes. Hes not going to win the majority. He doesnt need to. And I feel a lot of liberals are leaning on this idea that diversity will save us. And Ive been hearing that as long as Ive been hearing that the young will save us. Ive been hearing that since I was young, 30 some years ago.

Theres this sort of passivity. Were waiting for Godot to come and solve the situation as opposed to embracing a radical politics of organizing and real vital democracy that we have to do ourselves. Every one of us.

Chris Hedges:

I just want to throw in there that of course, especially in the south, all through slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the women who were raped were Black. Mary Chesnut in her diary, even writes about visiting plantations where there were some two dozen mulatto children because of course the chief slaveholder was raping the Black women. I mean, that gets into the paranoid style of American politics.

Lets talk about civil war. Ive covered civil wars. I think in some ways from my perspective, its even more frightening. Its less a civil war because its not like Weimar Germany where you had armed communist militias battling brown shirts in the streets. Its more the uninterrupted rise of heavily armed fascist, proto-fascists, Trump supporters with small arsenals in their homes and those who dont have any violent counterpart.

Jeff Sharlet:

Yeah. Youve covered civil wars. I accidentally, as a younger person, stumbled through one in Algeria. And I know that this is not that. And I am aware of the risk of hyperbole using this phrase I use in my subtitle, Scenes from a Slow Civil War. A slow civil war, and its my way of thinking about it.

In 2021, what I started noticing was academic historians who are very cautious, rightly so. They understand the history moves slowly. Im married to an academic historian. I understand this and I think its the right way. Starting to say, Oh, some of the conditions of an actual civil war here. And that language had always been there mostly on the fringe of the right, but now, it was moving as a rhetorical ploy more centrally. And I started thinking about the ways, how could we understand slow civil war as a kind of an institutionalization of violence.

I think the laws, for instance, I write about this in the book. I was in Wisconsin when Roe fell, which became the only blue state in which abortion was completely outlawed. It reverted to 1849 law. And you would hear these stories in the press of a woman who nearly bled out or bled out or something else went horrible happened because she couldnt get access to reproductive care. And as journalists, we know for every story like that we hear, theres a lot that dont go reported.

And I said, theres a way in which more harm now is being done than all the abortion clinic bombers. Its very easy to see an abortion clinic bomber. And there was a lot more of that than people realize as a kind of at least a desire to spark civil war. And yet here it is. And I thought of the ways that you have these armed militias, these groups of men who line up outside school libraries and churches and bars having drag shows and so on.

And theres been a few shots fired, not many. And so, people can say, Well, come on now. Nothings really happening. And Im like, Well, this is like were striking matches and flicking them into dry grass and so far, the flames havent caught and so we think everythings fine. How many times can you line up a group of men with guns.

To what you say though about there not being this counterforce like in Weimar, Germany. I mean, there is a scene in the book where in Sacramento had a rally for Ashli Babbitt. Antifa and Proud Boys show up to battle and they kind of all know each other and its a kind of a ridiculous fight, although I wouldnt have wanted to have one of those blows land on me.

But Im a nonviolent person, but Im also an all hands on deck person. I think anyone who says, Heres how we beat fascism, we dont know yet because we havent done it. We havent done it yet. So, Im like, Wherever you feel called, do that. That said, I do hear on the left this idea of the John Brown Gun Club and these right-wingers think theyre the only ones with guns. Im a gun owner myself. Theres 400 million guns in civilian hands in the United States, and all you need to do is drive it outside your blue bubble to understand very quickly the disparity of those guns.

The rest is here:

Is the US turning into a Christofascist state? - The Real News Network

In the late 1980s, John Heffernan created the two most desirable Grand Tourers of the time with the Aston Martin V8 Virage and Bentley Continental R. As both cars become modern classics, we met the automotive designer to learn more about the development of his game-changing signature cars.

Designers can go a lifetime without penning a whole car. However, in the late 1980s, one man found himself in the unique position of doing not just one, but two landmark cars for two different marquesat the same time. Standing before us now is the final upshot of that effort: the Aston Martin Vantage V550 and Bentley Continental T, cars that marked the zenith of their kind. On a bright autumn day at the Duke of London in Brentford,Classic Drivercaught up with their designer, John Heffernan.

Heffernans career began in England with the GM Vauxhall division, where he was part of the design team, and then to America, where he worked for GM Pontiac. However, because GM Opel was taking over all design responsibility, the divided atmosphere pushed him to join Audi in 1977. This was the moment the Audi 100 under development moved the brand upmarket. Heffernan notes that working at Audigot me ready for going freelance: more respect was shown for designers from engineers, and there wasnt the same hostility [as GM]. The design of the Audi 100 was not the only thing he influenced: an intern he oversaw, Peter Schreyer, would go on to become Chief Design Officer of Kia Motors.The temptation of a career in Germany was compounded when Heffernan was invited to interview for the head design role at BMW, a position that would ultimately go to a young American named Chris Bangle.Despite this promising trajectory, for personal reasons Heffernan moved back to theUK which then seemed 50 years behind the times.London looked terrible then, strike-ridden and in turmoil.

The 1980s marked a turning point for both Heffernan and the UK, leading to a partnership with Ken Greenley. Ken and I were very different designers: he was more American; I was influenced by European design and German rationalism. Wed balance each other out. While working at the Royal College of Art, Greenley received an unexpected call from Victor Gauntlett, CEO of Aston Martin and de facto product director: Id been working freelance on trucks and industrial design products as well as the Bentley P90 at the time and Ken phoned me to tell me that Victor had said Youve done a Panther and a Bentley,I think youre ready to do an Aston Martin.

Standing in front of the cars now, it is hard to imagine the alternative paths each might have taken. The Bentley Continental started life as a Rolls-Royce convertible to replace the Corniche. As for the Virage, Heffernan reveals his model of a bright red sports car. My proposal originally had pop-up headlamps, but theengineers didnt wantthat. Kens proposal was a fastback - which Victor thought would make a nice Corvette. The late Peter Horbury, then working at Mike Gibbs Associates (MGA), also made a good proposal. Victor already said he wanted me to do it. He said: You know the one I want to win, I know its a bit Ferrari-ish, but I think its interesting. Thus Heffernan's proposal went to a full scale model.

The first job was at the front endto incorporate conventional headlamps.They left it up to me to source the headlamps says Heffernan.Potential donors included an Audi200and, more improbably, a Porsche 959. Unsurprisingly, the Audi was selected. The Vantage presented another challenge in finding lights that would create a clean break from the Virage. Heffernan did not have to look far to find the perfect solution: Aston Martin then owned Zagato, who had done the Alfa SZ. We couldnt have done our own headlamps, which would have cost too much, so we used the same lights as the SZ. Aston just paid Triplex for the glass cover.The deeply-drawn bodyside of the V550 belies Heffernans inherent understanding of what could be produced. The sole flourish is a blister in the sill to increase downforce. Audi had 4000 hours of wind-tunnel testing for the 100; we had a day at Southampton University. First tests were not promising, zero lift was hard to achieve. That the V600 Vantage ultimately hit 198mph at Nardo without flipping over is some indication of the forces at work.

Pointing now above the rear wheel, Heffernan comments I wanted more muscle here, to add 10mm on the shoulder, but we had run out of modelling time before presenting to the CEO. I still think about it.Inside the car, Heffernan casts his eye over the interior, noting the pristine headliner, and pauses at the wood inlays. I wanted these to be machined metal, but Victor insisted on wood. He maintained that his customers wanted wood. And regrets? The airbag steering wheel is awful. We were using Ford parts, so this steering wheel is one of theirs. In 1993, the year the Vantage was launched, Aston Martin would formally join Fords Premier Automotive Group.

Parked side-by-side, it is hard not to be distracted by the Bentleys grille flashing in the late-September sun, opposite the black radiator of the Aston. This was not a question of budget; we could afford to do one in chrome, but I really wanted this stealth look. Beside the immaculate Bentley, the Vantage seems ready for a brawl. It is perhaps this contrast that most impresses: in a period when Italian design houses were selling similar shapes for different clients, Heffernans hand is all but absent. We werent Italdesign, where you buy into a certain look. We did a lot of research into each brand to try and continue the look In doing so, the Vantage and Continental each possess a clarity of purpose, offering a reminder that a designers role is more often as a conduit for characteristics other than their own. That said, Heffernan doesnt hesitate to name the Maserati Ghibli and De Tomaso Mangusta as favourites.

Our gaze strays to the front wing of the Bentley and to the meticulous surfaces. Ken and I shared the clay. The themes we did on each side were the same, but the differences were in the section Most noticeably, where Heffernans proposal had a negative section above the feature-line, Ken worked with his modeller to add extra muscle. The theme worked, and Greenley continued to develop the bodyside and some of the front, where the single-piece headlamps of the thwarted Corniche were replaced by twin lamps which had become a Bentley brand feature. Meanwhile, Heffernan continued on the roof and back of the car: We tried doing black surrounds on the glass before settling on stainless steel, and integrated the spoiler as the engineers wanted lower drag. The sales director Tom Purves told us there had been criticism that the Silver Spirit looked like a New York taxi, so I wanted these vertical rear lights. Beneath, a transom-like boot-lid constrains the cars prodigious length.

Contrary to Aston Martins in-house design, we did the Bentley away from the main studio in Crewe.They wanted an external team, soPark Warddonated a side-building to the fabulous factory, a 1930s firestation in London they kitted out as a design studio. However, the scale of the Bentley proved challenging: We could stand only 3ft from car. To quote Bill Mitchell (GM's legendary design boss)It was like playing a trombone in a bathroom.Wed do one week on the Bentley, then another on the Aston Martin and Panther Solo 2. The team in Crewe developed the interior, whileMulliner would go on to shorten the wheelbase and widen the track for the Continental T parked here.

The Bentley Continental R was unveiled at the 1991 GenevaMotor Show, where it shared the spotlight with the Mercedes-Benz W140 S-Class. Hans-Harald Hanson was an ex-RCA student and worked in the studio they had opened down in Italy. He really disparaged the Bentley, then he took me over to the Mercedes and said This is the future. He had a point, but he was annoyed we got a lot of press that day. Five years later, the launch of the Continental T would make it the most expensive car in the world, its 250,000 price-point unmatched in the Volkswagen era. On seeing it at its launch, Heffernan recalls Victor Gauntlett exclaiming: You didnt tell me you guys were doing this at the same time!

Thirty years on, how does it feel to see both cars reunited again? When I see the two cars together, I feel proud that Ken and I did our bit to ensure the ongoing history of both companies. Aston was on its knees at the time and some within Rolls-Royce Vickers wanted to put the Bentley brand out to rest. It was worth all our efforts to see both marques looking healthy again under their new owners. The other feeling I have is that both cars have weathered the 30 odd-years rather well.Asked which he prefers, Heffernan reflects: The Vantage is closer to my heart. It was the chance to do something different.

Text: Robert Forrest / Photos: Tom Shaxson for Classic Driver

Excerpt from:

Designer John Heffernan reinvented Aston Martin and Bentley with ... - Classic Driver

Born22nd of April, 1724Died12 of February, 1804Famous QuoteTo be is to doKnown ForGerman philosopher and enlightenment thinkerRegion of WorldGermany, 18th century

Immanuel Kant was a prominent 19th century German philosopher who was known to combine two schools of philosophical thought; Empiricism and Rationalism.

Immanuel Kant would forever change history when in the 19th century he would combine the emerging rationalist philosophy of the enlightenment with the old empiricist philosophy of the middle ages. Because of this Immanuel Kant changed history by bridging two great minds in two time periods in history.

Because of this Kant is remembered today as one of the greatest minds of the modern era. His teachings and knowledge. As a result he remains one of the most influential philosophers of all time.

Here at The History Ace I strive to publish the best history articles on the internet. If at the end you liked this article then consider subscribing to the free newsletter and sharing around the internet.

Without further ado, here is how Immanuel Kant forever changed history by combining empiricism and rationalism.

Before we can discuss exactly how Immanual Kant forever changed history by combining empiricism and rationalism we must first define these differing philosophies.

Each of these philosophies dated far before the birth of Immanuel Kant. Kant just took the best of each philosophy and combined them into his own version.

Before Immanuel Kant the predominant theory surrounding the theory on nature and spread of knowledge was called Empiricism.

Empiricism is the belief that human beings are born into the world with a blank slate of knowledge. That if everyone in the world was turned into children then all knowledge would be lost.

Because of this the philosophy of empiricism states that all knowledge is gathered through experience. That it is through experiments that knowledge is gathered.

A practitioner of the philosophy of empiricism would engage in scientific experiments to determine to gather new knowledge of how the world works.

Some of the most iconic philosophers of all time are empiricists. For example the world famous philosopher Aristotle believed that all human beings started with a clean mind with no innate knowledge called a tabula rasa.

Simply put, empiricists believe that humans start off life with absolutely no knowledge. That these humans would gather knowledge overtime through their life events. This differs drastically from the rationalism philosophy discussed next.

Immanuel Kant would also draw heavy inspiration from the other primary epistemological school of thought, rationalism.

Empiricism believed that all human knowledge was brought about by experimentation and reflection. Rationalism on the other hand believed that there existed some certain universal truths that any intelligent person would instantly know.

An example of this might be the concept of self at birth. Empiricism philosophers would state that a baby would see a reflection while rationalism philosophers state the baby is born with the concept of self.

This deeper level of thinking is what jump started the Age of Enlightenment. Rationalism believed that there were certain universal truths such as free will and pursuit of happiness.

This concept of universal truths was a bold viewpoint during the 18th century. During this time the world was ruled by authoritarian governments that sought to eliminate individual rule.

Simply put, the philosophy of rationalism believes that there are universal truths to the world that all people are born understanding. This indicates that all knowledge would stem from these truths instead of experimentation and reflection.

Immanuel Kant forever changed history by merging the best of both the empiricist and rationalism school of thoughts.

Kant agreed with rationalism by stating that there existed some universal truths in the world that all people would understand. That these universal truths made the backbone of knowledge. However this is where his views on rationalism stop

Rationalism according to Kant was broken when it went beyond the concepts of universal truths. For example, a baby was not born with the knowledge on how to ride a horse.

Regarding empiricism, Kant believed that all knowledge past the universal truths would be generated using the empirical methodology. This would later be called the scientific method that we use today.

This profoundly impacted the worlds intellectual development for one major reason. According to Kant things such as morals, identity, and language were all human constructs that were brought about by lived experiences.

This would forever change history.

Immanuel Kant changed history through his views on the development of human morality.

Morality, argued Kant, was not inherent and rational. Rather it was instilled by a society which shared its concept of morality.

Kant believed that differing societies had their own right to their own set of morals. That inherent to the human condition was a need to not only further the development of the sciences but also the development of society as a whole through moral purification.

The only way to achieve this moral purification was through discussion and shared experiences. This built upon his empirical view that human morality was developed from experience.

From this Immanuel Kant would go on to publish several books and pamphlets in the mid 18th century that presented the argument that the world should transition from authoritarian governments to democratic/republican ones.

That these democratic governments should work together to solve differences. That by doing this eventually the world will begin to form one moral code, which in theory should eventually unite the people of the world.

We can see this viewpoint in his publication of his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Today, modern institutions such as the United Nations represent Immanuel Kants vision and lifes work towards pushing people towards peace and prosperity.

Because of this viewpoint on world government and the spread of religion Immanuel Kant has forever changed history. This was done in the 18th century when Kant fused the two main schools of thought, empiricism and rationalism.

There you have it; an entire article on how Immanuel Kant changed history by fusing empiricism and rationalism into one school of modern thought.

Immanuel Kant remains today a widely studied subject for his philosophical school of thought. Potential students of history will find substantial articles surrounding this mans relatively unknown impact.

Here at The History Ace I strive to publish the best history articles on the internet. If you liked this article then consider subscribing to the free newsletter and sharing around.

Further you can check out some of the other articles below.

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Sincerely,

Nick

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Empiricism and Rationalism: How Immanuel Kant Changed History

During the 1936 International Surrealist Exposition, held in London, guest speaker Salvador Dal addressed his audience costumed head-to-toe in an old-fashioned scuba suit, with two dogs on leashes in one hand and a billiard cue in the other. Mid-lecture, constrained by the scuba mask, the Spanish artist began to suffocate and flailed his arms for help. The audience, unfazed, assumed his gesticulations were all part of the performance. As art legend has it, the Surrealist poet David Gascoyne eventually rescued Dal, who upon recovery remarked, I just wanted to show that I was plunging deeply into the human mind. Dal then finished his speechand his accompanying slides, to no ones surprise, were all presented upside down.

This anecdote underscores the most absurdist, even clownish, elements of the Surrealist movement, epitomized by Dalwho was considered something of a joke figure by the early 20th-century art establishment. But the art movement was actually far more diverse than is widely known, spanning various disciplines, styles, and geographies from 1924 until its end in 1966.

Founded by the poet Andr Breton in Paris in 1924, Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement. It proposed that the Enlightenmentthe influential 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualismhad suppressed the superior qualities of the irrational, unconscious mind. Surrealisms goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism.

Breton had studied medicine and psychiatry and was well-versed in the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud. He was particularly interested in the idea that the unconscious mindwhich produced dreamswas the source of artistic creativity. A devoted Marxist, Breton also intended Surrealism to be a revolutionary movement capable of unleashing the minds of the masses from the rational order of society. But how could they achieve this liberation of the human mind?

Automatism, a practice that is akin to free association or a stream of consciousness, gave the Surrealists the means to produce unconscious artwork.Surrealist artistAndr Massons mixed-media canvasBattle of Fishes(1926) is an early example of automatic painting. To begin, Masson took gessoa tacky substance typically used to prime supports for paintingand let it freely fall across the surface of his canvas. He then threw sand over it, letting the grains stick to the adhesive at random, and doodled and painted around the resulting forms. Artists employing automatic methods embraced the element of chance, often to surprising results. Massons end product features two prehistoric fish, jaws dripping with blood, fighting it out in the primordial ooze: an unconscious demonstration of the inherent violence of nature.

Not every Surrealist chose to create such abstract works, however. Many Surrealists recognized that the representation of a things actual appearance in the physical world might more effectively conjure associations for the viewer wherein a deeper, unconscious reality revealed itself. Artists like Dal and the Belgian painterRen Magrittecreated hyper-realistic, dreamlike visions that are windows into a strange world beyond waking life. MagrittesLa Clairvoyance(1936), for instance, in which an artist paints a bird in flight while he looks at an egg sitting atop a table, suggests a dreamscape or a hallucinatory state.

Though Surrealism is indeed most associated with such flamboyant and irreverent figures as Dal, Breton recruited a wide group of artists and intellectuals already active in Paris to write for and exhibit under his banner.

Building on the anti-rational tradition ofDada, Surrealism counted among its members such major Dada figures asTristan Tzara,Francis Picabia,Jean Arp,Max Ernst, andMarcel Duchamp. By 1924, this group was augmented by other artists and literary figures, including the writers Paul luard, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud; the paintersJoan MirandYves Tanguy; the sculptorsAlberto GiacomettiandMeret Oppenheim; and the filmmakers Ren Clair,Jean Cocteau, and Luis Buuel.

But Breton was notoriously fickle about who he admitted to the movement, and he had a habit of excommunicating members who he felt no longer shared his particular view of Surrealism. Desnos and Masson, for example, were tossed out of the group via Bretons Second Manifesto of Surrealism in 1930 for their unwillingness to support his political aims. Bataille, whose Surrealist viewpoint differed considerably from Bretons, went on to form his own influential splinter group, the College of Sociology, which published journals and held exhibitions throughout the 1930s.

As an interwar movement beginning in Paris in the 1920s, Surrealism responded to a post-World War I period that saw the slow reconstruction of major French cities, the height of the French colonial empire abroad, and the rise of fascism across Europe.

By 1937, however, most of the major figures in Surrealism had been forced to leave Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Max ErnstsEurope After the RainII(194042) reflects this fraught moment with a post-apocalyptic vision created at the height of World War II. A partially abstract work formed by decalcomaniaa technique that entailed painting on glass, then pressing that painted glass to the canvas to allow chance elements to remainEurope After the Rainsuggests bombed-out buildings, the corpses of humans and animals, and eroded geological formations in the aftermath of a great cataclysm.

The emigration of Surrealists to various sites of refuge during World War II did, however, spread the movements influence across the Atlantic, where it would take firm root in the Americas. As Surrealism gained traction in the 1930s and 40s, it brought automatic practices and an interest in psychology and mythology to a new generation of artists.Jackson Pollocks Surrealist-inspiredGuardians of the Secret(1943) exists somewhere between his earlierSocial Realistworks and the later drip paintings that would make him famous: it includes a recumbent jackal, two totemic forms, and a frieze of calligraphic pseudo-script.

In Latin America, Surrealism found its voice in the work of artists likeFrida Kahlo, whose highly personal artistic style paralleled aspects of Surrealism without owing it any specific intellectual debt. InArbol de la Esperanza(1946), which translates to tree of hope, Kahlo doesnt depict an actual tree, but rather a dual self-portrait set in an unfamiliar landscape, a tableau that suggests both the 1925 bus accident that rendered her infertile, and the possibility of renewal. While its depiction of fantastic subject matter is reminiscent of works byMagritte or Dal, Kahlos painting celebrates the everyday artistry of traditional Mexicanex votopainting.

The psychological and mythological underpinnings of Surrealism also enabled non-European artistslikeWifredo Lam, a painter of Afro-Cuban and Chinese descent who studied in Madrid and Paris in the 1920s and 30sto delve into the native traditions of their own countries. LamsLes Noces(1947) intricately weaves the Cubist-Surrealist forms of artists likePablo Picassoand Joan Mir into a representation of the Afro-Cuban ritual Santera.

Surrealism represents a crucible of avant-garde ideas and techniques that contemporary artists are still using today, including the introduction of chance elements into works of art. These methods opened up a new mode of painterly practice pursued by theAbstract Expressionists. The element of chance has also proven integral to performance art, as in the unscriptedHappeningsof the 1950s, and even to computer art based on randomization. The Surrealist focus on dreams, psychoanalysis, and fantastic imagery has provided fodder fora number of artists working today, such asGlenn Brown, who has also directly appropriated Dals art in his own painting.

Surrealisms desire to break free of reason led it to question the most basic foundation of artistic production: the idea that art is the product of a single artists creative imagination. As an antidote to this, Breton promoted the cadavre exquis, or exquisite corpse, as a technique for collectively creating art, one that is still played as a game widely today. It involves starting a sentence, sketch, or collage, and then giving it to another person to continuewithout letting that person see what has already been written, drawn, or placed. The term derived from a simple game of creating collective prose that resulted in the sentence, The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.

Given the methods embrace of chance and tendency to produce humorous, absurd, or unsettling images, it soon became a viable technique for creating exactly the type of unconscious, collective work that the Surrealists sought. Exquisite Corpse 27 (ca. 2011), a work completed by Ghada Amer, Will Cotton, and Carry Leibowitz, is a contemporary example of the sort of stylistically and thematically disconnected work that can arise from this Surrealist method.

The historian and music critic Greil Marcus has gone so far as to characterize Surrealism as one chapter in a series of revolutionary attempts to liberate thought that stretches from the blasphemies of medieval heretics up to the 1960s and beyond. In this light, Surrealism can be understood as the progenitor of the later, Marx-inspired art movement Situationism, 1960s countercultural protests, and even punk: a project of breaking down the rational order that society imposes on individuals.

Header image: Salvador Dal, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Salvador Dal, Fundaci Gala-Salvador Dal, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Photographs of Joan Mir and Max Ernst via Wikimedia Commons.

Read more here:

What Is Surrealism? | Artsy

The difference between rationalism and empiricism can be understood primarily in terms of three claims on which the positions disagree. The first claim is the intuition/deduction thesis. This is the idea that people can gain knowledge just by using intuition, and by building off their intuition with deductive reasoning. Empiricists generally only agree with this thesis in the case of knowledge that concerns ideas, and not knowledge concerning the external world. Rationalists, on the other hand, often claim that people can gain meaningful knowledge about the external world through intuition and deduction.

The second claim is the innate knowledge thesis. Similar to innate concepts, innate knowledge is the idea that it is simply part of human nature to know certain facts about the world, without having to learn them. The difference between a fact known through intuition and one known innately is that intuitively known facts are felt or sensed to be true when someone thinks about them, whereas innate knowledge is simply known to be true. Rationalists often identify particular claims that they believe are examples of innate knowledge. Empiricists generally hold that innate knowledge does not exist, as such a claim would go against the concept of the blank slate. Empiricists may hold that people have certain innate capacities that allow them to learn, but the knowledge itself must be the product of experience.

The third claim is the innate concept thesis. Like innate knowledge, an innate concept is one that exists within the human mind without a person having learned it. Innate concepts are different from innate knowledge because having a concept in one's mind just means understanding the meaning of some idea; it does not involve knowing a fact or statement. Rationalists often claim that people understand certain ideas innately, such as the idea of free will, or of mind and body. However, as in the case of innate knowledge, empiricists generally hold that innate concepts do not exist, because people are born as blank slates.

Although rationalism and empiricism generally advocate different views about the source of knowledge, it is not accurate to think of them as opposite positions or to view them as two binary options. Many philosophers who have been considered rationalists or empiricists actually have more complexity in their positions, and a given philosopher might follow rationalist principles in one field but empiricist principles in another.

Furthermore, rationalism and empiricism do not necessarily lead to opposing conclusions or viewpoints. For example, both rationalism and empiricism employ skepticism in their arguments. Descartes, who is generally viewed as a rationalist philosopher, argued for the importance of doubting apparent sources of knowledge and examining whether it is possible to have certainty about anything. This skeptical method was shared by empiricist philosophers such as David Hume, who examined whether the information people gain from experience is actually enough to justify knowledge about the world.

Another related shared idea is the emphasis on one's own individual perspective as the source of knowledge. According to Descartes's skeptical method, knowledge can only be gained by beginning with certainty about the existence of one's own mind. This is the source of his famous argument that ''I think, therefore I am,'' often called the cogito. The cogito claims that a person can be certain that they exist because they are thinking. This idea is linked to solipsism, the claim that other people do not truly exist or do not have minds. Descartes argues that external experience should be doubted, but ultimately claims that it is possible to gain knowledge of the outside world. Locke, who is generally viewed as an empiricist, takes up a similar idea and questions whether it is possible to know that other people think and feel. His conclusion is that there is no way to directly know that other people have minds, but that it is a reasonable inference based on observations of the world.

Rationalism and empiricism are terms used to describe different views about where people acquire knowledge. They are part of the field of epistemology, which examines the meaning, origin, and scope of knowledge. Rationalism views reason and intuition, or people's ability to sense the truth of statements, to be key ways of gaining knowledge. Rationalism focuses on deduction, or using the laws of logic to make arguments featuring conclusions that must be true. It also advocates the existence of innate ideas that people inherently possess in their minds. Empiricism, by contrast, holds that ideas and knowledge are the result of sense experience, or people's sensory interactions with the world. According to empiricism, the mind at birth is a tabula rasa or blank slate, without any knowledge or ideas. Knowledge is gained through induction, where people use experiences to make plausible inferences about the world.

Rationalism and empiricism can be distinguished based on three central claims. First is the intuition/deduction thesis: Rationalists generally consider intuition and deduction to be legitimate avenues to meaningful knowledge concerning the external world, whereas empiricists think intuition is only reliable when it comes to claims about ideas and their meaning. Next is the innate knowledge thesis: Rationalists often claim people have innate knowledge residing in their minds, whereas empiricists generally claim experience is where people get knowledge. Third is the innate concept thesis: Rationalists generally think people innately understand certain concepts, whereas empiricists disagree. Despite these disagreements, rationalism and empiricism are not truly opposing views. Many philosophers have views that incorporate both positions. There are also some issues where rationalists and empiricists take a similar approach. For instance, both rationalist and empiricist philosophers have advocated skepticism or doubt about apparent knowledge, and both have considered the issue of solipsism, or whether people can determine from their own experiences that other people exist and have minds of their own.

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Rationalism vs. Empiricism | Concepts, Differences & Examples - Video ...

In the charedi community, there is a carefully-crafted non-rationalist worldview about bitachon and hishtadlus. It was relentlessly drilled into me during my years in charedi yeshivos that all hishtadlus is meaningless. God directly controls everything, and the laws of nature have no power. The only reason why the world seems to run according to various laws is that otherwise there would be no free will. Hishtadlus is just a price that we pay to keep that illusion going, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything. And to the extent that we recognize that, it's possible to cut down on the hishtadlus.

Supposedly, this is a major reason why many charedim don't serve in the army or gain a secular education and work for a living. To the extent that you realize that Hashem directly runs everything, you don't need to engage in the sham of hishtadlus. On the contrary - it is learning Torah which provides divine protection from our enemies, which protects us from illness, which merits our parnasa.

The divide between the rationalist and anti-rationalist approaches to theology has fascinating ramifications with regard to the electoral system.

Rav Kornfeld is a local charedi rabbinic leader in Ramat Beit Shemesh who is not afraid to openly state the Israeli charedi perspective on such matters. For example, a few elections ago, he went on record in HaModia as stating that American olim are mistaken in believing that they have the right to choose who to vote for; instead, they are obligated to vote for whoever the Charedi-Litvishe-Non-RavShmuelAuerbach camp tell them to vote for. I am very grateful to Rav Elimelech Kornfeld for spelling out the ramifications of the charedi approach with regard to the electoral process. (I say that without any sarcasm; while I disagree with the anti-rationalist approach, I think that it's important for it to be articulated and I greatly appreciate his doing so.)

For this election, Rav Kornfeld gave a speech in his shul, reiterating the contents of a letter that he once printed on the front page of a local newspaper in a previous election, in which he spelled out the charedi anti-rationalist approach with regard to the very nature of the electoral system. In that letter, he explains that it is not in the hands of any politician or party to actually do anything for us, and continues as follows:

In other words, the entire system of voting in politicians who make policies that are implemented is, like all other forms of hishtadlus, is a sham; it's merely a cover, a mask for the workings of Hashem. However, it is very important to show support for the party that espouses Torah values (which he believes to be UTJ, notwithstanding how its MK was forced to resign for corruptly manipulating his power to protect a pedophile), because that will earn us the Divine favor which actually accomplishes everything that happens.

This appears to be an ingenious way of arriving at the same end result - vote for party x - while basing it on a fundamentally different idea about what voting actually accomplishes. However, the more one thinks through its ramifications, the more complications and problems arise.

First of all, it means that rallying votes is only important insofar as it shows Hashem that (charedi) Torah is important to us. But surely one can show Hashem that Torah is important even more powerfully by actually learning Torah! Are the two yeshivah boys who stayed in the Chevron Beis HaMidrash to learn while all their peers spent several hours traveling to and from Bnei Brak not showing Hashem that learning Torah is of supreme value to them?!

Second, it means that if people cheat (from either side), that will have absolutely no effect on the fate of the Jewish People. But why, then, is UTJ searching for people to monitor the voting booths?

Fourth, it means that if charedim are unsuccessful, then that is also from Hashem (and presumably as a result of their not sufficiently demonstrating their dedication to Him). So why, after Lapid's success in the last election and his resultant policies, was their so much anger towards him? Lapid didn't actually do anything, it was all from Hashem!

Fifth, it means that the followers of Rav Shmuel Auerbach and others, who are of the view that one should not participate in elections at all, are not doing any harm. After all, they are certainly acting out of dedication to Torah and Gedolim. So why is UTJ so upset about them?

Of course, nobody in the charedi world actually acts as though they think this way. When you look at all the vast effort expended to get charedim to vote, and the tremendous passion about who actually gets in the government, obviously charedim feel that the votes and politicians inherently make a difference. It's similar to the anti-rationalist notion that yeshivah students provide protection from rockets, and that parnassah is all in the hands of Hashem and has nothing to do with hishtadlus; people might profess to believe it, but when push comes to shove, nobody really believes it. After all, there is the awkward fact that on Rosh HaShanah, Hashem apparently decrees much more parnassah overall for people who engage in hishtadlus!

I wish people would just make up their minds and be consistent. Either you accept that hishtadlus has genuine significance - in which case, give your kids the education that they need to earn a living and maintain the economy, and stop ruling out army service for your community. Or, decide that hishtadlus has no real significance - in which case, stop with all the political stuff, and don't bother voting, just learn Torah!

(If you'd like to subscribe to this blog via email, use the form on the right of the page, or send me an email and I will add you.)

Continued here:

Rationalist Judaism: Anti-Rationalism and the Charedi Vote

European cultural movement of the 17th and 18th centuries

The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment[note 2] was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences and effects.[2][3] The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, and constitutional government.

The Enlightenment was preceded by the Scientific Revolution and the work of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and others. Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment to the publication of Ren Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637, featuring his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. European historians traditionally date its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the 1789 outbreak of the French Revolution. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.

Philosophers and scientists of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffeehouses and in printed books, journals, and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism, communism, and neoclassicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment.[4]

The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church. The principles of sociability and utility also played an important role in circulating knowledge useful to the improvement of society at large. The Enlightenment was marked by an increasing awareness of the relationship between the mind and the everyday media of the world,[5] and by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism, along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxyan attitude captured by Immanuel Kant's essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment, where the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know) can be found.[6]

The Age of Enlightenment was preceded by and closely associated with the Scientific Revolution.[9] Earlier philosophers whose work influenced the Enlightenment included Francis Bacon and Ren Descartes.[10] Some of the major figures of the Enlightenment included Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire.[11]

One particularly influential Enlightenment publication was the Encyclopdie (Encyclopedia). Published between 1751 and 1772 in thirty-five volumes, it was compiled by Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and a team of 150 other intellectuals. The Encyclopdie helped in spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment across Europe and beyond.[12]

Other landmark publications of the Enlightenment included Voltaire's Letters on the English (1733) and Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary; 1764); Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1740); Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748); Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1754) and The Social Contract (1762); Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776); and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Enlightenment thought was deeply influential in the political realm. European rulers such as Catherine II of Russia, Joseph II of Austria, and Frederick II of Prussia tried to apply Enlightenment thought on religious and political tolerance, which became known as enlightened absolutism.[11] Many of the major political and intellectual figures behind the American Revolution associated themselves closely with the Enlightenment: Benjamin Franklin visited Europe repeatedly and contributed actively to the scientific and political debates there and brought the newest ideas back to Philadelphia; Thomas Jefferson closely followed European ideas and later incorporated some of the ideals of the Enlightenment into the Declaration of Independence; and James Madison incorporated these ideals into the United States Constitution during its framing in 1787.[13] The ideas of the Enlightenment also played a major role in inspiring the French Revolution, which began in 1789.

Francis Bacon's empiricism and Ren Descartes' rationalist philosophy laid the foundation for enlightenment thinking.[14] Descartes attempt to construct the sciences on a secure metaphysical foundation was not as successful as his method of doubt applied in philosophic areas leading to a dualistic doctrine of mind and matter. His skepticism was refined by John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and David Hume's writings in the 1740s. His dualism was challenged by Spinoza's uncompromising assertion of the unity of matter in his Tractatus (1670) and Ethics (1677).

According to Jonathan Israel, these laid down two distinct lines of Enlightenment thought: first, the moderate variety, following Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, which sought accommodation between reform and the traditional systems of power and faith, and, second, the Radical Enlightenment, inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, advocating democracy, individual liberty, freedom of expression, and eradication of religious authority. The moderate variety tended to be deistic, whereas the radical tendency separated the basis of morality entirely from theology. Both lines of thought were eventually opposed by a conservative Counter-Enlightenment, which sought a return to faith.

In the mid-18th century, Paris became the center of philosophic and scientific activity challenging traditional doctrines and dogmas. The philosophical movement was led by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for a society based upon reason as in ancient Greece[18] rather than faith and Catholic doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, and for science based on experiments and observation. The political philosopher Montesquieu introduced the idea of a separation of powers in a government, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by the authors of the United States Constitution. While the philosophes of the French Enlightenment were not revolutionaries and many were members of the nobility, their ideas played an important part in undermining the legitimacy of the Old Regime and shaping the French Revolution.

Francis Hutcheson, a moral philosopher and founding figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, described the utilitarian and consequentialist principle that virtue is that which provides, in his words, "the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers". Much of what is incorporated in the scientific method (the nature of knowledge, evidence, experience, and causation) and some modern attitudes towards the relationship between science and religion were developed by Hutcheson's protgs in Edinburgh, Scotland, David Hume and Adam Smith.[20][21] Hume became a major figure in the skeptical philosophical and empiricist traditions of philosophy.

Immanuel Kant (17241804) tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority, as well as map out a view of the public sphere through private and public reason.[22] Kant's work continued to shape German thought and indeed all of European philosophy, well into the 20th century.[23]

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of England's earliest feminist philosophers.[24] She argued for a society based on reason and that women as well as men should be treated as rational beings. She is best known for her work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791).[25]

Science played an important role in Enlightenment discourse and thought. Many Enlightenment writers and thinkers had backgrounds in the sciences and associated scientific advancement with the overthrow of religion and traditional authority in favour of the development of free speech and thought. Scientific progress during the Enlightenment included the discovery of carbon dioxide (fixed air) by the chemist Joseph Black, the argument for deep time by the geologist James Hutton, and the invention of the condensing steam engine by James Watt.[26] The experiments of Antoine Lavoisier were used to create the first modern chemical plants in Paris and the experiments of the Montgolfier brothers enabled them to launch the first manned flight in a hot-air balloon on 21 November 1783 from the Chteau de la Muette, near the Bois de Boulogne.[27]

The wide-ranging contributions to mathematics of Leonhard Euler (17071783) included major results in analysis, number theory, topology, combinatorics, graph theory, algebra, and geometry (among other fields). In applied mathematics, he made fundamental contributions to mechanics, hydraulics, acoustics, optics, and astronomy. He was based in the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (17271741), then in Berlin at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres (17411766), and finally back in St. Petersburg at the Imperial Academy (17661783).[28]

Broadly speaking, Enlightenment science greatly valued empiricism and rational thought and was embedded with the Enlightenment ideal of advancement and progress. The study of science, under the heading of natural philosophy, was divided into physics and a conglomerate grouping of chemistry and natural history, which included anatomy, biology, geology, mineralogy, and zoology.[29] As with most Enlightenment views, the benefits of science were not seen universally: Rousseau criticized the sciences for distancing man from nature and not operating to make people happier.[30]

Science during the Enlightenment was dominated by scientific societies and academies, which had largely replaced universities as centres of scientific research and development. Societies and academies were also the backbone of the maturation of the scientific profession. Scientific academies and societies grew out of the Scientific Revolution as the creators of scientific knowledge, in contrast to the scholasticism of the university.[31] During the Enlightenment, some societies created or retained links to universities, but contemporary sources distinguished universities from scientific societies by claiming that the university's utility was in the transmission of knowledge while societies functioned to create knowledge.[32] As the role of universities in institutionalized science began to diminish, learned societies became the cornerstone of organized science. Official scientific societies were chartered by the state to provide technical expertise.[33]

Most societies were granted permission to oversee their own publications, control the election of new members and the administration of the society.[34] After 1700, a tremendous number of official academies and societies were founded in Europe and by 1789 there were over seventy official scientific societies. In reference to this growth, Bernard de Fontenelle coined the term "the Age of Academies" to describe the 18th century.[35]

Another important development was the popularization of science among an increasingly literate population. Philosophes introduced the public to many scientific theories, most notably through the Encyclopdie and the popularization of Newtonianism by Voltaire and milie du Chtelet. Some historians have marked the 18th century as a drab period in the history of science.[36]

The century saw significant advancements in the practice of medicine, mathematics, and physics; the development of biological taxonomy; a new understanding of magnetism and electricity; and the maturation of chemistry as a discipline, which established the foundations of modern chemistry.

The influence of science also began appearing more commonly in poetry and literature during the Enlightenment. Some poetry became infused with scientific metaphor and imagery, while other poems were written directly about scientific topics. Sir Richard Blackmore committed the Newtonian system to verse in Creation, a Philosophical Poem in Seven Books (1712). After Newton's death in 1727, poems were composed in his honour for decades.[37] James Thomson (17001748) penned his "Poem to the Memory of Newton", which mourned the loss of Newton, but also praised his science and legacy.[38]

Hume and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed a "science of man",[39] which was expressed historically in works by authors including James Burnett, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and William Robertson, all of whom merged a scientific study of how humans behaved in ancient and primitive cultures with a strong awareness of the determining forces of modernity. Modern sociology largely originated from this movement[40] and Hume's philosophical concepts that directly influenced James Madison (and thus the U.S. Constitution) and as popularised by Dugald Stewart, would be the basis of classical liberalism.[41]

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, often considered the first work on modern economics as it had an immediate impact on British economic policy that continues into the 21st century.[42] It was immediately preceded and influenced by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune drafts of Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (Paris, 1766). Smith acknowledged indebtedness and possibly was the original English translator.[43]

Cesare Beccaria, a jurist, criminologist, philosopher, and politician and one of the great Enlightenment writers, became famous for his masterpiece Of Crimes and Punishments (1764), later translated into 22 languages,[44] which condemned torture and the death penalty and was a founding work in the field of penology and the classical school of criminology by promoting criminal justice. Another prominent intellectual was Francesco Mario Pagano, who wrote important studies such as Saggi politici (Political Essays, 1783), one of the major works of the Enlightenment in Naples; and Considerazioni sul processo criminale (Considerations on the Criminal Trial, 1787), which established him as an international authority on criminal law.[45]

The Enlightenment has long been hailed as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture.[46] The Enlightenment brought political modernization to the West, in terms of introducing democratic values and institutions and the creation of modern, liberal democracies. This thesis has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter, and, most recently, by Jonathan Israel.[47][48]

John Locke, one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers,[49] based his governance philosophy in social contract theory, a subject that permeated Enlightenment political thought. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes ushered in this new debate with his work Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual, the natural equality of all men, the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state), the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people, and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.[50]

Both Locke and Rousseau developed social contract theories in Two Treatises of Government and Discourse on Inequality, respectively. While quite different works, Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau agreed that a social contract, in which the government's authority lies in the consent of the governed,[51] is necessary for man to live in civil society. Locke defines the state of nature as a condition in which humans are rational and follow natural law, in which all men are born equal and with the right to life, liberty, and property. However, when one citizen breaks the Law of Nature both the transgressor and the victim enter into a state of war, from which it is virtually impossible to break free. Therefore, Locke said that individuals enter into civil society to protect their natural rights via an "unbiased judge" or common authority, such as courts, to appeal to. In contrast, Rousseau's conception relies on the supposition that "civil man" is corrupted, while "natural man" has no want he cannot fulfill himself. Natural man is only taken out of the state of nature when the inequality associated with private property is established.[52] Rousseau said that people join into civil society via the social contract to achieve unity while preserving individual freedom. This is embodied in the sovereignty of the general will, the moral and collective legislative body constituted by citizens.

Locke is known for his statement that individuals have a right to "Life, Liberty, and Property" and his belief that the natural right to property is derived from labor. Tutored by Locke, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury wrote in 1706: "There is a mighty Light which spreads its self over the world especially in those two free Nations of England and Holland; on whom the Affairs of Europe now turn."[53] Locke's theory of natural rights has influenced many political documents, including the United States Declaration of Independence and the French National Constituent Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The philosophes argued that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change.[54]

Although much of Enlightenment political thought was dominated by social contract theorists, both David Hume and Adam Ferguson criticized this camp. Hume's essay Of the Original Contract argues that governments derived from consent are rarely seen and civil government is grounded in a ruler's habitual authority and force. It is precisely because of the ruler's authority over-and-against the subject, that the subject tacitly consents and Hume says that the subjects would "never imagine that their consent made him sovereign", rather the authority did so.[55] Similarly, Ferguson did not believe citizens built the state, rather polities grew out of social development. In his 1767 An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson uses the four stages of progress, a theory that was very popular in Scotland at the time, to explain how humans advance from a hunting and gathering society to a commercial and civil society without agreeing to a social contract.

Both Rousseau's and Locke's social contract theories rest on the presupposition of natural rights, which are not a result of law or custom, but are things that all men have in pre-political societies and are therefore universal and inalienable. The most famous natural right formulation comes from John Locke in his Second Treatise, when he introduces the state of nature. For Locke, the law of nature is grounded on mutual security or the idea that one cannot infringe on another's natural rights, as every man is equal and has the same inalienable rights. These natural rights include perfect equality and freedom, as well as the right to preserve life and property. Locke also argued against slavery on the basis that enslaving oneself goes against the law of nature because one cannot surrender one's own rights: one's freedom is absolute and no-one can take it away. Additionally, Locke argues that one person cannot enslave another because it is morally reprehensible, although he introduces a caveat by saying that enslavement of a lawful captive in time of war would not go against one's natural rights.

As a spill-over of the Enlightenment, nonsecular beliefs expressed first by Quakers and then by Protestant evangelicals in Britain and the United States emerged. To these groups, slavery became "repugnant to our religion" and a "crime in the sight of God".[56] These ideas added to those expressed by Enlightenment thinkers, leading many in Britain to believe that slavery was "not only morally wrong and economically inefficient, but also politically unwise." This ideals eventually led to the abolition of slavery in Britain and the United States.[57]

The leaders of the Enlightenment were not especially democratic, as they more often look to absolute monarchs as the key to imposing reforms designed by the intellectuals. Voltaire despised democracy and said the absolute monarch must be enlightened and must act as dictated by reason and justice in other words, be a "philosopher-king".[58]

In several nations, rulers welcomed leaders of the Enlightenment at court and asked them to help design laws and programs to reform the system, typically to build stronger states. These rulers are called "enlightened despots" by historians.[59] They included Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Leopold II of Tuscany and Joseph II of Austria. Joseph was over-enthusiastic, announcing many reforms that had little support so that revolts broke out and his regime became a comedy of errors and nearly all his programs were reversed.[60] Senior ministers Pombal in Portugal and Johann Friedrich Struensee in Denmark also governed according to Enlightenment ideals. In Poland, the model constitution of 1791 expressed Enlightenment ideals, but was in effect for only one year before the nation was partitioned among its neighbors. More enduring were the cultural achievements, which created a nationalist spirit in Poland.[61]

Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, saw himself as a leader of the Enlightenment and patronized philosophers and scientists at his court in Berlin. Voltaire, who had been imprisoned and maltreated by the French government, was eager to accept Frederick's invitation to live at his palace. Frederick explained: "My principal occupation is to combat ignorance and prejudice... to enlighten minds, cultivate morality, and to make people as happy as it suits human nature, and as the means at my disposal permit."[62]

The Enlightenment has been frequently linked to the American Revolution of 1776[63] and the French Revolution of 1789both had some intellectual influence from Thomas Jefferson in real time.[64][65] One view of the political changes that occurred during the Enlightenment is that the "consent of the governed" philosophy as delineated by Locke in Two Treatises of Government (1689) represented a paradigm shift from the old governance paradigm under feudalism known as the "divine right of kings". In this view, the revolutions of the late 1700s and early 1800s were caused by the fact that this governance paradigm shift often could not be resolved peacefully and therefore violent revolution was the result. A governance philosophy where the king was never wrong would be in direct conflict with one whereby citizens by natural law had to consent to the acts and rulings of their government.

Alexis de Tocqueville proposed the French Revolution as the inevitable result of the radical opposition created in the 18th century between the monarchy and the men of letters of the Enlightenment. These men of letters constituted a sort of "substitute aristocracy that was both all-powerful and without real power." This illusory power came from the rise of "public opinion", born when absolutist centralization removed the nobility and the bourgeoisie from the political sphere. The "literary politics" that resulted promoted a discourse of equality and was hence in fundamental opposition to the monarchical regime.[66] De Tocqueville "clearly designates... the cultural effects of transformation in the forms of the exercise of power."[67]

Enlightenment era religious commentary was a response to the preceding century of religious conflict in Europe, especially the Thirty Years' War.[69] Theologians of the Enlightenment wanted to reform their faith to its generally non-confrontational roots and to limit the capacity for religious controversy to spill over into politics and warfare while still maintaining a true faith in God. For moderate Christians, this meant a return to simple Scripture. John Locke abandoned the corpus of theological commentary in favor of an "unprejudiced examination" of the Word of God alone. He determined the essence of Christianity to be a belief in Christ the redeemer and recommended avoiding more detailed debate.[70] Anthony Collins, one of the English freethinkers, published his "Essay concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions the Evidence whereof depends on Human Testimony" (1707), in which he rejected the distinction between "above reason" and "contrary to reason", and demanded that revelation should conform to man's natural ideas of God. In the Jefferson Bible, Thomas Jefferson went further and dropped any passages dealing with miracles, visitations of angels, and the resurrection of Jesus after his death, as he tried to extract the practical Christian moral code of the New Testament.[71]

Enlightenment scholars sought to curtail the political power of organized religion and thereby prevent another age of intolerant religious war.[72] Spinoza determined to remove politics from contemporary and historical theology (e.g., disregarding Judaic law).[73] Moses Mendelssohn advised affording no political weight to any organized religion, but instead recommended that each person follow what they found most convincing.[74] They believed a good religion based in instinctive morals and a belief in God should not theoretically need force to maintain order in its believers, and both Mendelssohn and Spinoza judged religion on its moral fruits, not the logic of its theology.[75]

A number of novel ideas about religion developed with the Enlightenment, including deism and talk of atheism. According to Thomas Paine, deism is the simple belief in God the Creator, with no reference to the Bible or any other miraculous source. Instead, the deist relies solely on personal reason to guide his creed,[76] which was eminently agreeable to many thinkers of the time.[77] Atheism was much discussed, but there were few proponents. Wilson and Reill note: "In fact, very few enlightened intellectuals, even when they were vocal critics of Christianity, were true atheists. Rather, they were critics of orthodox belief, wedded rather to skepticism, deism, vitalism, or perhaps pantheism."[78] Some followed Pierre Bayle and argued that atheists could indeed be moral men.[79] Many others like Voltaire held that without belief in a God who punishes evil, the moral order of society was undermined. That is, since atheists gave themselves to no Supreme Authority and no law and had no fear of eternal consequences, they were far more likely to disrupt society.[80] Bayle (16471706) observed that, in his day, "prudent persons will always maintain an appearance of [religion]," and he believed that even atheists could hold concepts of honor and go beyond their own self-interest to create and interact in society.[81] Locke said that if there were no God and no divine law, the result would be moral anarchy: every individual "could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions."[82]

The "Radical Enlightenment" promoted the concept of separating church and state, an idea that is often credited to English philosopher John Locke (16321704).[86] According to his principle of the social contract, Locke said that the government lacked authority in the realm of individual conscience, as this was something rational people could not cede to the government for it or others to control. For Locke, this created a natural right in the liberty of conscience, which he said must therefore remain protected from any government authority.

These views on religious tolerance and the importance of individual conscience, along with the social contract, became particularly influential in the American colonies and the drafting of the United States Constitution.[87] Thomas Jefferson called for a "wall of separation between church and state" at the federal level. He previously had supported successful efforts to disestablish the Church of England in Virginia[88] and authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.[89] Jefferson's political ideals were greatly influenced by the writings of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton,[90] whom he considered the three greatest men that ever lived.[91]

The Enlightenment took hold in most European countries and influenced nations globally, often with a specific local emphasis. For example, in France it became associated with anti-government and anti-Church radicalism, while in Germany it reached deep into the middle classes, where it expressed a spiritualistic and nationalistic tone without threatening governments or established churches.[92] Government responses varied widely. In France, the government was hostile, and the philosophes fought against its censorship, sometimes being imprisoned or hounded into exile. The British government, for the most part, ignored the Enlightenment's leaders in England and Scotland, although it did give Isaac Newton a knighthood and a very lucrative government office. A common theme among most countries which derived Enlightenment ideas from Europe was the intentional non-inclusion of Enlightenment philosophies pertaining to slavery. Originally during the French Revolution, a revolution deeply inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, "France's revolutionary government had denounced slavery, but the property-holding 'revolutionaries' then remembered their bank accounts."[93] Slavery frequently showed the limitations of the Enlightenment ideology as it pertained to European colonialism, since many colonies of Europe operated on a plantation economy fueled by slave labor. In 1791, the Haitian Revolution, a slave rebellion by emancipated slaves against French colonial rule in the colony of Saint-Domingue, broke out. European nations and the United States, despite the strong support for Enlightenment ideals, refused to "[give support] to Saint-Domingue's anti-colonial struggle."[93]

The very existence of an English Enlightenment has been hotly debated by scholars. The majority of textbooks on British history make little or no mention of an English Enlightenment. Some surveys of the entire Enlightenment include England and others ignore it, although they do include coverage of such major intellectuals as Joseph Addison, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, Joshua Reynolds, and Jonathan Swift.[94] Freethinking, a term describing those who stood in opposition to the institution of the Church, and the literal belief in the Bible, can be said to have begun in England no later than 1713, when Anthony Collins wrote his "Discourse of Free-thinking", which gained substantial popularity. This essay attacked the clergy of all churches and was a plea for deism. Roy Porter argues that the reasons for this neglect were the assumptions that the movement was primarily French-inspired, that it was largely a-religious or anti-clerical, and that it stood in outspoken defiance to the established order.[95] Porter admits that, after the 1720s, England could claim thinkers to equal Diderot, Voltaire, or Rousseau. However, its leading intellectuals such as Edward Gibbon,[96] Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson were all quite conservative and supportive of the standing order. Porter says the reason was that Enlightenment had come early to England and had succeeded so that the culture had accepted political liberalism, philosophical empiricism, and religious toleration of the sort that intellectuals on the continent had to fight for against powerful odds. Furthermore, England rejected the collectivism of the continent and emphasized the improvement of individuals as the main goal of enlightenment.[97]

In the Scottish Enlightenment, the principles of sociability, equality, and utility were disseminated in schools and universities, many of which used sophisticated teaching methods which blended philosophy with daily life.[98] Scotland's major cities created an intellectual infrastructure of mutually supporting institutions such as schools, universities, reading societies, libraries, periodicals, museums, and masonic lodges.[99] The Scottish network was "predominantly liberal Calvinist, Newtonian, and 'design' oriented in character which played a major role in the further development of the transatlantic Enlightenment".[100] In France, Voltaire said that "we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization".[101] The focus of the Scottish Enlightenment ranged from intellectual and economic matters to the specifically scientific as in the work of William Cullen, physician and chemist; James Anderson, an agronomist; Joseph Black, physicist and chemist; and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.[20][102]

Several Americans, especially Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, played a major role in bringing Enlightenment ideas to the New World and in influencing British and French thinkers.[103] Franklin was influential for his political activism and for his advances in physics.[104][105] The cultural exchange during the Age of Enlightenment ran in both directions across the Atlantic. Thinkers such as Paine, Locke, and Rousseau all take Native American cultural practices as examples of natural freedom.[106] The Americans closely followed English and Scottish political ideas, as well as some French thinkers such as Montesquieu.[107] As deists, they were influenced by ideas of John Toland (16701722) and Matthew Tindal (16561733). During the Enlightenment there was a great emphasis upon liberty, republicanism, and religious tolerance. There was no respect for monarchy or inherited political power. Deists reconciled science and religion by rejecting prophecies, miracles, and biblical theology. Leading deists included Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason and by Thomas Jefferson in his short Jefferson Bible from which he removed all supernatural aspects.[108]

Prussia took the lead among the German states in sponsoring the political reforms that Enlightenment thinkers urged absolute rulers to adopt. There were important movements as well in the smaller states of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, and the Palatinate. In each case, Enlightenment values became accepted and led to significant political and administrative reforms that laid the groundwork for the creation of modern states.[109] The princes of Saxony, for example, carried out an impressive series of fundamental fiscal, administrative, judicial, educational, cultural, and general economic reforms. The reforms were aided by the country's strong urban structure and influential commercial groups and modernized pre-1789 Saxony along the lines of classic Enlightenment principles.[110][111]

Before 1750, the German upper classes looked to France for intellectual, cultural, and architectural leadership, as French was the language of high society. By the mid-18th century, the Aufklrung (The Enlightenment) had transformed German high culture in music, philosophy, science, and literature. Christian Wolff (16791754) was the pioneer as a writer who expounded the Enlightenment to German readers and legitimized German as a philosophic language.[112]

Johann Gottfried von Herder (17441803) broke new ground in philosophy and poetry, as a leader of the Sturm und Drang movement of proto-Romanticism. Weimar Classicism (Weimarer Klassik) was a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical, and Enlightenment ideas. The movement (from 1772 until 1805) involved Herder as well as polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) and Friedrich Schiller (17591805), a poet and historian. Herder argued that every group of people had its own particular identity, which was expressed in its language and culture. This legitimized the promotion of German language and culture and helped shape the development of German nationalism. Schiller's plays expressed the restless spirit of his generation, depicting the hero's struggle against social pressures and the force of destiny.[113]

German music, sponsored by the upper classes, came of age under composers Johann Sebastian Bach (16851750), Joseph Haydn (17321809), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (17561791).[114]

In remote Knigsberg, philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241804) tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom, and political authority. Kant's work contained basic tensions that would continue to shape German thought and indeed all of European philosophy well into the 20th century.[115]

The German Enlightenment won the support of princes, aristocrats, and the middle classes and it permanently reshaped the culture.[116] However, there was a conservatism among the elites that warned against going too far.[117]

In the 1780s, Lutheran ministers Johann Heinrich Schulz and Karl Wilhelm Brumbey got in trouble with their preaching as they were attacked and ridiculed by Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Abraham Teller and others. In 1788, Prussia issued an "Edict on Religion" that forbade preaching any sermon that undermined popular belief in the Holy Trinity and the Bible. The goal was to avoid skepticism, deism, and theological disputes that might impinge on domestic tranquility. Men who doubted the value of Enlightenment favoured the measure, but so too did many supporters. German universities had created a closed elite that could debate controversial issues among themselves, but spreading them to the public was seen as too risky. This intellectual elite was favoured by the state, but that might be reversed if the process of the Enlightenment proved politically or socially destabilizing.[118]

In the Habsburg Empire, which controlled a large part of Europe at the time, chiefly around Austria, the rule of Maria Theresa was the first age considered influenced by the Enlightenment in some areas, while still remaining quite conservative in others. The subsequent brief reign of her son Joseph II was also marked by a conflict of these two paradigms, with Josephinism finding serious opposition. The brief and contentious rule of Leopold II, an early opponent of capital punishment, was still marked mostly by relations with France, likewise with Francis II.

In Italy the main centers of diffusion of the Enlightenment were Naples and Milan:[119] in both cities the intellectuals took public office and collaborated with the Bourbon and Habsburg administrations. In Naples, Antonio Genovesi, Ferdinando Galiani, and Gaetano Filangieri were active under the tolerant King Charles of Bourbon. However, the Neapolitan Enlightenment, like Vico's philosophy, remained almost always in the theoretical field.[120] Only later, many Enlighteners animated the unfortunate experience of the Parthenopean Republic.

In Milan, however, the movement strove to find concrete solutions to problems. The center of discussions was the magazine Il Caff (17621764), founded by brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri (famous philosophers and writers, as well as their brother Giovanni), who also gave life to the Accademia dei Pugni, founded in 1761.

Minor centers were Tuscany, Veneto, and Piedmont, where among others, Pompeo Neri worked.

From Naples, Antonio Genovesi (17131769) influenced a generation of southern Italian intellectuals and university students. His textbook Della diceosina, o sia della Filosofia del Giusto e dell'Onesto (1766) was a controversial attempt to mediate between the history of moral philosophy on the one hand and the specific problems encountered by 18th-century commercial society on the other. It contained the greater part of Genovesi's political, philosophical, and economic thought guidebook for Neapolitan economic and social development.[121]

Science flourished as Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani made break-through discoveries in electricity. Pietro Verri was a leading economist in Lombardy. Historian Joseph Schumpeter states he was "the most important pre-Smithian authority on Cheapness-and-Plenty".[122] The most influential scholar on the Italian Enlightenment has been Franco Venturi.[123][124] Italy also produced some of the Enlightenment's greatest legal theorists, including Cesare Beccaria, Giambattista Vico, and Francesco Mario Pagano. Beccaria in particular is now considered one of the fathers of classical criminal theory as well as modern penology.[125] Beccaria is famous for his masterpiece On Crimes and Punishments (1764), a treatise (later translated into 22 languages) that served as one of the earliest prominent condemnations of torture and the death penalty and thus a landmark work in anti-death penalty philosophy.[44]

When Charles II the last Spanish Hapsburg monarch died in 1700, it touched out a major European conflict about succession and the fate of Spain and the Spanish Empire. The War of the Spanish Succession (17001715) brought Bourbon prince Philip, Duke of Anjou to the throne of Spain as Philip V. Under the 1715 Treaty of Utrecht, the French and the Spanish Bourbons could not unite, with Philip renouncing any rights to the French throne. The political restriction did not impede strong French influence of the Age of Enlightenment on Spain, the Spanish monarchs, the Spanish Empire.[126][127] Philip did not come into effective power until 1715 and began implementing administrative reforms to try to stop the decline of the Spanish Empire. Under Charles III, the crown began to implement serious structural changes, generally known as the Bourbon Reforms. The crown curtailed the power of the Catholic Church and the clergy, established a standing military in Spanish America, established new viceroyalties and reorganized administrative districts into intendancies. Freer trade was promoted under comercio libre in which regions could trade with companies sailing from any other Spanish port, rather than the restrictive mercantile system limiting trade. The crown sent out scientific expeditions to assert Spanish sovereignty over territories it claimed but did not control, but also importantly to discover the economic potential of its far-flung empire. Botanical expeditions sought plants that could be of use to the empire.[128] One of the best acts by Charles IV, a monarch not notable for his good judgment, was to give Prussian scientist, Baron Alexander von Humboldt, free rein to travel and gather information about the Spanish Empire during his five-year, self-funded expedition. Crown officials were to aid Humboldt in any way they could, so that he was able to get access to expert information. Given that Spain's empire was closed to foreigners, Humboldt's unfettered access is quite remarkable. His observations of New Spain, published as the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain remains an important scientific and historical text.[129] When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Ferdinand VII abdicated and Napoleon placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne. To add legitimacy to this move, the Bayonne Constitution was promulgated, which included representation from Spain's overseas components, but most Spaniards rejected the whole Napoleonic project. A war of national resistance erupted. The Cortes de Cdiz (parliament) was convened to rule Spain in the absence of the legitimate monarch, Ferdinand. It created a new governing document, the Constitution of 1812, which laid out three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial, put limits on the king by creating a constitutional monarchy, defined citizens as those in the Spanish Empire without African ancestry, established universal manhood suffrage, and established public education starting with primary school through university as well as freedom of expression. The constitution was in effect from 1812 until 1814, when Napoleon was defeated and Ferdinand was restored to the throne of Spain. Upon his return, Ferdinand repudiated the constitution and reestablished absolutist rule.[130] The French invasion of Spain sparked a crisis of legitimacy of rule in Spanish America, with many regions establishing juntas to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII. Most of Spanish America fought for independence, leaving only Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as the Philippines as overseas components of the Spanish Empire. All of newly independent and sovereign nations became republics by 1824, with written constitutions. Mexico's brief post-independence monarchy was overthrown and replaced by a federal republic under the Constitution of 1824, inspired by both the U.S. and Spanish constitutions.

The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 and ended in 1804 and shows how Enlightenment ideas "were part of complex transcultural flows."[3] Radical ideas in Paris during and after the French Revolution were mobilized in Haiti, such as by Toussaint L'Ouverture.[3] Toussaint had read the critique of European colonialism in Guillaume Thomas Raynal's book Histoire des deux Indes and "was particularly impressed by Raynal's prediction of the coming of a 'Black Spartacus.'"[3]

The revolution combined Enlightenment ideas with the experiences of the slaves in Haiti, two-thirds of whom had been born in Africa and could "draw on specific notions of kingdom and just government from Western and Central Africa, and to employ religious practices such as voodoo for the formation of revolutionary communities."[3] The revolution also affected France and "forced the French National Convention to abolish slavery in 1794."[3]

The Enlightenment in Portugal (Iluminismo) was heavily marked by the rule of the Prime Minister Marquis of Pombal under King Joseph I of Portugal from 1756 to 1777. Following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake which destroyed a large part of Lisbon, the Marquis of Pombal implemented important economic policies to regulate commercial activity (in particular with Brazil and England), and to standardise quality throughout the country (for example by introducing the first integrated industries in Portugal). His reconstruction of Lisbon's riverside district in straight and perpendicular streets (the Lisbon Baixa), methodically organized to facilitate commerce and exchange (for example by assigning to each street a different product or service), can be seen as a direct application of the Enlightenment ideas to governance and urbanism. His urbanistic ideas, also being the first large-scale example of earthquake engineering, became collectively known as Pombaline style, and were implemented throughout the kingdom during his stay in office. His governance was as enlightened as ruthless, see for example the Tvora affair.

In literature, the first Enlightenment ideas in Portugal can be traced back to the diplomat, philosopher, and writer Antnio Vieira (16081697),[131] who spent a considerable amount of his life in colonial Brazil denouncing discriminations against New Christians and the Indigenous peoples in Brazil. His works remain today as one of the best pieces of Portuguese literature[citation needed]. During the 18th century, enlightened literary movements such as the Arcdia Lusitana (lasting from 1756 until 1776, then replaced by the Nova Arcdia in 1790 until 1794) surfaced in the academic medium, in particular involving former students of the University of Coimbra. A distinct member of this group was the poet Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage.The physician Antnio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches was also an important Enlightenment figure, contributing to the Encyclopdie and being part of the Russian court.

The ideas of the Enlightenment also influenced various economists and anti-colonial intellectuals throughout the Portuguese Empire, such as Jos de Azeredo Coutinho, Jos da Silva Lisboa, Cludio Manoel da Costa, and Toms Antnio Gonzaga.

The Napoleonic invasion of Portugal had consequences for the Portuguese monarchy. With the aid of the British navy, the Portuguese royal family was evacuated to Brazil, its most important colony. Even though Napoleon had been defeated, the royal court remained in Brazil. The Liberal Revolution of 1820 forced the return of the royal family to Portugal. The terms by which the restored king was to rule was a constitutional monarchy under the Constitution of Portugal. Brazil declared its independence of Portugal in 1822, and became a monarchy.

In Russia, the government began to actively encourage the proliferation of arts and sciences in the mid-18th century. This era produced the first Russian university, library, theatre, public museum, and independent press. Like other enlightened despots, Catherine the Great played a key role in fostering the arts, sciences and education. She used her own interpretation of Enlightenment ideals, assisted by notable international experts such as Voltaire (by correspondence) and in residence world class scientists such as Leonhard Euler and Peter Simon Pallas. The national Enlightenment differed from its Western European counterpart in that it promoted further modernization of all aspects of Russian life and was concerned with attacking the institution of serfdom in Russia. The Russian Enlightenment centered on the individual instead of societal enlightenment and encouraged the living of an enlightened life.[132] A powerful element was prosveshchenie which combined religious piety, erudition, and commitment to the spread of learning. However, it lacked the skeptical and critical spirit of the Western European Enlightenment.[134]

Enlightenment ideas (owiecenie) emerged late in Poland, as the Polish middle class was weaker and szlachta (nobility) culture (Sarmatism) together with the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth political system (Golden Liberty) were in deep crisis. The political system was built on aristocratic republicanism, but was unable to defend itself against powerful neighbors Russia, Prussia, and Austria as they repeatedly sliced off regions until nothing was left of independent Poland. The period of Polish Enlightenment began in the 1730s1740s and especially in theatre and the arts peaked in the reign of King Stanisaw August Poniatowski (second half of the 18th century). Warsaw was a main centre after 1750, with an expansion of schools and educational institutions and the arts patronage held at the Royal Castle.[135] Leaders promoted tolerance and more education. They included King Stanislaw II Poniatowski and reformers Piotr Switkowski, Antoni Poplawski, Josef Niemcewicz, and Jsef Pawlinkowski, as well as Baudouin de Cortenay, a Polonized dramatist. Opponents included Florian Jaroszewicz, Gracjan Piotrowski, Karol Wyrwicz, and Wojciech Skarszewski.[136]

The movement went into decline with the Third Partition of Poland (1795) a national tragedy inspiring a short period of sentimental writing and ended in 1822, replaced by Romanticism.[137]

Eighteenth-century China experienced "a trend towards seeing fewer dragons and miracles, not unlike the disenchantment that began to spread across the Europe of the Enlightenment."[3] Furthermore, "some of the developments that we associate with Europe's Enlightenment resemble events in China remarkably."[3]

During this time, ideals of Chinese society were reflected in "the reign of the Qing emperors Kangxi (16611722) and Qianlong (17361795); China was posited as the incarnation of an enlightened and meritocratic societyand instrumentalized for criticisms of absolutist rule in Europe."[3]

From 1641 to 1853, the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan enforced a policy called kaikin. The policy prohibited foreign contact with most outside countries.[138]

Robert Bellah found "origins of modern Japan in certain strands of Confucian thinking, a 'functional analogue to the Protestant Ethic' that Max Weber singled out as the driving force behind Western capitalism."[3]

Japanese Confucian and Enlightenment ideas were brought together, for example, in the work of the Japanese reformer Tsuda Mamichi in the 1870s, who said, "Whenever we open our mouths...it is to speak of 'enlightenment.'"[3]

In Japan and much of East Asia, Confucian ideas were not replaced but "ideas associated with the Enlightenment were instead fused with the existing cosmologywhich in turn was refashioned under conditions of global interaction."[3] In Japan in particular, the term ri, which is the Confucian idea of "order and harmony on human society" also came to represent "the idea of laissez-faire and the rationality of market exchange."[3]

By the 1880s, the slogan "Civilization and Enlightenment" became potent throughout Japan, China, and Korea and was employed to address challenges of globalization.[3]

During this time, Korea "aimed at isolation" and was known as the "hermit kingdom", but became awakened to Enlightenment ideas by the 1890s such as with the activities of the Independence Club.[3]

Korea was influenced by China and Japan but also found its own Enlightenment path with the Korean intellectual Yu Kilchun who popularized the term Enlightenment throughout Korea.[3] The use of Enlightenment ideas was a "response to a specific situation in Korea in the 1890s, and not a belated answer to Voltaire."[3]

In eighteenth-century India, Tipu Sultan was an enlightened monarch, who "was one of the founding members of the (French) Jacobin Club in Seringapatam, had planted a liberty tree, and asked to be addressed as 'Tipu Citoyen,'" which means Citizen Tipu.[3]

In parts of India, an important movement called the "Bengal Renaissance" led to Enlightenment reforms beginning in the 1820s.[3] Rammohan Roy was a reformer who "fused different traditions in his project of social reform that made him a proponent of a 'religion of reason.'"[3]

Eighteenth-century Egypt had "a form of 'cultural revival' in the makingspecifically Islamic origins of modernization long before Napoleon's Egyptian campaign."[3] Napoleon's expedition into Egypt further encouraged "social transformations that harked back to debates about inner-Islamic reform, but now were also legitimized by referring to the authority of the Enlightenment."[3]

A major intellectual influence on Islamic modernism and expanding the Enlightenment in Egypt, Rifa al-Tahtawi "oversaw the publication of hundreds of European works in the Arabic language."[3]

The Enlightenment began to influence the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and continued into the late nineteenth century.[3] Namik Kemal, a political activist and member of the Young Ottomans, drew on major Enlightenment thinkers and "a variety of intellectual resources in his quest for social and political reform."[3] In 1893, Kemal responded to Ernest Renan, who had indicted the Islamic religion, with his own version of the Enlightenment, which "was not a poor copy of French debates in the eighteenth century, but an original position responding to the exigencies of Ottoman society in the late nineteenth century."[3]

The Enlightenment has always been contested territory. According to Keith Thomas, its supporters "hail it as the source of everything that is progressive about the modern world. For them, it stands for freedom of thought, rational inquiry, critical thinking, religious tolerance, political liberty, scientific achievement, the pursuit of happiness, and hope for the future."[139] Thomas adds that its detractors accuse it of shallow rationalism, nave optimism, unrealistic universalism, and moral darkness. From the start, conservative and clerical defenders of traditional religion attacked materialism and skepticism as evil forces that encouraged immorality. By 1794, they pointed to the Terror during the French Revolution as confirmation of their predictions. As the Enlightenment was ending, Romantic philosophers argued that excessive dependence on reason was a mistake perpetuated by the Enlightenment because it disregarded the bonds of history, myth, faith, and tradition that were necessary to hold society together.[140]

Ritchie Robertson portrays it as a grand intellectual and political program, offering a "science" of society modeled on the powerful physical laws of Newton. "Social science" was seen as the instrument of human improvement. It would expose truth and expand human happiness.[141]

The term "Enlightenment" emerged in English in the later part of the 19th century,[142] with particular reference to French philosophy, as the equivalent of the French term Lumires (used first by Dubos in 1733 and already well established by 1751). From Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklrung?" ("Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?"), the German term became Aufklrung (aufklren=to illuminate; sich aufklren=to clear up). However, scholars have never agreed on a definition of the Enlightenment, or on its chronological or geographical extent. Terms like les Lumires (French), illuminismo (Italian), ilustracin (Spanish) and Aufklrung (German) referred to partly overlapping movements. Not until the late nineteenth century did English scholars agree they were talking about "the Enlightenment".[140][143]

Enlightenment historiography began in the period itself, from what Enlightenment figures said about their work. A dominant element was the intellectual angle they took. D'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse of l'Encyclopdie provides a history of the Enlightenment which comprises a chronological list of developments in the realm of knowledge of which the Encyclopdie forms the pinnacle.[144] In 1783, Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn referred to Enlightenment as a process by which man was educated in the use of reason.[145] Immanuel Kant called Enlightenment "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage", tutelage being "man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another".[146] "For Kant, Enlightenment was mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance".[147] The German scholar Ernst Cassirer called the Enlightenment "a part and a special phase of that whole intellectual development through which modern philosophic thought gained its characteristic self-confidence and self-consciousness".[148] According to historian Roy Porter, the liberation of the human mind from a dogmatic state of ignorance, is the epitome of what the Age of Enlightenment was trying to capture.[149]

Bertrand Russell saw the Enlightenment as a phase in a progressive development which began in antiquity and that reason and challenges to the established order were constant ideals throughout that time.[150] Russell said that the Enlightenment was ultimately born out of the Protestant reaction against the Catholic Counter-Reformation and that philosophical views such as affinity for democracy against monarchy originated among 16th-century Protestants to justify their desire to break away from the Catholic Church. Although many of these philosophical ideals were picked up by Catholics, Russell argues that by the 18th century the Enlightenment was the principal manifestation of the schism that began with Martin Luther.[150]

Jonathan Israel rejects the attempts of postmodern and Marxian historians to understand the revolutionary ideas of the period purely as by-products of social and economic transformations. He instead focuses on the history of ideas in the period from 1650 to the end of the 18th century and claims that it was the ideas themselves that caused the change that eventually led to the revolutions of the latter half of the 18th century and the early 19th century. Israel argues that until the 1650s Western civilization "was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition, and authority".

There is little consensus on the precise beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, though several historians and philosophers argue that it was marked by Descartes' 1637 philosophy of Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), which shifted the epistemological basis from external authority to internal certainty.[154][155][156] In France, many cited the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687),[157] which built upon the work of earlier scientists and formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation.[158] The middle of the 17th century (1650) or the beginning of the 18th century (1701) are often used as epochs.[citation needed] French historians usually place the Sicle des Lumires ("Century of Enlightenments") between 1715 and 1789: from the beginning of the reign of Louis XV until the French Revolution.[159] Most scholars use the last years of the century, often choosing the French Revolution of 1789 or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (18041815) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment.[160]

In recent years, scholars have expanded the time span and global perspective of the Enlightenment by examining: (1) how European intellectuals did not work alone and other people helped spread and adapt Enlightenment ideas, (2) how Enlightenment ideas were "a response to cross-border interaction and global integration", and (3) how the Enlightenment "continued throughout the nineteenth century and beyond."[3] The Enlightenment "was not merely a history of diffusion" and "was the work of historical actors around the world... who invoked the term... for their own specific purposes."[3]

In the 1947 book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argued:

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.[161]

Extending Horkheimer and Adorno's argument, intellectual historian Jason Josephson-Storm has argued that any idea of the Age of Enlightenment as a clearly defined period that is separate from the earlier Renaissance and later Romanticism or Counter-Enlightenment constitutes a myth. Josephson-Storm points out that there are vastly different and mutually contradictory periodizations of the Enlightenment depending on nation, field of study, and school of thought; that the term and category of "Enlightenment" referring to the Scientific Revolution was actually applied after the fact; that the Enlightenment did not see an increase in disenchantment or the dominance of the mechanistic worldview; and that a blur in the early modern ideas of the humanities and natural sciences makes it hard to circumscribe a Scientific Revolution.[162] Josephson-Storm defends his categorization of the Enlightenment as "myth" by noting the regulative role ideas of a period of Enlightenment and disenchantment play in modern Western culture, such that belief in magic, spiritualism, and even religion appears somewhat taboo in intellectual strata.[163]

In the 1970s, study of the Enlightenment expanded to include the ways Enlightenment ideas spread to European colonies and how they interacted with indigenous cultures and how the Enlightenment took place in formerly unstudied areas such as Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary, and Russia.[164]

Intellectuals such as Robert Darnton and Jrgen Habermas have focused on the social conditions of the Enlightenment. Habermas described the creation of the "bourgeois public sphere" in 18th-century Europe, containing the new venues and modes of communication allowing for rational exchange. Habermas said that the public sphere was bourgeois, egalitarian, rational, and independent from the state, making it the ideal venue for intellectuals to critically examine contemporary politics and society, away from the interference of established authority. While the public sphere is generally an integral component of the social study of the Enlightenment, other historians[note 3] have questioned whether the public sphere had these characteristics.

In contrast to the intellectual historiographical approach of the Enlightenment, which examines the various currents or discourses of intellectual thought within the European context during the 17th and 18th centuries, the cultural (or social) approach examines the changes that occurred in European society and culture. This approach studies the process of changing sociabilities and cultural practices during the Enlightenment.

One of the primary elements of the culture of the Enlightenment was the rise of the public sphere, a "realm of communication marked by new arenas of debate, more open and accessible forms of urban public space and sociability, and an explosion of print culture", in the late 17th century and 18th century.[165] Elements of the public sphere included that it was egalitarian, that it discussed the domain of "common concern", and that argument was founded on reason.[166] Habermas uses the term "common concern" to describe those areas of political/social knowledge and discussion that were previously the exclusive territory of the state and religious authorities, now open to critical examination by the public sphere. The values of this bourgeois public sphere included holding reason to be supreme, considering everything to be open to criticism (the public sphere is critical), and the opposition of secrecy of all sorts.[167]

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Non-Twelver branch of Shia Islam

The Nizaris (Arabic: , romanized:al-Nizriyyn, Persian: , romanized:Nezriyn) are the largest segment of the Ismaili Muslims, who are the second-largest branch of Shia Islam after the Twelvers.[1] Nizari teachings emphasize independent reasoning or ijtihad; pluralismthe acceptance of racial, ethnic, cultural and inter-religious differences; and social justice.[2] Nizaris, along with Twelvers, adhere to the Jafari school of jurisprudence.[3] The Aga Khan, currently Aga Khan IV, is the spiritual leader and Imam of the Nizaris. The global seat of the Ismaili Imamate is in Lisbon, Portugal.

Nizari Isma'ili history is often traced through the unbroken hereditary chain of guardianship, or walayah, beginning with Ali Ibn Abi Talib, who was declared Muhammad's successor as Imam during the latter's final pilgrimage to Mecca, and continues in an unbroken chain to the current Imam, Shah Karim Al-Husayni, the Aga Khan.

From early in his reign, the Fatimid Caliph-Imam Al-Mustansir Billah had publicly named his elder son Nizar as his heir to be the next Fatimid Caliph-Imam. Dai Hassan-i Sabbah, who had studied and accepted Ismailism in Fatimid Egypt, had been made aware of this fact personally by al-Mustansir. After Al-Mustansir died in 1094, Al-Afdal Shahanshah, the all-powerful Armenian Vizier and Commander of the Armies, wanted to assert, like his father before him, dictatorial rule over the Fatimid State. Al-Afdal engineered a palace coup, placing his brother-in-law, the much younger and dependent Al-Musta'li, on the Fatimid throne. Al-Afdal claimed that Al-Mustansir had made a deathbed decree in favour of Musta'li and thus got the Ismaili leaders of the Fatimid Court and Fatimid Dawa in Cairo, the capital city of the Fatimids, to endorse Musta'li, which they did, realizing that the army was behind the palace coup.[4]:p:106107

In early 1095, Nizar fled to Alexandria, where he received the people's support and where he was accepted as the next Fatimid Caliph-Imam after Al-Mustansir, with gold dinars being minted in Alexandria in Nizar's name (one such coin, found in 1994, is in the collection of the Aga Khan Museum). In late 1095, Al-Afdal defeated Nizar's Alexandrian army and took Nizar prisoner to Cairo where he had Nizar executed.[4]:p:107

After Nizar's execution, the Nizari Ismailis and the Musta'li Ismailis parted ways in a bitterly irreconcilable manner. The schism finally broke the remnants of the Fatimid Empire, and the now-divided Ismailis separated into the Musta'li following (inhabiting regions of Egypt, Yemen, and western India) and those pledging allegiance to Nizar's son Al-Hadi ibn Nizar (living in regions of Iran and Syria). The latter Ismaili following came to be known as Nizari Ismailism.[4]:p:106107

Imam Al-Hadi, being very young at the time, was smuggled out of Alexandria and taken to the Nizari stronghold of Alamut Castle in the Elburz Mountains of northern Iran, south of the Caspian Sea and under the regency of Dai Hasan bin Sabbah.

The offshoot of these Muhammad-Shahi Nizari Ismailis recognize the elder son of Shamsu-d-Dn Muammad, the 28th Qasim-Shahi Imam, named Al ad-Dn Mumin Shh (the 26th Imam of the Muhammad-Shahi Nizari Ismailis). They recognize this line of Imams down to the disappearance of the 40th Imam, Amir Muhammad al-Baqir, in 1796. There are followers of this line of Nizari Imams in Syria today, locally called the Jafariyah.

Followers of the young Imam Hadi who wished to be fighters were trained as Fidai (Fedayeen), whose bravery and self-sacrificing spirituality was due to their belief that the Nizari Imam-ul-waqt ("Imam of the time") had the noor (light) of God within him. As such it became a religious duty for the Fidai to obey every dictate of their Imam-ul-waqt and to protect him and their community of believers without compromise even to the extent of dying for their cause.

Under Hassan-i Sabbah in Iran, and Rashid ad-Din Sinan in Syria, the Nizari Fidai targeted the most powerful enemy leaders faced by these new Nizari Ismaili communities in the Elburz Mountains of northern Iran and in the mountains of the Levantine coast, the Jabal Bahra, overlooking the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

The Fidai were feared as the Assassins, but did not assassinate for payment. Although they were trained in the art of spying and combat, they also practiced Islamic mysticism at the highest level. This religious ardor turned them into formidable foes, as in the anecdote of Count Henry of Champagne. Returning from Armenia, Henry spoke with Grand Master Rashid ad-Din Sinan (known to the West as "The Old Man of the Mountain") at one of his castles, al-Kahf, in Syria. Henry pointed out that since his army was bigger by far than Sinan's, Sinan should pay him an annual tribute.

Sinan refused, asserting that his army was far stronger, in spirit and unquestioning obedience if not in numbers. He invited Henry to witness this obedience and sacrificial spirit of his Fidai. Sinan signalled to a Fidai standing on the parapet of a high wall of his castle, to jump. The Fidai called out "God is Great" and unhesitatingly took a headlong death dive into the rocks far below.

The bewildered Henry asked Sinan the cause for the suicidal jump. Sinan pointed once again to the Fidai who had taken the place of the now dead Fidai. Again Sinan gave a signal to the Fidai to jump and the second Fidai also called out "God is Great" and jumped to his death. Henry was visibly shaken by the experience of witnessing the two Fidais' total disregard for their own lives. He accepted Sinan's terms of peace on a non-tribute-paying basis. The Nizaris thus averted debilitating wars against them because of their Fidais' feats of self-sacrifice and assassinations of powerful enemy leaders to demonstrate the will and commitment of the community to live free from being a vassal to any Levantine power.[5]:p:25

The Fidai were some of the most feared assassins in the then known world.[4]:p:120158[6] Sinan ordered assassinations against politicians and generals such as the great Kurdish general and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, Saladin. A sleeping Saladin had a note from Sinan delivered to him by a Fidai planted in his entourage. The note was pinned to his pillow with a dagger, and it informed Saladin that he had been spared this once and should give up his anti-Nizari militancy. A shaken Saladin quickly made a truce with Sinan.[4]:p:144

Subsequently, the Fidai aided the Muslim cause against the Christian Crusaders of the Third Crusade which included Richard the Lionheart of England. Saladin having by now established a friendly relationship with Sinan, the Nizari Fidai themselves joined Saladin's forces to defeat the Crusaders in the last great battle between the two forces. Later on, when "the Nizaris faced renewed Frankish hostilities, they received timely assistance from the Ayyubids".[4]:p:146

The Fidais' apparent lack of fear of personal injury or even death could not be understood by the Crusaders, who propagated the black legends of the so-called Assassins. According to Daftary, these were "fictions ... meant to provide satisfactory explanations for behavior that would otherwise seem strange to the medieval Western mind".[4]:p:14 These black legends were then further popularized in the Western world by Marco Polo, the Venetian storyteller who had, in fact, never investigated Sinan, in contradiction to his claim that he had. Polo asserted that Sinan fed hashish to his drugged followers, the so-called Hashishins (Assassins), so as to fortify them with the type of courage to commit the assassinations of the most intrepid kind.[4]:p:14

This tale of the "Old Man of the Mountain" was assembled by Marco Polo and accepted by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, a 19th-century Austrian orientalist responsible for much of the spread of this legend. Until the 1930s, Hammer-Purgstall's retelling of Marco Polo's fiction served as the standard description of the Nizari Ismailis across Europe. "The Russian orientalist Vladimir Alexeyevich Ivanov ... gained access also to Nizari literature preserved in Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan and elsewhere ... compiled the first detailed catalogue of (Nizari and Fatimid) Ismaili works, citing some 700 separate titles attesting to the hitherto unknown richness and diversity of (Nizari and Fatimid) Ismaili literature and literary traditions".[4]:p:17

As with all Shia Muslims, the succession of leadership following the death of the prophet Muhammed is of major importance to Nizaris. Nizaris believe that at al-Ghadir Khumm, by God's direct command, Muhammad designated his cousin and son-in-law Alithe husband of his daughter Fatimahas his successor. As such, Ali became the spiritual successor and the first Imam in the continuing line of hereditary Imams that leads up to the present 49th imam Prince Shah Karim Al Hussaini.

The Nizari Ismaili tradition is unique in that it is the only tradition that has this continuity of hereditary divine authority vested in the Imamim-Mubeen. In all the Sunni traditions, the Imamim-Mubeen is interpreted as the Quran itself; and in all the Shia traditions, except the Shia Nizari, the Imamim-Mubeen is the last Imam of a dynasty that went into occultation. However, in Nizari Ismailism, the Imamim-Mubeen is a living human Imam who is never in occultation, who will never ever be absent from this world but will always be perpetually present and physically alive, and who is designated as the inheritor of an Imamate passed down from father to son. This tradition has continued for almost 1400 years.

The Ismailis and the Twelvers split over the succession to Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq. Ismailis contend that Jafar had designated his son Isma'il ibn Jafar as his heir and the next Imam in the hereditary line, and thus the Isma'ilis follow the Imamate of Isma'il and his progeny. Although Imam Ismail predeceased his father, Isma'il supposedly had designated his own son Muhammad ibn Ismail as the next hereditary Imam to follow. In opposition to this belief, the Twelvers believe that Imam Ismail's younger brother Musa al Kadhim was, from the beginning, the rightful successor to Imam Jafar and that Ismail was never a contender.

The Nizari Ismailis have since split from others, initially from the Qarmatians, Druze, Musta'li Ismailis, Muhammad Shahi Nizari Ismailis, and Satpanthis, the last two splitting from the Nizari branch of Ismailism in the 14th and 15th centuries.

The Nizari Ismailis have always maintained that the Imamah (also known as 'Imamat') can only be inherited from the current Imam to a direct descendant in a father-to-son (or grandson) hereditary lineage starting with Imam Ali and then to Imam Hussain and so on until their present and living 49th Imam, Prince Karim al-Husayni Aga Khan IV.

The Nizaris regard Hassan bin (son of) Ali as a Trustee Imam (imam al-mustawda) as opposed to a Hereditary Imam (imam al-mustaqarr). This fact is clearly demonstrated in the recitation of the Nizari Ismailis daily prayers three times a day in which although Hassan bin Ali is revered as part of the Prophet's personal family (Ahl al-Bayt), his name is not included in the hereditary lineage[7] from their first Imam, Imam Ali, to their 49th[8] Imam Prince Karim al Hussaini. If Hassan bin Ali's name were to be included as one of the Ismaili Imams in their prayer recitation then the present Imam Prince Karim of the Nizari Ismailis would have to be the 50th Imam and not the 49th Imam - the way he has identified himself and is known to the world.

All Nizr Ism'ls now accept Prince Shah Karim Al-Husayni, the Aga Khan IV, as their Imm-i-Zaman (Imam of the Time). He is referred to in Persian as Khudawand (Lord of the Time), in Arabic as Maulana (Master) or Hzar Imm (Present Imam). Karim succeeded his grandfather Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III as Imm in 1957, when he was just 20 and still an undergraduate at Harvard University. He was referred to as "the Imam of the Atomic Age". The period following his accession can be characterized as one of rapid political and economic change. Planning of programs and institutions became increasingly difficult due to the rapid changes in the newly emerging post-colonial nations where many of his followers resided. Upon becoming Imm, Karim's immediate concern was the preparation of his followers, wherever they lived, for the changes that lay ahead. This rapidly evolving situation called for bold initiatives and new programs to reflect developing national aspirations in the newly independent nations.[4]:p:206209

In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, a major objective of the community's social welfare and economic programs, until the mid-1950s, had been to create a broad base of businessmen, agriculturists, and professionals. The educational facilities of the community tended to emphasize secondary-level education. With the coming of independence, each nation's economic aspirations took on new dimensions, focusing on industrialization and the modernization of agriculture. The community's educational priorities had to be reassessed in the context of new national goals, and new institutions had to be created to respond to the growing complexity of the development process.[citation needed]

In 1972, under the regime of the then President Idi Amin, Ism'ls and Asians were expelled from Uganda, despite being citizens of the country and having lived there for generations. The Imam took urgent steps to facilitate the resettlement of Ismls displaced from Uganda, but also Tanzania, Kenya, and from Burma. Owing to his personal efforts, most found homes, not only in Asia, but also in Europe and North America. Most of the basic resettlement problems were overcome remarkably rapidly. This was due to the adaptability of the Ismls themselveshelped in particular by their educationtheir linguistic abilities, the efforts of the host countries, and the moral and material support from Isml community programs.

In view of the importance that Islm places on maintaining a balance between the spiritual well-being of the individual and the quality of his life, the Imm's guidance deals with both aspects of the life of his followers. The Aga Khan has encouraged Ism'l Muslims settled in the industrialized world to contribute towards the progress of communities in the developing world through various development programs. The Economist noted that Isma'ili immigrant communities integrated seamlessly as immigrant communities, and did better at attaining graduate and post-graduate degrees, "far surpassing their native, Hindu, Sikh, fellow Muslims, and Chinese communities".[9]

From July 1982 to July 1983, to celebrate the present Aga Khan's Silver Jubilee marking the 25th anniversary of his accession to the Imamate, many new social and economic development projects were launched. These ranged from the establishment of the US$450million international Aga Khan University with its Faculty of Health Sciences and teaching hospital based in Karachi; the expansion of schools for girls and medical centers in the Hunza region, one of the remote parts of Northern Pakistan bordering on China and Afghanistan; the establishment of the Aga Khan Rural Support Program in Gujarat, India; and the extension of existing urban hospitals and primary health care centers in Tanzania and Kenya. These initiatives form part of an international network of institutions involved in fields that range from education, health, and rural development, to architecture and the promotion of private sector enterprise and together make up the Aga Khan Development Network.

From 2007 to 2008, during the Golden Jubilee marking 50 years of his Imamate, the Aga Khan commissioned a number of projects: renowned Pritzker Prize winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki was commissioned to design a new kind of community structure, resembling an embassy, in Ottawa, Canada; and the Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, to be composed of two large interconnected spaces an atrium and a courtyard, opened on 8 December 2008. The atrium is an interior space, to be used all year round. It is protected by a unique glass dome made of multi-faceted, angular planes assembled to create the effect of rock crystal; the Aga Khan asked Maki to consider the qualities of "rock crystal", which was valued by the Imams of the Fatimid Empire, in his design. Within the glass dome is an inner layer of woven glass-fibre fabric which will appear to float and hover over the atrium. The delegation building is located on Sussex Drive near the Canadian parliament. Future delegation buildings are planned for other capitals, beginning with Lisbon, Portugal.

In addition to primary and secondary schools, the Aga Khan academies, were set up to educate future leaders in the developing world. The Aga Khan Museum, in Toronto, Canada, is the first museum in the West dedicated to Islamic civilization. Completed in 2013, it is dedicated to the "acquisition, preservation and display of artefacts from various periods and geographies relating to the intellectual, cultural, artistic and religious heritage of Islamic communities". A series of new Isma'ili centres are underway: including in Toronto, Ontario; Houston, Texas; Dushanbe and the Pamir, Tajikistan.

During 20172018 the Ismaili Muslim community commemorated 60 years since the Aga Khan became the 49th hereditary Imam on 11 July 1957.

Following an agreement with the Republic of Portugal in 2015, on 11 July 2018, the Aga Khan officially designated the Henrique de Mendona Palace, located on Rua Marqus de Fronteira in Lisbon, as the "Diwan (seat) of the Ismaili Imamat" (Portuguese: Div do Imamato Ismaeli).[10]

Nizari Ismaili theology is the pre-eminent negative or apophatic theology of Islam because it affirms the absolute Oneness of God (tawhid) through negating all names, descriptions, conceptions, and limitations from God. The Ismaili theology of tawhid goes back to the teachings of the early Shia Imams, especially Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661), Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (d. 743), and Imam Jafar al-Sadiq (d. 765). Additionally, a number of eminent Ismaili Muslim philosophersAbu Yaqub al-Sjistani (d. 971), Jafar ibn Mansur al-Yaman (d. 960), Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. 1021), al-Muayyad al-Din Shirazi (d. 1077), Nasir-i Khusraw (d. 1088), Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani (d. 1153), Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1273)consolidated and refined the Ismaili theology of tawhid using the strongest philosophical arguments of their time. Even in the present age, Imam Shah Karim al-Husayni Aga Khan IV, the present and 49th hereditary Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, continues to stress the absolute and utter transcendence of God. At the 1975 All-Ismailia Paris Conference, the Ismaili Imam endorsed and approved the following resolution concerning the contemporary Ismaili position on the concept of God:

The absolute transcendence of God to be emphasized, and the Ismaili belief in God to be expounded in association with the general stress on the transcendence of God in the Quran, as exemplified particularly in the Surat al-Ikhlas.[11]

The Ismaili Concept of tawhid can be summarized as follows:[12]

The full recognition of tawhid, in a mode beyond human rational discourse, is a spiritual and mystical realization in the human soul and intellect called ma'rifah. In the Ismaili tariqah of Islam, the marifah of the tawhid of God is attained through the Imam of the Time. The perfect soul of the Imam of the Time always experiences the fullness of the marifah of God and his murids reach that recognition through the recognition of the Imam.[13] This is the essential role of the Imam of the time and embodied in the Ismaili Muslim daily prayer called du'a'. The Aga Khan III also alluded to this when he said that the "real miracle of Hazrat Ali is that he brought people to the Truth".

Nizaris, like all Muslims, consider the Quran, the central religious text of Islam, to be the word of God.[14] Nizaris employ tafsir (the science of Quranic commentary) for zahir, or exoteric understanding, and tawil (the Quranic poetic metre), for batin, or esoteric understanding.

Tawil stems from the Quranic root word "to return to" the original meaning of the Quran. While acknowledging the importance of both, the zahir and the batin in religion, the batin informs on how the zahir is to be practiced. More importantly, the batin guides the believer on a spiritual journey of discovery of the intangible truth (haqiqa) that engages both the intellect (''aql) and the spirit (ruh) with the ultimate destination being that of gnostic enlightenment (marifa or fana-fillah).

The word Quran means "recitation". When Muslims speak of "the Quran" in the abstract, they usually mean the scripture as recited rather than the printed work or any translation of it. For the Nizari Ismaili, the tafsir and tawil of the Quran are embodied most perfectly in the being of the Imam-i-Zaman (the Imam of the Time), due to his divinity as "the Imam from God Himself" as expressed in the third part of their Shahada.

Isma'ilism holds that there are seven pillars in Islam, each of which possesses both an exoteric ("outer" or zahir) expression and an esoteric ("inner" or batin) one.

The Foundation:

Ismailis believe in the basic principle of One God, and Prophet Muhammed is the final messenger. However, they believe that Muhammed's progeny are the rightful successors of Islam, hence, they seek guidance from "the living imam", who is a living descendant of Muhammed's family.

The Seven Pillars consist of:

Various rival approaches to the challenge that Greek rationalism posed to Quranic revelation permeated early Islamic society. The Atharis considered Kalam (reason) as contradictory to Islam, and falsafa (philosophy) as antagonistic to faith, which asserts the absolute supremacy of revelation, and the abandonment of reason in the spiritual and secular space (which are interconnected within orthodox Islam). The Mu'tazilis took a less absolutist approach, allowing for a limited role of reason (Kalam). Isma'ilis adopted an altogether more philosophical approach, in which only through reasoned discourse could one attain understanding of revelation, social structure, and individualism, as well as the functioning of the natural world. For this reason Isma'ilis produced a relatively scant collection of theological discourse in comparison to other Shia, and the Sunni. Yet they had a leading place in the development of philosophical discourse within the Islamic world.

While Nizaris subscribe to the Imami jurisprudence, they also follow in part the Ja'friyya Madhhab (school of Jurisprudence), which is believed by Shias to have been founded by Imam Ja'far as-Sadiq. Nizaris adhere to supremacy of Kalam in the interpretation of scripture, and in the temporal relativism of understanding, as opposed to fiqh (traditional legalism), which adheres to an absolutist approach to revelation.

For Nizaris, there exists a dialectic between revelation and human reasoning, based on a synergy of Islamic scripture and classical Greek philosophy, in particular Aristotelian reasoning and neoplatonic metaphysics. It seeks to extend an understanding of religion and revelation to identify the outwardly apparent (zahir), and also to penetrate to the roots, to retrieve and disclose that which is the inner underlying (batin). This process of discovery engages both the intellect ('aql) and the spirit (ruh), generating an integral synergy to illuminate and disclose truths (haqi'qat) culminating in gnosis (ma'rifat). Parallels have also been noted between the Nizari version of Imamah and the Platonic idea of a philosopher king.[16]

The present Aga Khan continued the practice of his predecessor and gave constitutions to Ism'l communities in the US, Canada, several European countries, the Persian Gulf, Syria, and Iran, following a process of consultation within each constituency. In 1986, he promulgated a World Constitution that, for the first time, brought the social governance of the worldwide Ism'l community into a single structure with built-in flexibility to account for diverse circumstances of different regions. Served by volunteers appointed by and accountable to the Imam, the Constitution functions to enable individual creativity in an ethos of group responsibility to promote the common well-being.

Like its predecessors, the present constitution is founded on adherence to the basic principles of Islam, belief in one God and Muhammad as the seal of the prophets, and on each Ism'l's spiritual allegiance to the Imm of the Time, which is separate from the secular allegiance that all Ism'ls owe as citizens to their national entities. The present Imam and his predecessor emphasized every Isml's allegiance to his or her country as a fundamental obligation. These obligations are discharged not by passive affirmation but through responsible engagement and active commitment to uphold national integrity and contribute to peaceful development.

Jama'at Khana (Persian: , from the Arabic Jamaat (congregation) and the Persian Khaneh (house)) are Isma'ili houses of prayer, study, and community. They usually contain separate spaces for prayer and a social hall for community gatherings.There are no principle architectural guidelines for Jama'at Khana, although inspiration is drawn from Islamic architecture and local architectural traditions to seamlessly and discreetly blend them with the local architectural environment, informed by a minimalist design aesthetic.

Larger Jama'at Khana are referred to as Darkhanas, or "Isma'ili Centers" in the West, and have been referred to as "Isma'ili Cathedrals" by observers. While containing prayer and social infrastructure albeit on a larger scale, they may also contain auditoriums and lecture spaces, libraries, offices, and council chambers, as they act as the regional or national governing centers for community administration.

Jama'at Khana, particularly the larger centers, offer their spaces to the community at large, and arrange guided tours. However, during the obligatory prayer (Holy Du'a) only Isma'ili are allowed to enter the prayer hall (masjid).

From the Encyclopaedia of Ismailism by Mumtaz Ali Tajddin:

In the Ismaili tariqah, the guardian of each Jamatkhana is called mukhi (in the South-Asian tradition) or Sheikh (in the Arab tradition) there are also other names that are applied based on the cultural context of the Jamat, mukhi is a word derived from mukhiya means foremost. Since the Imam physically is not present all the times in the Jamatkhana, the Mukhi acts [as the] tangible symbol of the Imam's authority. In the big jamat, the Mukhi was assisted by a caretaker called tha'nak. Later, the office of kamadia (from kamdar [meaning] accountant) was created. The Mukhi and Kamadia are the traditional titles going back to the pre-Aga Khan period when they enjoyed considerable local power. Their responsibilities include officiating over the daily rituals in the Jamatkhana, but they are primarily lay officials. Since the wholesale reorganizations undertaken by the Imams, the local committees are now tied into an elaborately hierarchical administrative structure of boards and councils.

The Fatimids adopted Green (akhdar) as the colour of their standard, which symbolized their allegiance to Ali, who, in order to thwart an assassination attempt on Muhammad, once wrapped himself in a green coverlet to appear to be Muhammad. When Hassan I Sabbah captured Alamut, it is said he hoisted the green standard over the fortress, it was later reported that Hassan I Sabbah prophesied that when the Hidden Imam made himself known he would hoist a red flag, which Hasan II did during his appearance. Following the destruction of Alamut, Isma'ili hoisted both green and red flags above the tombs of their Imams. Green and Red were combined in the 19th century Isma'ili flag known as "My Flag".[citation needed]

The Fatimids also used a white standard with gold inlays, and the Caliph Imams often wore white with gold, as Isma'ili Imams do today. Isma'ili use a gold crest on white standard to symbolize the authority of Imamate, and often wear white in the presence of their Imam.

The Rub el Hizb, an eight pointed star, is often used by Isma'ilis as a symbol.

Marriage ('ur, ) is a legal wedding contract (Nikah, ) between a consenting adult man and a woman. As a contract, it allows both parties to add certain conditions. Nizari ideals of marriage envision a long-term union.

Since marriage is not considered a sacrament, Nizari Isma'ili consider secular court marriages in the West as valid legal contracts. However many Isma'ili couples opt to have both a court marriage to secure legal recognition as well as a Nikah ceremony performed at a Jama'at Khana.

Unlike many other groups, inter-faith marriages are recognized by the community. In addition to the other Abrahamic faiths, the prevalence of Nizari Ismailis of South Asian descent has resulted in growing numbers married to those of Dharmic faiths, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, as well as other Indian religions, such as Sikhism and Zoroastrianism. The Aga Khan IV has said that he has no objection to increasingly-common mixed marriages, and has met non-Ismaili spouses and children during his various deedars throughout the world. In fact, many members of his family, including his daughter Princess Zahra Aga Khan, have married non-Ismailis in inter-faith ceremonies. Child marriages are strictly prohibited. The Aga Khan IV also condemned polygamy, except in certain circumstances.[17]

Nndi is a ceremony in which food is symbolically offered to the Imm-e Zamn, and is subsequently auctioned to the congregation. Money obtained is used for the expenses incurred in JammatKhana. The ceremony is conducted by volunteers from the community. The food is prepared at home and is brought to the Jama'at Khana; the Mukhi (congregation head) blesses the food offering, known as Mehmni, at the end of prayers, informing the congregation that it has been offered to the Imam and the benefits of it are for the whole Jamat. If no physical food offering has been brought to the Jama'at Khana, then a symbolic plate called the "Mehmni plate", which serves as a substitute, can be touched during the Du'a Karavi ceremony.

The origins of Nndi are said to be in the Prophet Muhammad's time when a similar practice occurred.[citation needed]

Nizari use an arithmetically based lunar calendar to calculate the year, unlike most Muslim communities, which rely on visual sightings. The Isma'ili calendar was developed in the Middle Ages during the Faitmid Caliphate of Imam Al-Hakim.

A lunar year contains about 354 11/30 days, Nizari Isma'ili employ a cycle of 11 leap years (kasibah) with 355 days in a 30-year cycle. The odd-numbered months contain 30 days and the even numbered months 29 days; the 12th and final month in a leap year contains 30 days.

Unlike the other branches of Islam, Nizari Isma'ilis divide the Ramadan fast into two separate, but closely related, kinds: hir awm (exoteric fasting) and bin awm (esoteric fasting). The former refers to the abstention food, drink and sensual pleasure. The latter refers to the abstention from communicating the esoteric knowledge of revelation (tanzl) and interpretation (tawl) to those who are not ready to receive it.[18]

A third kind of fasting known as aqq awm (real fasting) is the abstention from anything (in thought, word, or deed) which is contrary to the Command of God. This kind is observed year-round.[18]

The Aga Khan Development Network[19] (AKDN) was set up by the Imamate and the Ismaili community as a group of private, non-denominational development agencies that seek to empower communities and individuals, regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation, and seek to improve living conditions and opportunities within the developing world. It has active working relationships with international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), and private organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Governmental bodies the AKDN works with include the United States Agency for International Development, the Canadian International Development Agency, the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, and Germany's Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development.It's also known that the Aga Khan Development Network is funded by donations and offerings given by the followers of the Aga Khan.[20]

For a list of Ismaili Imams: Daftary, Farhad (1990). The Ismailis: Their history and doctrines. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. pp.551553. ISBN0-521-42974-9.

Originally posted here:

Nizari Isma'ilism - Wikipedia

Philosophy carried out by Jews, or in relation to the religion of Judaism

Jewish philosophy (Hebrew: ) includes all philosophy carried out by Jews, or in relation to the religion of Judaism. Until modern Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and Jewish emancipation, Jewish philosophy was preoccupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, thus organizing emergent ideas that are not necessarily Jewish into a uniquely Jewish scholastic framework and world-view. With their acceptance into modern society, Jews with secular educations embraced or developed entirely new philosophies to meet the demands of the world in which they now found themselves.

Medieval re-discovery of ancient Greek philosophy among the Geonim of 10th century Babylonian academies brought rationalist philosophy into Biblical-Talmudic Judaism. The philosophy was generally in competition with Kabbalah. Both schools would become part of classic rabbinic literature, though the decline of scholastic rationalism coincided with historical events which drew Jews to the Kabbalistic approach. For Ashkenazi Jews, emancipation and encounter with secular thought from the 18th century onwards altered how philosophy was viewed. Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities had later more ambivalent interaction with secular culture than in Western Europe. In the varied responses to modernity, Jewish philosophical ideas were developed across the range of emerging religious movements. These developments could be seen as either continuations of or breaks from the canon of rabbinic philosophy of the Middle Ages, as well as the other historical dialectic aspects of Jewish thought, and resulted in diverse contemporary Jewish attitudes to philosophical methods.

Rabbinic literature sometimes views Abraham as a philosopher. Some have suggested that Abraham introduced a philosophy learned from Melchizedek;[1] further, some Jews ascribe the Sefer Yetzirah "Book of Creation" to Abraham.[2] A midrash[3] describes how Abraham understood this world to have a creator and director by comparing this world to "a house with a light in it", what is now called the argument from design. Psalms contains invitations to admire the wisdom of God through his works; from this, some scholars suggest, Judaism harbors a Philosophical under-current.[4] Ecclesiastes is often considered to be the only genuine philosophical work in the Hebrew Bible; King Solomon, its author, seeks to understand the place of human beings in the world and life's meaning.[5]

Philo attempted to fuse and harmonize Greek and Jewish philosophy through allegory, which he learned from Jewish exegesis and Stoicism.[6] Philo attempted to make his philosophy the means of defending and justifying Jewish religious truths. These truths he regarded as fixed and determinate, and philosophy was used as an aid to truth, and a means of arriving at it. To this end Philo chose from philosophical tenets of Greeks, refusing those that did not harmonize with Judaism such as Aristotle's doctrine of the eternity and indestructibility of the world.

Dr. Bernard Revel, in dissertation on Karaite halakha, points to writings of a 10th-century Karaite, Jacob Qirqisani, who quotes Philo, illustrating how Karaites made use of Philo's works in development of Karaite Judaism. Philo's works became important to Medieval Christian scholars who leveraged the work of Karaites to lend credence to their claims that "these are the beliefs of Jews" - a technically correct, yet deceptive, attribution.

With the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Second Temple Judaism was in disarray,[7] but Jewish traditions were preserved especially thanks to the shrewd maneuvers of Johanan ben Zakai, who saved the Sanhedrin and moved it to Yavne. Philosophical speculation was not a central part of Rabbinic Judaism, although some have seen the Mishnah as a philosophical work.[8] Rabbi Akiva has also been viewed as a philosophical figure.[9] His statements include:

After the Bar Kokhba revolt, rabbinic scholars gathered in Tiberias and Safed to re-assemble and re-assess Judaism, its laws, theology, liturgy, beliefs and leadership structure. In 219 CE, the Sura Academy (from which Jewish Kalam emerged many centuries later) was founded by Abba Arika. For the next five centuries, Talmudic academies focused upon reconstituting Judaism and little, if any, philosophic investigation was pursued.[citation needed]

Rabbinic Judaism had limited philosophical activity until it was challenged by Islam, Karaite Judaism, and Christianitywith Tanach, Mishnah, and Talmud, there was no need for a philosophic framework. From an economic viewpoint, Radhanite trade dominance was being usurped by coordinated Christian and Islamic forced-conversions, and torture, compelling Jewish scholars to understand nascent economic threats. These investigations triggered new ideas and intellectual exchange among Jewish and Islamic scholars in the areas of jurisprudence, mathematics, astronomy, logic and philosophy. Jewish scholars influenced Islamic scholars and Islamic scholars influenced Jewish scholars. Contemporary scholars continue to debate who was Muslim and who was Jewsome "Islamic scholars" were "Jewish scholars" prior to forced conversion to Islam, some Jewish scholars willingly converted to Islam, such as Abdullah ibn Salam, while others later reverted to Judaism, and still others, born and raised as Jews, were ambiguous in their religious beliefs such as ibn al-Rawandi, although they lived according to the customs of their neighbors.[citation needed]

Around 700 CE, Amr ibn Ubayd Abu Uthman al-Basri introduces two streams of thought that influence Jewish, Islamic and Christian scholars:

The story of the Bahshamiyya Mutazila and Qadariyah is as important, if not more so, as the intellectual symbiosis of Judaism and Islam in Islamic Spain.

Around 733 CE, Mar Natronai ben Habibai moves to Kairouan, then to Spain, transcribing the Talmud Bavli for the Academy at Kairouan from memorylater taking a copy with him to Spain.[10]

Borrowing from the Mutakallamin of Basra, the Karaites were the first Jewish group to subject Judaism to Mutazila. Rejecting the Talmud and rabbinical tradition, Karaites took liberty to reinterpret the Tanakh. This meant abandoning foundational Jewish belief structures. Some scholars suggest that the major impetus for the formation of Karaism was a reaction to the rapid rise of Shi'i Islam, which recognized Judaism as a fellow monotheistic faith but claimed that it detracted from monotheism by deferring to rabbinic authority. Karaites absorbed certain aspects of Jewish sects such as the followers of Abu Isa (Shi'ism), Maliki (Sunnis) and Yudghanites (Sufis), who were influenced by East-Islamic scholarship yet deferred to the Ash'ari when contemplating the sciences.[citation needed]

The spread of Islam throughout the Middle East and North Africa rendered Muslim all that was once Jewish. Greek philosophy, science, medicine and mathematics was absorbed by Jewish scholars living in the Arab world due to Arabic translations of those texts; remnants of the Library of Alexandria. Early Jewish converts to Islam brought with them stories from their heritage, known as Isra'iliyyat, which told of the Banu Isra'il, the pious men of ancient Israel. One of the most famous early mystics of Sufism, Hasan of Basra, introduced numerous Isra'iliyyat legends into Islamic scholarship, stories that went on to become representative of Islamic mystical ideas of piety of Sufism.

Hai Gaon of Pumbedita Academy begins a new phase in Jewish scholarship and investigation (hakirah); Hai Gaon augments Talmudic scholarship with non-Jewish studies. Hai Gaon was a savant with an exact knowledge of the theological movements of his time so much so that Moses ibn Ezra called him a mutakallim. Hai was competent to argue with followers of Qadariyyah and Mutazilites, sometimes adopting their polemic methods. Through correspondence with Talmudic Academies at Kairouan, Cordoba and Lucena, Hai Gaon passes along his discoveries to Talmudic scholars therein.

The teachings of the Brethren of Purity were carried to the West by the Cordovan hadith scholar and alchemist Maslama al-Qurub (died 964),[11] where they would be of central importance to the Jewish philosophers of Islamic Spain. One of the themes emphasized by the Brethren of Purity and adopted by most Spanish Jewish philosophers is the microcosm-macrocosm analogy.[12] From the 10th century on, Spain became a center of philosophical learning as is reflected by the explosion of philosophical inquiry among Jews, Muslims and Christians.[13]

According to Sa'adya Gaon, the Jewish community of Balkh (Afghanistan) was divided into two groups: "Jews" and "people that are called Jews"; Hiwi al-Balkhi was a member of the latter. Hiwi is generally considered to be the very first "Jewish" philosopher to subject the Pentateuch to critical analysis.[14] Hiwi is viewed by some scholars as an intellectually conflicted man torn between Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Gnostic Christianity, and Manichaean thought.[15][16]

Hiwi espoused the belief that miraculous acts, described in the Pentateuch, are simply examples of people using their skills of reasoning to undertake, and perform, seemingly miraculous acts.[17] As examples of this position, he argued that the parting of the Red Sea was a natural phenomenon, and that Moses' claim to greatness lay merely in his ability to calculate the right moment for the crossing. He also emphasized that the Egyptian magicians were able to reproduce several of Moses' "miracles," proving that they could not have been so unique. According to scholars, Hiwi's gravest mistake was having the Pentateuch redacted to reflect his own views - then had those redacted texts, which became popular, distributed to children.[18] Since his views contradicted the views of both Rabbanite and Karaite scholars, Hiwi was declared a heretic. In this context, however, we can also regard Hiwi, while flawed, as the very first critical biblical commentator; zealous rationalistic views of Hiwi parallel those of Ibn al-Rawandi.

Saadya Gaon dedicated an entire treatise, written in rhyming Hebrew, to a refutation of w's arguments, two fragments of which, preserved in the Cairo Geniza, have been published (Davidson, 1915; Schirmann, 1965).[19] w's criticisms are also noted in Abraham ibn Ezra's commentary on the Pentateuch. Sa'adya Gaon denounced Hiwi as an extreme rationalist, a "Mulhidun", or atheist/deviator. Abraham Ibn Daud described HIwi as a sectarian who "denied the Torah, yet used it to formulate a new Torah of his liking".[20]

Saadia Gaon, son of a proselyte, is considered the greatest early Jewish philosopher after Solomon. During his early years in Tulunid Egypt, the Fatimid Caliphate ruled Egypt; the leaders of the Tulunids were Ismaili Imams. Their influence upon the Jewish academies of Egypt resonate in the works of Sa'adya. Sa'adya's Emunoth ve-Deoth ("Beliefs and Opinions") was originally called Kitab al-Amanat wal-l'tikadat ("Book of the Articles of Faith and Doctrines of Dogma"); it was the first systematic presentation and philosophic foundation of the dogmas of Judaism, completed at Sura Academy in 933 CE.

Little known is that Saadia traveled to Tiberias in 915CE to study with Ab 'l-Kathr Yay ibn Zakariyy al-Katib al-Tabari (Tiberias), a Jewish theologian and Bible translator from Tiberias whose main claim to fame is the fact that Saadia Gaon studied with him at some point. He is not mentioned in any Jewish source, and apart from the Andalusian heresiographer and polemicist Ibn Hazm, who mentions him as a Jewish mutakallim (rational theologian), our main source of information is the Kitb al-Tanbh by the Muslim historian al-Masd (d. 956). In his brief survey of Arabic translations of the Bible, al-Masd states that the Israelites rely for exegesis and translation of the Hebrew booksi.e., the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, twenty-four books in all, he sayson a number of Israelites whom they praise highly, almost all of whom he has met in person. He mentions Ab l-Kathr as one of them, and also Saadia ("Sad ibn Yaqb al-Fayym"). Regardless of what we do not know, Saadia traveled to Tiberias (home of the learned scribes and exegetes) to learn and he chose Ab 'l-Kathr Yay ibn Zakariyy al-Katib al-Tabariya. The extent of Ab l-Kathr's influence on Saadia's thought cannot be established, however.[21]

Ab l-Kathr's profession is also unclear. al-Masd calls him a ktib, which has been variously interpreted as secretary, government official, (biblical) scribe, Masorete, and book copyist. For lack of further information, some scholars have tried to identify Ab l-Kathr with the Hebrew grammarian Ab Al Judah ben Alln, likewise of Tiberias, who seems to have been a Karaite Jew. However, al-Masd unequivocally describes Abu l-Kathr (as well as his student Saadia) as an ashmath (Rabbanite).

In "Book of the Articles of Faith and Doctrines of Dogma" Saadia declares the rationality of the Jewish religion with the caveat that reason must capitulate wherever it contradicts tradition. Dogma takes precedence over reason. Saadia closely followed the rules of the Mutazila school of Abu Ali al-Jubba'i in composing his works.[22][23] It was Saadia who laid foundations for Jewish rationalist theology which built upon the work of the Mutazila, thereby shifting Rabbinic Judaism from mythical explanations of the rabbis to reasoned explanations of the intellect. Saadia advanced the criticisms of Mutazila by Ibn al-Rawandi.[24]

David ibn Merwan al-Mukkamas was author of the earliest known Jewish philosophical work of the Middle Ages, a commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah; he is regarded as the father of Jewish medieval philosophy. Sl-Mukkamas was first to introduce the methods of Kalam into Judaism and the first Jew to mention Aristotle in his writings. He was a proselyte of Rabbinic Judaism (not Karaite Judaism, as some argue); al-Mukkamas was a student of physician, and renowned Christian philosopher, Hana. His close interaction with Hana, and his familial affiliation with Islam gave al-Mukkamas a unique view of religious belief and theology.

In 1898 Abraham Harkavy discovered, in Imperial Library of St. Petersburg, fifteen of the twenty chapters of David's philosophical work entitled Ishrun Maalat (Twenty Chapters) of which 15 survive. One of the oldest surviving witnesses to early Kalm, it begins with epistemological investigations, turns to proofs of the creation of the world and the subsequent existence of a Creator, discusses the unity of the Creator (including the divine attributes), and concludes with theodicy (humanity and revelation) and a refutation of other religions (mostly lost).

In 915 CE, Sa'adya Gaon left for Palestine, where, according to al-Masd (Tanbh, 113), he perfected his education at the feet of Ab 'l-Kathr Yay ibn Zakariyy al-Katib al-Tabari (d. 320/932). The latter is also mentioned by Ibn azm in his K. al-Filal wa 'l-nial, iii, 171, as being, together with Dwd ibn Marwn al-Muqammi and Sa'adya himself, one of the mutakallimn of the Jews.[25]

Since al-Muqammi made few references to specifically Jewish issues and very little of his work was translated from Arabic into Hebrew, he was largely forgotten by Jewish tradition. Nonetheless, he had a significant impact on subsequent Jewish philosophical followers of the Kalm, such as Saadya Gaon.[26]

Samuel ibn Naghrillah, born in Mrida, Spain, lived in Crdoba and was a child prodigy and student of Hanoch ben Moshe. Samuel ibn Naghrillah, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, and Moshe ben Hanoch founded the Lucena Yeshiva that produced such brilliant scholars as Isaac ibn Ghiyyat and Maimon ben Yosef, the father of Maimonides. Ibn Naghrillah's son, Yosef, provided refuge for two sons of Hezekiah Gaon; Daud Ibn Chizkiya Gaon Ha-Nasi and Yitzhak Ibn Chizkiya Gaon Ha-Nasi. Though not a philosopher, he did build the infrastructure to allow philosophers to thrive. In 1070 the gaon Isaac ben Moses ibn Sakri of Denia, Spain traveled to the East and acted as rosh yeshivah of the Baghdad Academy.

Solomon ibn Gabirol was born in Mlaga then moved to Valencia. Ibn Gabirol was one of the first teachers of Neoplatonism in Europe. His role has been compared to that of Philo. Ibn Gabirol occidentalized Greco-Arabic philosophy and restored it to Europe. The philosophical teachings of Philo and ibn Gabirol were largely ignored by fellow Jews; the parallel may be extended by adding that Philo and ibn Gabirol both exercised considerable influence in secular circles; Philo upon early Christianity and Ibn Gabirol upon the scholars of medieval Christianity. Christian scholars, including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, defer to him frequently.

Abraham bar Hiyya, of Barcelona and later Arles-Provence, was a student of his father Hiyya al-Daudi and one of the most important figures in the scientific movement which made the Jews of Provence, Spain and Italy the intermediaries between Averroism, Mutazila and Christian Europe. He aided this scientific movement by original works, translations and as interpreter for another translator, Plato Tiburtinus. Bar-Hiyya's best student was v.[clarification needed] His philosophical works are "Meditation of the Soul", an ethical work written from a rationalistic religious viewpoint, and an apologetic epistle addressed to Judah ben Barzillai.

Originally known by his Hebrew name Nethanel Baruch ben Melech al-Balad,[27] Abu'l-Barakt al-Baghdd, known as Hibat Allah, was a Jewish philosopher and physicist and father-in-law of Maimonides who converted to Islam in his twilight years - once head of the Baghdad Yeshiva and considered the leading philosopher of Iraq.

Historians differ over the motive for his conversion to Islam. Some suggest it was a reaction to a social slight inflicted upon him because he was a Jew, while others suggest he was forcibly converted at the edge of a sword (which prompted Maimonides to comment upon Anusim). Despite his conversion to Islam, his works continued to be studied at the Jewish Baghdad Academy, a well-known academy, into the thirteenth century. He was a follower of Avicenna's teaching, who proposed an explanation of the acceleration of falling bodies by the accumulation of successive increments of power with successive increments of velocity.

His writings include Kitb al-Mutabar ("The Book of What Has Been Established by Personal Reflection"); a philosophical commentary on the Kohelet, written in Arabic using Hebrew aleph bet; and the treatise "On the Reason Why the Stars Are Visible at Night and Hidden in Daytime." According to Hibat Allah, Kitb al-Mutabar consists in the main of critical remarks jotted down by him over the years while reading philosophical text, and published at the insistence of his friends, in the form of a philosophical work.

Natan'el al-Fayyumi[28] of Yemen, was the twelfth-century author of Bustan al-Uqul ("Garden of Intellects"), a Jewish version of Ismaili Shi'i doctrines. Like the Ismailis, Natan'el al-Fayyumi argued that God sent different prophets to various nations of the world, containing legislations suited to the particular temperament of each individual nation. Ismaili doctrine holds that a single universal religious truth lies at the root of the different religions. Some Jews accepted this model of religious pluralism, leading them to view Muhammad as a legitimate prophet, though not Jewish, sent to preach to the Arabs, just as the Hebrew prophets had been sent to deliver their messages to Israel; others refused this notion in entirety.

Bahye ben Yosef Ibn Paquda, of Zaragoza, was author of the first Jewish system of ethics Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-hulub, ("Guide to the Duties of the Heart"). Bahya often followed the method of the Arabian encyclopedists known as "the Brethren of Purity" but adopts some of Sufi tenets rather than Ismaili. According to Bahya, the Torah appeals to reason and knowledge as proofs of God's existence. It is therefore a duty incumbent upon every one to make God an object of speculative reason and knowledge, in order to arrive at true faith. Baya borrows from Sufism and Jewish Kalam integrating them into Neoplatonism. Proof that Bahya borrowed from Sufism is underscored by the fact that the title of his eighth gate, Muasabat al-Nafs ("Self-Examination"), is reminiscent of the Sufi Abu Abd Allah arith Ibn-Asad, who has been surnamed El Muasib ("the self-examiner"), becausesay his biographers"he was always immersed in introspection"[29]

Judah Halevi of Toledo, Spain defended Rabbinic Judaism against Islam, Christianity and Karaite Judaism. He was a student of Moses ibn Ezra whose education came from Isaac ibn Ghiyyat; trained as a Rationalist, he shed it in favor of Neoplatonism. Like al-Ghazali, Judah Halevi attempted to liberate religion from the bondage of philosophical systems. In particular, in a work written in Arabic Kitab al-ujjah wal-Dalil fi Nur al-Din al-Dhalil, translated by Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon, by the title Kuzari he elaborates upon his views of Judaism relative to other religions of the time.

Abraham ibn Daud was a student of Rabbi Baruch ben Yitzhak Ibn Albalia, his maternal uncle. Ibn Daud's philosophical work written in Arabic, Al-'akidah al-Rafiyah ("The Sublime Faith"), has been preserved in Hebrew by the title Emunah Ramah. Ibn Daud did not introduce a new philosophy, but he was the first to introduce a more thorough systematic form derived from Aristotle. Accordingly, Hasdai Crescas mentions Ibn Daud as the only Jewish philosopher among the predecessors of Maimonides.[30] Overshadowed by Maimonides, ibn Daud's Emunah Ramah, a work to which Maimonides was indebted, received little notice from later philosophers. "True philosophy", according to Ibn Daud, "does not entice us from religion; it tends rather to strengthen and solidify it. Moreover, it is the duty of every thinking Jew to become acquainted with the harmony existing between the fundamental doctrines of Judaism and those of philosophy, and, wherever they seem to contradict one another, to seek a mode of reconciling them".

Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed his most influential philosophic work. He was a student of his father, Rabbi Maimon ben Yosef (a student of Joseph ibn Migash) in Cordoba, Spain. When his family fled Spain, for Fez, Maimonides enrolled in the Academy of Fez and studied under Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Kohen Ibn Soussan a student of Isaac Alfasi. Maimonides strove to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and science with the teachings of Torah. In some ways his position was parallel to that of Averroes; in reaction to the attacks on Avicennian Aristotelism, Maimonides embraced and defended a stricter Aristotelism without Neoplatonic additions. The principles which inspired all of Maimonides' philosophical activity was identical those of Abraham Ibn Daud: there can be no contradiction between the truths which God has revealed and the findings of the human intellect in science and philosophy. Maimonides departed from the teachings of Aristotle by suggesting that the world is not eternal, as Aristotle taught, but was created ex nihilo. In "Guide for the Perplexed" (1:17 & 2:11)" Maimonides explains that Israel lost its Mesorah in exile, and with it "we lost our science and philosophy only to be rejuvenated in Al Andalus within the context of interaction and intellectual investigation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts.

Maimonides writings almost immediately came under attack from Karaites, Dominican Christians, Tosafists of Provence, Ashkenaz and Al Andalus. Scholars suggest that Maimonides instigated the Maimonidean Controversy when he verbally attacked Samuel ben Ali ("Gaon of Baghdad") as "one whom people accustom from his youth to believe that there is none like him in his generation," and he sharply attacked the "monetary demands" of the academies. Samuel ben Ali was an anti-Maimonidean operating in Babylon to undermine the works of Maimonides and those of Maimonides' patrons (the Al-Constantini family from North Africa). To illustrate the reach of the Maimonidean Controversy, Samuel ben Ali, the chief opponent of Maimonides in the East, was excommunicated by Daud Ibn Hodaya al Daudi (Exilarch of Mosul). Maimonides' attacks on Samuel ben Ali may not have been entirely altruistic given the position of Maimonides' in-laws in competing Yeshivas.

In Western Europe, the controversy was halted by the burning of Maimonides' works by Christian Dominicans in 1232. Avraham son of Rambam, continued fighting for his father's beliefs in the East; desecration of Maimonides' tomb, at Tiberias by Jews, was a profound shock to Jews throughout the Diaspora and caused all to pause and reflect upon what was being done to the fabric of Jewish culture. This compelled many anti-Maimonideans to recant their assertions and realize what cooperation with Christians meant to them, their texts and their communities.

Maimonidean controversy flared up again[31] at the beginning of the fourteenth century when Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet, under influence from Asher ben Jehiel, issued a cherem on "any member of the community who, being under twenty-five years, shall study the works of the Greeks on natural science and metaphysics."

Contemporary Kabbalists, Tosafists and Rationalists continue to engage in lively, sometimes caustic, debate in support of their positions and influence in the Jewish world. At the center of many of these debates are "Guide for the Perplexed", "13 Principles of Faith", "Mishnah Torah", and his commentary on Anusim.

Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta was the son of Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Kohen Ibn Soussan and a student of Maimonides for whom the Guide for the Perplexed is written. Yosef traveled from Alexandria to Fustat to study logic, mathematics, and astronomy under Maimonides. Philosophically, Yosef's dissertation, in Arabic, on the problem of "Creation" is suspected to have been written before contact with Maimonides. It is entitled Ma'amar bimehuyav ha-metsiut ve'eykhut sidur ha-devarim mimenu vehidush ha'olam ("A Treatise as to (1) Necessary Existence (2) The Procedure of Things from the Necessary Existence and (3) The Creation of the World").

Jacob Anatoli is generally regarded as a pioneer in the application of the Maimonidean Rationalism to the study of Jewish texts. He was the son-in-law of Samuel ibn Tibbon, translator of Maimonides. Due to these family ties Anatoli was introduced to the philosophy of Maimonides, the study of which was such a great revelation to him that he, in later days, referred to it as the beginning of his intelligent and true comprehension of the Scriptures, while he frequently alluded to Ibn Tibbon as one of the two masters who had instructed and inspired him. Anatoli wrote the Malmad exhibiting his broad knowledge of classic Jewish exegetes, as well as Plato, Aristotle, Averroes, and the Vulgate, as well as with a large number of Christian institutions, some of which he ventures to criticize, such as celibacy and monastic castigation, as well as certain heretics and he repeatedly appeals to his readers for a broader cultivation of the classic languages and the non-Jewish branches of learning. To Anatoli all men are, in truth, formed in the image of God, although the Jews stand under a particular obligation to further the true cognition of God simply by reason of their election, "the Greeks had chosen wisdom as their pursuit; the Romans, power; and the Jews, religiousness"

Firstly, Hillel ben Samuel's importance in the history of medieval Jewish philosophy lies in his attempt to deal, systematically, with the question of the immortality of the soul. Secondly, Hillel played a major role in the controversies of 128990 concerning the philosophical works of Maimonides. Thirdly, Hillel was the first devotee of Jewish learning and Philosophy in Italy, bringing a close to a period of relative ignorance of Hakira in Verona (Italy). And finally, Hillel is one of the early Latin translators of "the wise men of the nations" (non-Jewish scholars).

Defending Maimonides, Hillel addressed a letter to his friend Maestro Gaio asking him to use his influence with the Jews of Rome against Maimonides' opponents (Solomon Petit). He also advanced the bold idea of gathering together Maimonides' defenders and opponents in Alexandria, in order to bring the controversy before a court of Babylonian rabbis, whose decision would be binding on both factions. Hillel was certain the verdict would favor Maimonides.

Hillel wrote a commentary on the 25 propositions appearing at the beginning of the second part of the Guide of the Perplexed, and three philosophical treatises, which were appended to Tagmulei ha-Nefesh: the first on knowledge and free will; the second on the question of why mortality resulted from the sin of Adam; the third on whether or not the belief in the fallen angels is a true belief.

Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera was a Spanish-born philosopher who pursued reconciliation between Jewish dogma and philosophy. Scholars speculate he was a student of Rabbi David Kimhi whose family fled Spain to Narbonne.[32] Ibn Falaquera lived an ascetic live of solitude.[33] Ibn Falaquera's two leading philosophic authorities were Averroes and Maimonides. Ibn Falaquera defended the "Guide for the Perplexed" against attacks of anti-Maimonideans.[34] He knew the works of the Islamic philosophers better than any Jewish scholar of his time, and made many of them available to other Jewish scholars often without attribution (Reshit Hokhmah). Ibn Falaquera did not hesitate to modify Islamic philosophic texts when it suited his purposes. For example, Ibn Falaquera turned Alfarabi's account of the origin of philosophic religion into a discussion of the origin of the "virtuous city". Ibn Falaquera's other works include, but are not limited to Iggeret Hanhagat ha-Guf we ha-Nefesh, a treatise in verse on the control of the body and the soul.

Ibn Kaspi was a fierce advocate of Maimonides to such an extent that he left for Egypt in 1314 in order to hear explanations on the latter's Guide of the Perplexed from Maimonides' grandchildren. When he heard that the Guide of the Perplexed was being studied in the Muslim philosophical schools of Fez, he left for that town (in 1332) in order to observe their method of study.

Ibn Kaspi began writing when he was 17 years old on topics which included logic, linguistics, ethics, theology, biblical exegesis, and super-commentaries to Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides. Philosophic systems he followed were Aristotle's and Averroes'. He defines his aim as "not to be a fool who believes in everything, but only in that which can be verified by proof...and not to be of the second unthinking category which disbelieves from the start of its inquiry," since "certain things must be accepted by tradition, because they cannot be proven." Scholars continue to debate whether ibn Kaspi was a heretic or one of Judaisms most illustrious scholars.

Rabbi Levi ben Gershon was a student of his father Gerson ben Solomon of Arles, who in turn was a student of Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera. Gersonides is best known for his work Milhamot HaShem ("Wars of the Lord"). Milhamot HaShem is modelled after the "Guide for the Perplexed". Gersonides and his father were avid students of the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aristotle, Empedocles, Galen, Hippocrates, Homer, Plato, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Themistius, Theophrastus, Ali ibn Abbas al-Magusi, Ali ibn Ridwan, Averroes, Avicenna, Qusta ibn Luqa, Al-Farabi, Al-Fergani, Chonain, Isaac Israeli, Ibn Tufail, Ibn Zuhr, Isaac Alfasi, and Maimonides.[citation needed] Gersonides held that God does not have complete foreknowledge of human acts. "Gersonides, bothered by the old question of how God's foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom, suggests that what God knows beforehand is all the choices open to each individual. God does not know, however, which choice the individual, in his freedom, will make."[35]

Moses ben Joshua composed commentaries on Islamic philosophical works. As an admirer of Averroes, he devoted a great deal of study to his works and wrote commentaries on a number of them. His best-known work is his Shelemut ha-Nefesh ("Treatise on the Perfection of the Soul"). Moses began studying philosophy with his father when he was thirteen later studying with Moses ben David Caslari and Abraham ben David Caslari - both of whom were students of Kalonymus ben Kalonymus. Moses believed that Judaism was a guide to the highest degree of theoretical and moral truth. He believed that the Torah had both a simple, direct meaning accessible to the average reader as well as a deeper, metaphysical meaning accessible to thinkers. Moses rejected the belief in miracles, instead believing they could be explained, and defended man's free will by philosophical arguments.

Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet, of Barcelona, studied under Hasdai Crescas and Rabbi Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi. Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi was a steadfast Rationalist who did not hesitate to refute leading authorities, such as Rashi, Rabbeinu Tam, Moses ben Nahman, and Solomon ben Adret. The pogroms of 1391, against Jews of Spain, forced Isaac to flee to Algiers - where he lived out his life. Isaac's responsa evidence a profound knowledge of the philosophical writings of his time; in one of Responsa No. 118 he explains the difference between the opinion of Gersonides and that of Abraham ben David of Posquires on free will, and gives his own views on the subject. He was an adversary of Kabbalah who never spoke of the Sefirot; he quotes another philosopher when reproaching kabbalists with "believing in the "Ten" (Sefirot) as the Christians believe in the Trinity".[36]

Hasdai Crescas, of Barcelona, was a leading rationalist on issues of natural law and free-will. His views can be seen as precursors to Baruch Spinoza's. His work, Or Adonai, became a classic refutation of medieval Aristotelianism, and harbinger of the scientific revolution in the 16th century. Hasdai Crescas was a student of Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi, who in turn was a student of Reuben ben Nissim Gerondi. Crescas was a rabbi and the head of the Jewish community of Aragon, and in some ways of all Hispanic Jewry, during one of its most critical periods.[37] Among his fellow students and friends, his best friend was Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet. Crescas' students won accolades as participants in the Disputation of Tortosa.

Influenced by the teaching of Rabbi Nissim of Gerona, via Ephraim Vidal's Yeshiva in Majorca, Duran's commentary Magen Avot ("The Shield of the Fathers"), which influenced Joseph Albo, is important. He was also a student of philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and especially of medicine, which he practiced for a number of years at Palma, in Majorca. Magen Avot deals with concepts such as the nature of God, the eternity of the Torah, the coming of the Messiah, and the Resurrection of the dead. Duran believed that Judaism has three dogmas only: the existence of God, the Torah's Divine origin, and Reward and Punishment; in this regard he was followed by Joseph Albo.

Joseph Albo, of Monreal, was a student of Hasdai Crescas. He wrote Sefer ha-Ikkarim ("Book of Principles"), a classic work on the fundamentals of Judaism. Albo narrows the fundamental Jewish principles of faith from thirteen to three -

Albo rejects the assumption that creation ex nihilo is essential in belief in God. Albo freely criticizes Maimonides' thirteen principles of belief and Crescas' six principles. According to Albo, "belief in the Messiah is only a 'twig' unnecessary to the soundness of the trunk"; not essential to Judaism. Nor is it true, according to Albo, that every law is binding. Although every ordinance has the power of conferring happiness in its observance, it is not true that every law must be observed, or that through the neglect of a part of the law, a Jew would violate the divine covenant or be damned. Contemporary Orthodox Jews, however, vehemently disagree with Albo's position believing that all Jews are divinely obligated to fulfill every applicable commandment.

Hoter ben Shlomo was a scholar and philosopher in Yemen heavily influenced by Nethanel ben al-Fayyumi, Maimonides, Saadia Gaon and al-Ghazali. The connection between the "Epistle of the Brethren of Purity" and Ismailism suggests the adoption of this work as one of the main sources of what would become known as "Jewish Ismailism" as found in Late Medieval Yemenite Judaism. "Jewish Ismailism" consisted of adapting, to Judaism, a few Ismaili doctrines about cosmology, prophecy, and hermeneutics. There are many examples of the Brethren of Purity influencing Yemenite Jewish philosophers and authors in the period 11501550.[38] Some traces of Brethren of Purity doctrines, as well as of their numerology, are found in two Yemenite philosophical midrashim written in 14201430: Midrash ha-hefez ("The Glad Learning") by Zerahyah ha-Rof (a/k/a Yahya al-Tabib) and the Siraj al-'uqul ("Lamp of Intellects") by Hoter ben Solomon.

Isaac Abravanel, statesman, philosopher, Bible commentator, and financier who commented on Maimonides' thirteen principles in his Rosh Amanah. Isaac Abravanel was steeped in Rationalism by the Ibn Yahya family, who had a residence immediately adjacent to the Great Synagogue of Lisbon (also built by the Ibn Yahya Family). His most important work, Rosh Amanah ("The Pinnacle of Faith"), defends Maimonides' thirteen articles of belief against attacks of Hasdai Crescas and Yosef Albo. Rosh Amanah ends with the statement that "Maimonides compiled these articles merely in accordance with the fashion of other nations, which set up axioms or fundamental principles for their science".

Isaac Abravanel was born and raised in Lisbon; a student of the Rabbi of Lisbon, Yosef ben Shlomo Ibn Yahya.[39] Rabbi Yosef was a poet, religious scholar, rebuilder of Ibn Yahya Synagogue of Calatayud, well versed in rabbinic literature and in the learning of his time, devoting his early years to the study of Jewish philosophy. The Ibn Yahya family were renowned physicians, philosophers and accomplished aides to the Portuguese Monarchy for centuries.

Isaac's grandfather, Samuel Abravanel, was forcibly converted to Christianity during the pogroms of 1391 and took the Spanish name "Juan Sanchez de Sevilla". Samuel fled Castile-Len, Spain, in 1397 for Lisbon, Portugal, and reverted to Judaism - shedding his Converso after living among Christians for six years. Conversions outside Judaism, coerced or otherwise, had a strong impact upon young Isaac, later compelling him to forfeit his immense wealth in an attempt to redeem Iberian Jewry from coercion of the Alhambra Decree. There are parallels between what he writes, and documents produced by Inquisitors, that present conversos as ambivalent to Christianity and sometimes even ironic in their expressions regarding their new religion - crypto-jews.

Judah Leon Abravanel was a Portuguese physician, poet and philosopher. His work Dialoghi d'amore ("Dialogues of Love"), written in Italian, was one of the most important philosophical works of his time. In an attempt to circumvent a plot, hatched by local Catholic Bishops to kidnap his son, Judah sent his son from Castile, to Portugal with a nurse, but by order of the king, the son was seized and baptized. This was a devastating insult to Judah and his family, and was a source of bitterness throughout Judah's life and the topic of his writings years later; especially since this was not the first time the Abravanel Family was subjected to such embarrassment at the hands of the Catholic Church.

Judah's Dialoghi is regarded as the finest of Humanistic Period works. His neoplatonism is derived from the Hispanic Jewish community, especially the works of Ibn Gabirol. Platonic notions of reaching towards a nearly impossible ideal of beauty, wisdom, and perfection encompass the whole of his work. In Dialoghi d'amore, Judah defines love in philosophical terms. He structures his three dialogues as a conversation between two abstract "characters": Philo, representing love or appetite, and Sophia, representing science or wisdom, Philo+Sophia (philosophia).

The word "Kabbalah" was used in medieval Jewish texts to mean "tradition", see Abraham Ibn Daud's Sefer Ha-Qabbalah also known as the "Book of our Tradition". "Book of our Tradition" does not refer to mysticism of any kind - it chronicles "our tradition of scholarship and study" in two Babylonian Academies, through the Geonim, into Talmudic Yeshivas of Spain. In Talmudic times there was a mystic tradition in Judaism, known as Maaseh Bereshith (the work of creation) and Maaseh Merkavah (the work of the chariot); Maimonides interprets these texts as referring to Aristotelian physics and metaphysics as interpreted in the light of Torah.

In the 13th century, however, a mystical-esoteric system emerged which became known as "the Kabbalah". Many of the beliefs associated with Kabbalah had long been rejected by philosophers. Saadia Gaon had taught in his book Emunot v'Deot that Jews who believe in gilgul have adopted a non-Jewish belief. Maimonides rejected many texts of Heichalot, particularly Shi'ur Qomah whose anthropomorphic vision of God he considered heretical.

In the 13th century, Meir ben Simon of Narbonne wrote an epistle (included in Milhhemet Mitzvah) against early Kabbalists, singled out Sefer Bahir, rejecting the attribution of its authorship to the tanna R. Nehhunya ben ha-Kanah and describing some of its content:

... And we have heard that a book had already been written for them, which they call Bahir, that is 'bright' but no light shines through it. This book has come into our hands and we have found that they falsely attribute it to Rabbi Nehunya ben Haqqanah. haShem forbid! There is no truth in this... The language of the book and its whole content show that it is the work of someone who lacked command of either literary language or good style, and in many passages it contains words which are out and out heresy.

Some of the Monarchies of Asia Minor and European welcomed expelled Jewish Merchants, scholars and theologians. Divergent Jewish philosophies evolved against the backdrop of new cultures, new languages and renewed theological exchange. Philosophic exploration continued through the Renaissance period as the center-of-mass of Jewish Scholarship shifted to France, Germany, Italy, and Turkey.

Elia del Medigo was a descendant of Judah ben Eliezer ha-Levi Minz and Moses ben Isaac ha-Levi Minz. Eli'ezer del Medigo, of Rome, received the surname "Del Medigo" after studying medicine. The name was later changed from Del Medigo to Ha-rofeh. He was the father and teacher of a long line of rationalist philosophers and scholars. Non-Jewish students of Delmedigo classified him as an "Averroist", however, he saw himself as a follower of Maimonides. Scholastic association of Maimonides and Ibn Rushd would have been a natural one; Maimonides, towards the end of his life, was impressed with the Ibn Rushd commentaries and recommended them to his students. The followers of Maimonides (Maimonideans) had therefore been, for several generations before Delmedigo, the leading users, translators and disseminators of the works of Ibn Rushd in Jewish circles, and advocates for Ibn Rushd even after Islamic rejection of his radical views. Maimonideans regarded Maimonides and Ibn Rushd as following the same general line. In his book, Delmedigo portrays himself as defender of Maimonidean Judaism, and like many Maimonideans he emphasized the rationality of Jewish tradition.

Moses Almosnino was born Thessaloniki 1515 - died Constantinople abt 1580. He was a student of Levi Ibn Habib, who was in turn a student of Jacob ibn Habib, who was, in turn, a student of Nissim ben Reuben. In 1570 he wrote a commentary on the Pentateuch titled "Yede Mosheh" (The Hands of Moses); also an exposition of the Talmudical treatise "Abot" (Ethics of the Fathers), published in Salonica in 1563; and a collection of sermons delivered upon various occasions, particularly funeral orations, entitled "Meamme Koa" (Re-enforcing Strength).

al-Ghazl's Intentions of the Philosophers (De't ha-Flsfm or Kavvant ha-Flsfm) was one of the most widespread philosophical texts studied among Jews in Europe having been translated in 1292 by Isaac Albalag.[40] Later Hebrew commentators include Moses Narboni, and Moses Almosnino.

Moses ben Jehiel Ha-Kohen Porto-Rafa (Rapaport), was a member of the German family "Rafa" (from whom the Delmedigo family originates) that settled in the town of Porto in the vicinity of Verona, Italy, and became the progenitors of the renowned Rapaport rabbinic family. In 1602 Moses served as rabbi of Badia Polesine in Piedmont. Moses was a friend of Leon Modena.[41]

Abraham ben Judah ha-Levi Minz was an Italian rabbi who flourished at Padua in the first half of the 16th century, father-in-law of Mer Katzenellenbogen. Minz studied chiefly under his father, Judah Minz, whom he succeeded as rabbi and head of the yeshiva of Padua.

Meir ben Isaac Katzellenbogen was born in Prague where together with Shalom Shachna he studied under Jacob Pollak. Many rabbis, including Moses Isserles, addressed him in their responsa as the "av bet din of the republic of Venice." The great scholars of the Renaissance with whom he corresponded include Shmuel ben Moshe di Modena, Joseph Katz, Solomon Luria, Moses Isserles, Obadiah Sforno, and Moses Alashkar.

Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm was a student of Rabbi Solomon Luria who was, in turn a student of Rabbi Shalom Shachna - father-in-law and teacher of Moses Isserles. Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm was also a cousin of Moses Isserles.

Rabbi Eliezer ben Elijah Ashkenazi Ha-rofeh Ashkenazi of Nicosia ("the physician") the author of Yosif Lekah on the Book of Esther.

With expulsion from Spain came the dissemination of Jewish philosophical investigation throughout the Mediterranean Basin, Northern Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The center-of-mass of Rationalism shifted to France, Italy, Germany, Crete, Sicily and Netherlands. Expulsion from Spain and the coordinated pogroms of Europe resulted in the cross-pollination of variations on Rationalism incubated within diverse communities. This period is also marked by the intellectual exchange among leaders of the Christian Reformation and Jewish scholars. Of particular note is the line of Rationalists who migrated out of Germany, and present-day Italy into Crete, and other areas of the Ottoman Empire seeking safety and protection from the endless pogroms fomented by the House of Habsburg and the Roman Catholic Church against Jews.

Rationalism was incubating in places far from Spain. From stories told by Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm, German-speaking Jews, descendants of Jews who migrated back to Jerusalem after Charlemagne's invitation was revoked in Germany many centuries earlier, who lived in Jerusalem during the 11th century, were influenced by prevailing Mutazilite scholars of Jerusalem. A German-speaking Palestinian Jew saved the life of a young German man surnamed "Dolberger". When the knights of the First Crusade came to besiege Jerusalem, one of Dolberger's family members rescued German-speaking Jews in Palestine and brought them back to the safety of Worms, Germany, to repay the favor.[42] Further evidence of German communities in the holy city comes in the form of halakic questions sent from Germany to Jerusalem during the second half of the eleventh century.[43]

All of the foregoing resulted in an explosion of new ideas and philosophic paths.

Joseph Solomon Delmedigo was a physician and teacher Baruch Spinoza was a student of his works.[44]

Baruch Spinoza founded Spinozism, broke with Rabbinic Jewish tradition, and was placed in herem by the Beit Din of Amsterdam. The influence in his work from Maimonides and Leone Ebreo is evident. Elia del Medigo claims to be a student of the works of Spinoza. Some contemporary critics (e.g., Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Judenthum) claimed to detect the influence of the Kabbalah, while others (e.g., Leibniz) regarded Spinozism as a revival of Averroism a talmudist manner of referencing to Maimonidean Rationalism. In the centuries that have lapsed since the herem declaration, scholars[who?] have re-examined the works of Spinoza and find them to reflect a body of work and thinking that is not unlike some contemporary streams of Judaism. For instance, while Spinoza was accused of pantheism, scholars[who?] have come to view his work as advocating panentheism, a valid contemporary view easily accommodated by contemporary Judaism.

Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch ben Yaakov Ashkenazi was a student of his father, but most notably also a student of his grandfather Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm.

Rabbi Jacob Emden was a student of his father Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch ben Yaakov Ashkenazi a rabbi in Amsterdam. Emden, a steadfast Talmudist, was a prominent opponent of the Sabbateans (Messianic Kabbalists who followed Sabbatai Tzvi). Although anti-Maimonidean, Emden should be noted for his critical examination of the Zohar concluding that large parts of it were forged.

Rabbi Leone di Modena wrote that if we[who?] were to accept the Kabbalah, then the Christian trinity would indeed be compatible with Judaism, as the Trinity closely resembles the Kabbalistic doctrine of the Sefirot.

A new era began in the 18th century with the thought of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn has been described as the "'third Moses,' with whom begins a new era in Judaism," just as new eras began with Moses the prophet and with Moses Maimonides.[45] Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the renaissance of European Jews, Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) is indebted. He has been referred to as the father of Reform Judaism, although Reform spokesmen have been "resistant to claim him as their spiritual father".[46] Mendelssohn came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Germans and Jews. His most significant book was Jerusalem oder ber religise Macht und Judentum (Jerusalem), first published in 1783.

Alongside Mendelssohn, other important Jewish philosophers of the eighteenth century included:

Important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century included:

Haredi traditionalists who emerged in reaction to the Haskalah considered the fusion of religion and philosophy as difficult because classical philosophers start with no preconditions for which conclusions they must reach in their investigation, while classical religious believers have a set of religious principles of faith that they hold one must believe. Most Haredim contended that one cannot simultaneously be a philosopher and a true adherent of a revealed religion. In this view, all attempts at synthesis ultimately fail. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, for example, viewed all philosophy as untrue and heretical. In this he represents one strand of Hasidic thought, with creative emphasis on the emotions.

Other exponents of Hasidism had a more positive attitude towards philosophy. In the Chabad writings of Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Hasidut is seen as able to unite all parts of Torah thought, from the schools of philosophy to mysticism, by uncovering the illuminating Divine essence that permeates and transcends all approaches. Interpreting the verse from Job, "from my flesh I see HaShem", Shneur Zalman explained the inner meaning, or "soul", of the Jewish mystical tradition in intellectual form, by means of analogies drawn from the human realm. As explained and continued by the later leaders of Chabad, this enabled the human mind to grasp concepts of Godliness, and so enable the heart to feel the love and awe of God, emphasised by all the founders of hasidism, in an internal way. This development, the culminating level of the Jewish mystical tradition, in this way bridges philosophy and mysticism, by expressing the transcendent in human terms.

One of the major trends in modern Jewish philosophy was the attempt to develop a theory of Judaism through existentialism. Among the early Jewish existentialist philosophers was Lev Shestov (Jehuda Leib Schwarzmann), a Russian-Jewish philosopher. One of the most influential Jewish existentialists in the first half of the 20th century was Franz Rosenzweig. While researching his doctoral dissertation on the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Rosenzweig reacted against Hegel's idealism and developed an existential approach. Rosenzweig, for a time, considered conversion to Christianity, but in 1913, he turned to Jewish philosophy. He became a philosopher and student of Hermann Cohen. Rosenzweig's major work, Star of Redemption, is his new philosophy in which he portrays the relationships between haShem, humanity and world as they are connected by creation, revelation and redemption. Orthodox rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, and Conservative rabbis Neil Gillman and Elliot N. Dorff have also been described as existentialists.[citation needed]

The French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas, whose approach grew out of the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, has also been described as a Jewish existentialist.[48]

Rationalism has re-emerged as a popular perspective among Jews.[49] Contemporary Jewish rationalism often draws on ideas associated with medieval philosophers such as Maimonides and modern Jewish rationalists such as Hermann Cohen.

Cohen was a German Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher who turned to Jewish subjects at the end of his career in the early 20th century, picking up on ideas of Maimonides. In America, Steven Schwarzschild continued Cohen's legacy.[50] Another prominent contemporary Jewish rationalist is Lenn Goodman, who works out of the traditions of medieval Jewish rationalist philosophy. Conservative rabbis Alan Mittleman of the Jewish Theological Seminary[51] and Elliot N. Dorff of American Jewish University[52] also see themselves in the rationalist tradition, as does David Novak of the University of Toronto.[53] Novak works in the natural law tradition, which is one version of rationalism.

Philosophers in modern-day Israel in the rationalist tradition include David Hartman[54] and Moshe Halbertal.[55]

Some Orthodox rationalists in Israel take a "restorationist"[citation needed] approach, reaching back in time for tools to simplify Rabbinic Judaism and bring all Jews, regardless of status or stream of Judaism, closer to observance of Halacha, Mitzvot, Kashrut and embrace of Maimonides' "13 Principles of Faith". Dor Daim, and Rambamists are two groups who reject mysticism as a "superstitious innovation" to an otherwise clear and succinct set of Laws and rules. According to these rationalists, there is shame and disgrace attached to failure to investigate matters of religious principle using the fullest powers of human reason and intellect. One cannot be considered wise, or perceptive, if one does not attempt to understand the origins, and establish the correctness, of one's beliefs.

Judaism has traditionally taught that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Yet, these claims are in jarring contrast with the fact that there is much evil in the world. Perhaps the most difficult question that monotheists have confronted is "how can one reconcile the existence of this view of God with the existence of evil?" or "how can there be good without bad?" "how can there be a God without a devil?" This is the problem of evil. Within all monotheistic faiths many answers (theodicies) have been proposed. However, in light of the magnitude of evil seen in the Holocaust, many people have re-examined classical views on this subject. How can people still have any kind of faith after the Holocaust? This set of Jewish philosophies is discussed in the article on Holocaust theology.

Perhaps the most controversial form of Jewish philosophy that developed in the early 20th century was the religious naturalism of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. His theology was a variant of John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy. Dewey's naturalism combined atheist beliefs with religious terminology in order to construct a philosophy for those who had lost faith in traditional Judaism. In agreement with the classical medieval Jewish thinkers, Kaplan affirmed that haShem is not personal, and that all anthropomorphic descriptions of haShem are, at best, imperfect metaphors. Kaplan's theology went beyond this to claim that haShem is the sum of all natural processes that allow man to become self-fulfilled. Kaplan wrote that "to believe in haShem means to take for granted that it is man's destiny to rise above the brute and to eliminate all forms of violence and exploitation from human society."

A recent trend has been to reframe Jewish theology through the lens of process philosophy, more specifically process theology. Process philosophy suggests that fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of these occasions of experience. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping of many smaller occasions of experience. In this view, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing entity.

Intrinsic to this worldview is the notion that all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences. This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of comprehending other experiences, and then reacting to it. This is the "process" in "process philosophy". Process philosophy gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus process philosophy is a form of panentheism.

The original ideas of process theology were developed by Charles Hartshorne (18972000), and influenced a number of Jewish theologians, including British philosopher Samuel Alexander (18591938), and Rabbis Max Kadushin, Milton Steinberg and Levi A. Olan, Harry Slominsky, and Bradley Shavit Artson. Abraham Joshua Heschel has also been linked to this tradition.[56]

Link:

Jewish philosophy - Wikipedia