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Loading... The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715 (1935)by Paul Hazard
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Hazard sees in his period the crystallization of the factors which became decisive later in the century. For as he says, many of the factors which seemed innovative in 1750 were already at play in 1700. This book can serve as an introduction to secular culture glimsed at a moment in its history when its Christian roots still were intelligible. no reviews | add a review
Paul Hazard's magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage. Hazard shows how travelers' tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon's new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the Huguenot Pierre Bayle's critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism. Hazard's range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas, excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.2History and Geography Europe Europe Early Modern 1453-1914LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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