An important strain in the literature on the rise of anthropological thought in the early-modern world identifies anthropological thought’s biggest insight as the ascription of unity to the human species via the encounter ...

The contemporary literature on the Renaissance invention of terrestrial globes is fixated on the images that globemakers drew, expending great energy in determining how “correct” they were. This essay, in contrast, understands ...

This essay explores Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s supposedly critical reaction to Prussia’s Edict on Religion of 1788. The word “supposed” is acceptable here, because in the course of his career, Fichte actually took both sides ...

This article argues that modern time discipline was a product of the eighteenth-century. Whereas other works have emphasized the integration of time through nineteenth-century railway networks, this article holds that ...

Physical orientation was a central philosophical problem for German thinkers in the late eighteenth century. Moses Mendelssohn, for instance, pondered in Morgenstunden, o Vorlesungen uber das Daseyn Gotten (1785) whether ...

This essay argues that modern cultural anthropology is a product of early-modern astronomical science. Analyzing a variety of texts from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, this text shows how the conceptual ...

Prussia’s Edict on Religion of 1788 forbade sermons that undermined popular belief in the Holy Trinity and the Bible. Historians have evaluated this edict with respect to the German Enlightenment’s defense of autonomy: the ...

Prussia' s Edict on Religion of 1788 is generally understood as a conservative reaction, its promulgation on July 9th of that year marking the end of the Enlightenment in Prussia. This article argues, however, that the ...

Most works on the eighteenth century see the public sphere as an emancipatory, anti-state phenomenon. This essay offers a statistical analysis of a broad German debate that occurred in the wake of Prussia’s Edict on Religion ...

This essay argues that intellectual historians have overlooked the significance of the return of Euclid’s geometric thought to early-modern Europe. Looking at the period between 1400 and 1800, this essay shows how geometric ...