Fichte's Philosophy of Freemasonry took as its object the culture of a secret society, quite influential and widespread but no less obscure in times of Enlightenment and early Romanticism. He tried clarify it from the perspective of classical German idealism, and to use it for his own purposes: through it, Fichte sought to realize the idea of man as citizen of the world and thus to influence the so-called or public society, as well as politics. Fihteova Filozofija masonstva predstavlja pokusaj (...) da se sa stanovista filozofije klasicnog nemackog idealizma rasvetli i preuzme, odnosno iskoristi za vlastite svrhe, jedna u doba prosvetiteljstva i rane romantike uticajna i rasirena, iako i u to vreme nista manje opskurna kultura tajnog drustva, da se preko nje ostvari ideja coveka kao svetskog gradjanina i da se na taj nacin izvrsi uticaj na tzv. veliko ili javno drustvo i na politiku. (shrink)

This book examines the history of Freemasonry beginning with the medieval guilds and tracing it through the formation of the first Grand Lodge. Included are chapters on the nature of history, education, ethics, and ritual.

CATEGORY: Philosophy play; historical fiction; comedy; social criticism. -/- STORYLINE: Katherine, a neurotic American lawyer, meets Christianus for a philosophy session at The Late Victorian coffee shop in London, where they also meet Wendy the waitress and Baldy the player. Will Katherine be able to overcome her deep depression by adopting some of Christianus’s satisfactionist ideas? Or will she stay unsatisfied and unhappy by stubbornly sticking to her own neti-neti nothingness philosophy? And what roles do Baldy, Wendy, and the Okefenokee (...) Man-Monster have in this connexion? -/- TOPICS: In the course of this philosophy play, Katherine and Christianus discuss many things: friendship, a Renoir painting, global warming, elephant conservation, freemasons, Prince of Wales and his tiger-hunting experience in Nepal, Victorian Chartism and a Kennington Common daguerreotype, a Mortality Proof, and, last but not least, Baldy, Wendy, and the gory plot of the Okefenokee Man-Monster. -/- NOTES: This work features elaborate footnotes and comments (including full bibliographical references) by the author, to enhance the reader's experience of the play and its philosophizing characters. (shrink)

Given that conspiracies exist, can we be justified in dismissing conspiracy theories without concerning ourselves with specific details? I answer this question by focusing on contrarian conspiracy theories, theories about conspiracies that conflict with testimony from reliable sources of information. For example, theories that say the CIA masterminded the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11 was an inside job, or the Freemasons are secretly running the world are contrarian conspiracy theories. When someone argues for a contrarian conspiracy theory, their (...) options are to appeal to eyewitness testimony, incriminating documents, photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, allegedly scientific evidence, anomalies, or considerations of cui bono (who benefits). Most laypeople don’t know how to adequately respond to arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories, but this doesn’t mean that it’s dogmatic to reject them. I argue that many laypeople are defeasibly justified in rejecting a variety of contrarian conspiracy theories based on testimony and this justification is rarely defeated by arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories even if we don’t know how to respond to these arguments. (shrink)

Freemasonry was the most widespread form of secular association in eighteenth-century England, providing a model for other forms of urban sociability and a stimulus to music and the arts. Many members of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, for instance, were Freemasons, while historians such as Margaret Jacob have argued that Freemasonry was inspired by Whig Newtonianism and played an important role in European Enlightenment scientific education. This paper illustrates the importance of natural philosophy in Masonic rhetoric (...) and utilizes material from Masonic histories, lodge records and secondary works to demonstrate that scientific lectures were indeed given in some lodges. It contends, however, that there were other sources of inspiration for Freemasonry besides Newtonianism, such as antiquarianism, and that many other factors as well as the prevalence of Masonic lodges determined the geography of English scientific culture. Although the subject of Freemasonry and natural philosophy has great potential, as Jacob has demonstrated so well, much further work, especially in the form of prosopographical studies of provincial lodges, is required before the nature of the relationship between the two can be fully appreciated. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the contributions to natural history, particularly in methods of plant classification of the Portuguese botanist, man of letters, diplomat, and Freemason Abbé José Correia da Serra (1751-1823), placing them in their national and international political and social contexts. Correia da Serra adopted the natural method of classification championed by the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, and introduced refinements of his own that owe much to parallel developments in zoology. He endorsed the view that the classification of plants (...) should be based on the establishment of affinities rather than of differences. The emphasis on affinities went hand in hand with the development of the concept of symmetry. This idea was introduced by Correia da Serra in systematics and was adopted and further developed by his friend, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle. Correia da Serra also argued that Cryptogamia reproduce sexually, advocated extension of methods of comparative anatomy from zoology to botany, and applied them to the study of fruits. Correia da Serra was one among many of the estrangeirados, Portuguese "Europeanized" intellectuals who traveled extensively abroad in most cases to escape political or religious persecution at home. The estrangeirados were important contributors to 18th and 19th century European thinking. Most of the estrangeirados were pivotal in the introduction, dissemination and propagation of the new sciences in Portugal, but unlike most of his fellow estrangeirados, Correia da Serra was also an innovative man of science in his own right. (shrink)

The theme of the article relies to the particular contribution of Freemasonry in the initiation and development of modernity, focusing on science, religion and politics. We know that, during the late Middle Ages, the European society was obedient to the „Church-Tradition-Monarchy” trinity; this status-quo collapsed due to the rational way of thinking; also the establishment of the universal human rights belongs to the Enlightenment, whose theses were supported mainly by Freemasons. Many researchers have proposed to show the extent to (...) which Freemasonry helped to build the ideals of Enlightenment. The main conclusions that can be drawn, by analyzing their tracks, are: All famous leaders of the Enlightenment had connections to Freemasonry; The Enlightenment tenets overlap Freemasonry tenets, and, therefore they were supported and propagated by English, French, and American lodges; Freemasonry progressively turned into a transnational vehicle for liberal thinking, disseminating the concepts of property and freedom in Europe and across the Atlantic. (shrink)

Complete in itself, this volume originated as a commentary and expansion of Manly P. Hall's masterpiece of symbolic philosophy, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. In Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, Manly P. Hall expands on the philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological themes introduced in his classic work, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Hall wrote this volume as a reader's companion to his earlier work, intending it for those wishing to delve more deeply into the esoteric philosophies and ideas that undergird (...) the Secret Teachings. Particular attention is paid to Neoplatonism, ancient Christianity, Rosicrucian and Freemasonic traditions, ancient mysteries, pagan rites and symbols, and Pythagorean mathematics. First published in 1929-the year after the publication of Hall's magnum opus-this edition includes the author's original subject index, twenty diagrams prepared under his supervision for the volume, and his 1984 preface, which puts the book in context for the contemporary reader. (shrink)

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people’s everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of (...) the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. (shrink)

Without so much as an America Online account, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University two centuries ago, learned of an evil plot -- hatched in France by Freemasons hopped up on Enlightenment philosophy -- to overthrow the United States Government. A Bavarian secret society called the Order of the Illuminati was also involved. Unable to access alt.conspiracy or even a good E-mail program, Dwight had to resort to public speaking to spread the word.

A common element of Western theism is a belief in Providence, in the sense of some kind of (perhaps unknown or inscrutable) Divine Plan for creation, especially if it involves Divine intervention in the world to see to it that His will be done. This positioning of God as a behind-the-scenes agent acting so as to bring about some end of His own desire has the flavor of conspiracy theory. Where some secular conspiracy theorists posit a cabal of powerful individuals (...) (bankers, Freemasons, etc.) “pulling the strings” behind current events, belief in Providence posits God in a similar role (or perhaps God in conflict with a powerful, supernatural force of evil). But is this a fair comparison? Prima facie, there are a number of differences between the two cases, for example, God is posited as beneficent, whereas most conspiracy theories involve more self-serving goals or conspiracy theorists believe they have rational reason for their belief, not mere faith. This paper explores the relationship between these two cases in an attempt to more clearly define the epistemological features of each and to help understand how conclusions about the epistemic virtue of one might (or might not) apply to the other. (shrink)

Like many other locals, I was unprepared for the global media's invasion of Roslin. The former mining village just outside the southern city limits is best known to most Edinburgh citizens for its tiny, ornately carved medieval chapel. Constructed for Crusading Knights and long associated with Freemasons, Rosslyn Chapel was made famous by Sir Walter Scott's LayoftheLastMinstrel. Nowadays it is visited, in coachloads, by devotees of less literary and historically more dubious esoterica, many of whom believe that the Holy (...) Grail and/or a version of the gospels are buried beneath it. In the local media, demands for the chapel's foundations to be excavated in search of secret clues to the meaning of life, death, and everything, have figured just as prominently as articles agonizing over scientific developments at the Roslin Institute, half a country mile away. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 276-277 [Access article in PDF] Wiep Van Bunge. From Stevin to Spinoza: An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. xii + 217. Cloth, $80.00 By 1660 there were probably more followers of Descartes in the Dutch Republic, population 1.4 million, than in France, population 20 million. Protestantism and prosperity encouraged high rates of literacy and (...) the universities of Leiden and Utrecht were among the liveliest in the world. This vibrancy infused the metaphors that Descartes put into his great Discours de la methode published first in Leiden in 1637. In it he spoke about the beauty of cities that looked as if they had been built by a single architect and of the freedom to be found among people so busy with their business as to leave thinkers to their pursuits. Indirectly he spoke about his adopted homeland where he found many followers—some more eager than loyal. By the 1640s disputes raged in the Republic and the anti-Cartesian forces were led by the Aristotelian and anti-Copernican Gisbertus Voetius. What has been missing in our scholarship up to now has been any convincing account as to why these disputes occurred, and how they resonated within the Dutch context. Wiep Van Bunge's book takes a big step toward closing that knowledge gap.Van Bunge convincingly argues that the vibrancy of the stadtholder-less period up to 1672 produced a willingness to entertain new ideas. It also did not hurt to have Descartes on the scene and active on behalf of his mechanical philosophy, even to the point of addressing the Utrecht magistrates publicly and asking that his critics be chastised. What is remarkable—especially given the resistance to Descartes seen at Oxford and Cambridge—was the speed with which Cartesian ideas entered the Dutch classrooms where as many as a third of the students came from abroad. Again Van Bunge provides context when he starts with the Dutch engineer Simon Stevin and demonstrates the vitality of mathematics for a commercial society but also for a militant one. (The Netherlands was at war with Spain up to 1609.) A recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, April to July 2002, also illustrates another aspect of mathematics in the Republic. Precisely in the 1630s when Descartes was putting the finishing touches on his Discours, Pieter Saenredam applied geometry to the interiors of the elegant Utrecht churches so as to give his paintings a regularity and precision worthy of the Cartesian dream of order and clarity. The Dutch commitment to discipline and order also made their army one of the most accomplished in the world. It was perhaps over-determined that Descartes, who had trained with it, would find such a sympathetic audience in the Republic.One of the more fascinating aspects of Van Bunge's detailed study, first of Cartesianism and then of Spinozism in the Republic, concerns the political and ideological meanings to be extracted from the new philosophy. Hobbes also finds a place in the narrative, surprisingly taken up by republicans eager to construct a state that could control the passions. Abraham van Berkel, who put Hobbes's Leviathan into Dutch in 1667, gave the allegiance of his text and himself to Jan de Witt and the cause of the regents and the estates. We can only wonder what Hobbes would have made of the association. The republican affiliations of the mechanical philosophy in the Republic provide a distinctively Dutch context to the [End Page 276] political writings of Spinoza, the most famous and outrageous Cartesian of the century. Van Bunge is especially deft in finding Spinozists and providing far more evidence than I could back in 1981 when I argued for a radical enlightenment within the late seventeenth-century Dutch context (see The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans [London: 1981]). None of these positions with their deeply heretical implications could be taken lightly or without danger. Men lost... (shrink)

Among the central meanings in Büchner's Woyzeck, there is one that comes clear only when we read the play in the context of the history of ideas—specifically in the light of certain currents of thought about human history and eschatology. Aspects of the play's expression are thereby elucidated, that are forcefully brought forward through the organization and compositional procedures of Berg's Wozzeck. Near the end of the long third scene of the opera, Wozzeck appears suddenly at Marie's window and alludes (...) cryptically to the mysterious signs that had come to him in the field the scene before, confiding to her that he is "on the track of something big." As those signs had first been presented through Wozzeck's eyes, they seemed like the imaginings and fears of a simple man about Freemasons and who knows what other objects of superstition, But now in the third scene he gives them a scriptural context, as though through a sudden insight: "Isn't it written, 'And behold, the smoke went up from the land, as the smoke from a furnace'?" What Wozzeck has recalled here is a passage in the Book of Genesis, chapter 19: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. . . . and, behold, the smoke went up from the Land as the smoke from a furnace." The image is repeated in the New Testament Book of Revelation , chapter 9: "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of the great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit." Both passages are about a holocaust visited by a wrathful God upon a corrupt and debauched people, and that is the idea that begins to form in Wozzeck's mind as he stands for the first time on the stage before his mistress. And he asks, "What will it all come to?" The answer to this thematic question lies in the strange unfolding of the drama, pressed forward by forces that lie, as Büchner had once put it, "Outside of ourselves"1 and by Wozzeck, who guarantees the outcome as he imagines himself becoming aware of what it must be. · 1. Letter to his family, February 1834: "I scorn no one, least of all because of his understanding or his education, for it lies in no one's power not to become a dumbbell or a criminal—because we have all become alike through like circumstances, and because the circumstances lie outside of ourselves . . ." Werner Lehmann, George Büchner: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe , 2:422. Leo Treitler, professor and chairman of the department of music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of, among other works, "Dufay the Progressive" and "Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant.". (shrink)

'the oldest biography of Spinoza', La Vie de Mr. Spinosa, which in the manuscript copies is often followed by L'Esprit de M. Spinosa. Margaret Jacob, in her Radical Enlightenment, contended that the Traite was written by a radical group of Freemasons in The Hague in the early eighteenth century. Silvia Berti has offered evidence it was written by Jan Vroesen. Various discussions in the early eighteenth century consider many possi ble authors from the Renaissance onwards to whom the work (...) might be attributed. The Trois imposteurs has attracted quite a bit of recent attention as one of the most significant irreligious clandestine writings available in the Enlightenment, which is most important for understanding the develop ment of religious scepticism, radical deism, and even atheism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars for the last couple of decades have been trying to assess when the work was actually written or compiled and by whom. In view of the widespread distribution of manu scripts of the work all over Europe, they have also been seeking to find out who was influenced by the work, and what it represented for its time. Hitherto unknown manuscripts are being turned up in public and private libraries all over Europe and the United States. (shrink)