This essay explores how the Enlightenment preoccupation with nature and reason, and the concomitant desire to restructure civil and political society according to these principles, served simultaneously to write certain speculations within mental philosophy into the heart of the republican project and to orient the emerging human sciences toward embracing those social formations most consonant ...

The metaphor between physical light and inner light has a long history that permeates diverse languages and cultures. This paper outlines a system for using basic principles from optics to visually represent psychological states and processes, such as ideation, enlightenment, mindfulness, and fragmentation versus integrity, as well as situations that occur between people involving phenomena suc...

The Edinburgh surgeon-apothecary and physician George Young was an empiric who emphasised observation, practical experience and a sceptical approach to evidence in medicine. He was an early member of the Rankenian Club, a group of young intellectuals whose ideas were to be at the heart of Scottish Enlightenment thinking. Young certainly influenced his pupil Robert Whytt, who went on to make imp...

'Scientists and Charlatans' (pp. 257-331), Gillispie goes on to show doctors endeavouring to define more clearly the contours of their profession by attacking what they saw as medical quacks. Entertaining full-dress treatments of the medical careers of Mesmer and Marat illuminate the general theme. Gillispie's general thesis is not, it is true, novel in regard to medical science. However, the b...

Nationalism creates and recreates a sense of distinctive identity and autonomy based on the Enlightenment idea of human freedom that enables people to survive in a modern world in which unpredictable change has become the norm. While, in the medieval world, the feudal states invoked religion and cultural resources to make people servile, the modern state invokes identity in a language of servin...

'Scientists and Charlatans' (pp. 257-331), Gillispie goes on to show doctors endeavouring to define more clearly the contours of their profession by attacking what they saw as medical quacks. Entertaining full-dress treatments of the medical careers of Mesmer and Marat illuminate the general theme. Gillispie's general thesis is not, it is true, novel in regard to medical science. However, the b...

Getting straight on ethics in qualitative research is not an internal matter only. Putting ethics and politics together is the right move intellectually, but it engages a major agenda beyond adjustments in qualitative theory and methods. The overall issue is the Enlightenment mind and its progeny. Only when the Enlightenment’s epistemology is contradicted will there be conceptual space for a mo...