Alan Charles Kors | |
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![]() President George W. Bush (right) and Laura Bush (left) stand with 2005 National Humanities Medal recipient Alan Charles Kors (center). | |
Born | July 18, 1943 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Princeton University (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) |
Occupation | Professor |
Alan Charles Kors (born July 18, 1943) [1] is an American historian who is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania, [2] where he taught the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has received both the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching.
Kors graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from Princeton University in 1964, and received a M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in European history from Harvard University.
Kors has written on the history of skeptical, atheistic, and materialist thought in 17th and 18th-century France, on the Enlightenment in general, on the history of European witchcraft beliefs, and on academic freedom. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, which was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press in 2002. [3]
Kors co-founded – with civil rights advocate Harvey Silverglate and served from 2000 to 2006[ citation needed ] as chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
He has occasionally written pieces for popular libertarian journals on political matters such as Reason . [4] His essay "Can There Be An After Socialism?" was published by the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. [5]
He has served on the boards of The Historical Society and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
The Age of Enlightenment was the intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the 17th and the 18th centuries.
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, better known as Encyclopédie, was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It had many writers, known as the Encyclopédistes. It was edited by Denis Diderot and, until 1759, co-edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert.
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, known as d'Holbach, was a Franco-German philosopher, encyclopedist and writer, who was a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He helped in the dissemination of "Protestant and especially German thought", particularly in the field of the sciences, but was best known for his atheism and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being The System of Nature (1770) and The Universal Morality (1776).
Johann Georg Hamann was a German Lutheran philosopher from Königsberg known as "the Wizard of the North" who was one of the leading figures of post-Kantian philosophy. His work was used by his student J. G. Herder as the main support of the Sturm und Drang movement, and is associated with the Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Summis desiderantes affectibus, sometimes abbreviated to Summis desiderantes, was a papal bull regarding witchcraft issued by Pope Innocent VIII on 5 December 1484.
Owen Davies is a British historian who specialises in the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, and popular medicine. He is currently Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire and has been described as Britain's "foremost academic expert on the history of magic".
Atheism is the rejection of an assertion that a deity exists. In a narrower sense, hard atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities, effectively taking the stance of a positive claim in regards to the existence of any goddess or god. The English term 'atheist' was used at least as early as the sixteenth century and atheistic ideas and their influence have a longer history.
Balthasar Bekker was a Dutch minister and author of philosophical and theological works. Opposing superstition, he was a key figure in the end of the witchcraft persecutions in early modern Europe. His best known work is De Betoverde Weereld (1691), or The World Bewitched (1695).
A speech code is any rule or regulation that limits, restricts, or bans speech beyond the strict legal limitations upon freedom of speech or press found in the legal definitions of harassment, slander, libel, and fighting words. Such codes are common in the workplace, in universities, and in private organizations. The term may be applied to regulations that do not explicitly prohibit particular words or sentences. Speech codes are often applied for the purpose of suppressing hate speech or forms of social discourse thought to be disagreeable to the implementers.
The Treatise of the Three Impostors was a long-rumored book denying all three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with the "impostors" of the title being Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad. Hearsay concerning such a book surfaces by the 13th century and circulates through the 17th century. Authorship of the hoax book was variously ascribed to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian writers. Fabrications of the text eventually begin clandestine circulation, with a notable French underground edition Traité sur les trois imposteurs first appearing in 1719.
The Formicarius, written 1436–1438 by Johannes Nider during the Council of Florence and first printed in 1475, is the second book ever printed to discuss witchcraft. Nider dealt specifically with witchcraft in the fifth section of the book. Unlike his successors, he did not emphasize the idea of the Witches' Sabbath and was skeptical of the claim that witches could fly by night. With over 25 manuscript copies from fifteenth and early sixteenth century editions from the 1470s to 1692, the Formicarius is an important work for the study of the origins of the witch trials in Early Modern Europe, as it sheds light on their earliest phase during the first half of the 15th century.
Jonathan Irvine Israel is a British historian specialising in Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza's Philosophy and European Jews. Israel was appointed as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in January 2001 and retired in July 2016. He was previously Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University College London.
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition is a 1964 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book delves into the history of Hermeticism and its influence upon Renaissance philosophy and Giordano Bruno.
Harvey Allen Silverglate is an American attorney, journalist, writer, and the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
The Modern Greek Enlightenment was the Greek expression of the Age of Enlightenment, characterized by an intellectual and philosophical movement within the Greek community. At this time, many Greeks were dispersed across the Ottoman Empire, with some residing on the Ionian Islands, in Venice, and other parts of Italy. Leonardos Philaras, one of the early advocates for Greek independence, played a significant role before the movement truly gained momentum following his death.
Jacques-André Naigeon was a French artist, atheist–materialist philosopher, editor and man of letters best known for his contributions to the Encyclopédie and for reworking Baron d'Holbach's and Diderot's manuscripts.
Atheism, as defined by the entry in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, is "the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world. The simple ignorance of God doesn't constitute atheism. To be charged with the odious title of atheism one must have the notion of God and reject it." In the period of the Enlightenment, avowed and open atheism was made possible by the advance of religious toleration, but was also far from encouraged.
Nicholas Jacquier was a French Dominican and Inquisitor. He became known as demonologist and proponent of witch-hunting.
Franklin T. Lambert is a professor of history at Purdue University, Indiana, United States. He received his PhD from Northwestern University, Illinois, in 1990 and has special interests in American Colonial and Revolutionary Era history. Before earning his PhD he was also a punter for the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1965 to 1966.