What is enlightenment?

Kant's essay "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?", is part of an intellectual 'revolution' with both philosophical, as well as broadly cultural consequences. As many of Kant's contemporaries saw, and Heinrich Heine made famous, Kant's 'revolution' bears many similarities to the French Revolution -- but in this paper, I argue that it nevertheless sets a very different kind of intellectual precedent.

Translation from German to English. Answer the question: What is Enlightenment? Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (Königsberg in Prussia, 30 September 1784) By Immanuel Kant (Born in 1724 and died in 1804) Translation into English by Daniel Fidel Ferrer (2013)

2022

Paper was written for class during academic studies. Introduction: Throughout the annals of history, humanity has yearned to better understand the universe and its place within it. Over the course of centuries, many individuals have pondered this question and created various philosophies and systems to assist in explaining their viewpoint on the answer. Many have struggled – and continue to struggle – with the quest to become “enlightened”. But what exactly is meant when one is considered to have achieved this elusive answer? Can an individual truly find enlightenment? Can the answer to these questions ever truly be obtained?

Enlightenment 2.0, 2018

It has always been about understanding. Be it the news, the weather forecast or the speech one encounters, understanding was and is the key to a success in life. Over the past nearly 3,000 years since the written tradition was established in the Middle East knowledge began to play a crucial role in the life of individuals and their socio-political establishments and relations. The ability to not just read, thus reproducing mechanically what you read but actually understand what you read in detail and in depth became a truly desired art. That was the very subject of education-mastering the art of understanding and not just comprehending, i.e. literacy. The method of critical thinking established by the Enlightenment along with the mass literacy of individuals, however diminished in value over the past two decades as information channels and moreover their speed and nature changed dramatically the everyday life of all human beings. In the age of Internet, the very core of humanity is threatened by phenomena like "post-truth", fake and false news. The solution is simple as usual-we must speed up in every possible way the process of Enlightenment 2.0 to counter fight the lack of functional illiteracy among humans which deprives them of their imagination and freedom of thinking.

Conference panel, co-organized with Franz L. Fillafer, at the 13th International Congress of Eighteenth Century Studies, organized by the International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ISECS), held in Graz in 2011.

Numen 67, no. 4, 2020

This article provides a genealogy for the concept of spiritual enlightenment, which rose to prominence in the 1960s.

The Australian Sociological Association, University of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014

Kant's political and historical essays offer an important narrative on the potential for transformation which is inherently embodied within the individual, the social, and the political. Considered in relation to Kant's philosophy of history, this narrative introduces the intimate tie between enlightenment and the concepts of reason and freedom. However, within these essays Kant also introduces an under acknowledge narrative, which considers imagination as also playing an inherent role in the possibility of forms of transformation.