aesthetics
(Greek sense perception)Kant keeps the ancient Greek usage, in which anything treating of sense perception may be called an aesthetic. The word had earlier been restricted by Baumgarten to the ...
André Morellet
(1727–1819), French thinker and reformer. Morellet's long career is important because it illustrates the complex interaction between Enlightenment liberalism and French Revolutionary ideology. The ...
anonymity
[Greek ‘nameless’]A state where a person's name or other identifying characteristics are not known. A characteristic of internet communication of the kind that takes place in online forums such as ...
anticlericalism
The opposition to the secular influence of the Church, usually the Roman Catholic Church. It was a major theme in the domestic politics of several European countries during the late nineteenth ...
Arabian Nights
Also referred to as The Thousand and One Nights, or Alf layla wa layla, The Arabian Nights is a collection of highly entertaining tales that have traveled easily from one ...
art criticism
Critical discourse about the various arts is enormously diverse in nature and intent. The versions of criticism which philosophical aesthetics puts forward tend to be idealized rather than practical ...
art History
An academic discipline which, as its name implies, is concerned with the historical study of art in all its manifestations throughout the ages to the present day. Its origins can be traced back to ...
atheism
The theory or belief that God does not exist. The word comes (in the late 16th century, via French) from Greek atheos, from a- ‘without’ + theos ‘god’.
Baron d'Holbach Paul Henri
(1723–89)German-born French intellectual. Paul Heinrich Dietrich took the name and French nationality of his maternal uncle, who had made a fortune in Paris. For many years Holbach's salon in Paris ...
Bernard-Joseph Saurin
(1706–81).French dramatist. Having begun as a lawyer, he was supported as a writer by a pension from Helvétius and wrote plays in several genres. Fame came with Spartacus (1760) ...
bourgeois theatre
A cultural phenomenon which emerged during the rise of the European bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century. In Marxist parlance ‘bourgeois’ refers to the legal owners, or the managerial and state ...
British, Irish, and American Influences
1. Before 1700The English crown held sway over much of what is now France for long periods in the Middle Ages. After the Norman Conquest, however, French was the ...
Bürgerliches Trauerspiel
Domestic middle-class or bourgeois tragedy in prose inaugurated in Germany by Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson (1755). Written under the influence of Diderot and Lillo, it refuted Aristotle's assertion ...
Catherine II
(1729–96)Empress of Russia (1762–96). A German princess, she was made empress following a plot that deposed her husband Peter III (1728–62). Her attempted social and political reforms were impeded by ...
Charles de Brosses
(1709–1777),French magistrate and president of the Burgundian local assembly or parlement. A leading member of the Dijon Academy, Brosses was a typical representative of the Enlightenment. His ...
Charles Palissot de Montenoy
(1730–1814).French playwright and satirist. His early tragedy Zarès (1751) received only three performances, but substantial success came with Les Tuteurs in 1754. 1755 saw the performance of his Le ...
Charles-Nicolas Cochin
(1715–90).French designer and engraver of vignettes, frontispieces, and decorations for books. Among many other works he designed the frontispiece for Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and was ...
Clandestine Manuscripts
Publication during the ancien régime was not free; censorship was constant, though often ineffective, and the penalties serious. In consequence a thriving trade in all sorts of clandestine literature ...
Claude-Joseph Vernet
(1714–1789),French marine painter. Joseph Vernet was born on August 14, 1714, in Avignon, a city of Provence, the southern province of France, which was at that time the holy ...
closet drama
A play – often in verse – written to be read rather than performed, such as The Dynasts (1904–8) by Thomas Hardy (which later was adapted for performance by Granville ...
