Posted in Honors, tagged Dissertation, Linkedin, PhD, Prize, Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft on December 17, 2011| 1 Comment »
I’m honoured to announce that my dissertation “Zeichen des Verfalls. Semantische Studien zur Entstehung der Kulturkritik im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert” has been awarded the dissertation prize 2011 of the Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft.
The prize will be presented by the Gesellschafts chairman, Ortwin Goldbeck, on February 24th, 2012 at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld.
An account of the ceremony with a photo is to be found here.
Posted in Publications, tagged Concept, Conference, Counter-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, Isaiah Berlin, Linkedin, Publication on December 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
An article I wrote on the concept of Counter-Enlightenment has been published in the proceedings of a conference I attended last year in Bern, Switzerland.
My contribution takes its starting point from the observation that a large part of the debate about the meaning(s) of Enlightenment in the present is structured around a pair of mutually exclusive counter-concepts: Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Tracing this opposition back to its most influential proponent, Isaiah Berlin, and ultimately to its emergence in the Eighteenth Century itself, I argue for a less schematic approach taking into account recent historical research especially in the field of historical semantics. Thus, a better understanding of the different meanings and uses of the concepts of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in the past may also shed light on our current debates about the relevance of the Enlightenment tradition to our own culture today.
The volume also includes interesting contributions by (among others) Claudia Honegger, Urs Stäheli, Hartmut Rosa and Andreas Langenohl. For more information, please click here and here.
Theo Jung, Gegenaufklärung. Ein Begriff zwischen Aufklärung und Gegenwart, in: Dietmar J. Wetzel (Hg.), Perspektiven der Aufklärung. Zwischen Mythos und Realität (= Laboratorium Aufklärung, Bd. 12), München 2012, S. 87–100.
Theo Jung 