Associate%20Professor%20Avi%20Lifschitz: List of publications

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802078763

<a href="https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2022/09/22/enlightenment-research-as-a-vocation/">https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2022/09/22/enlightenment-research-as-a-vocation/</a>

Die jüdische Selbstemanzipation des 18. Jahrhunderts (Haskala) ist in der neueren Aufklärungsforschung zu einem zentralen Thema avanciert. Buchtitel wie 'Cultural Revolution in Berlin: Jews in the Age of Enlightenment' sind bezeichnend dafür. Der vorliegende Band, der auf eine Konferenz im Jüdischen Museum Berlin im Jahr 2016 zurückgeht, ergänzt das komplexe Bild dieses Umbruchs um einen in der Regel unterschätzten Aspekt – nämlich die um 1800 reich dokumentierte Symbiose zwischen jüdischen und christlichen Intellektuellen der Stadt. In ihrer Vielgestaltigkeit geht sie weit über den kanonisch gewordenen Fall Lessing/Moses Mendelssohn hinaus. Ihr Antrieb war das beidseitige Wunschbild einer jüdischen Mitbürgerschaft nicht nur in rechtlicher, sondern auch kultureller Hinsicht. Im Aktionsraum dieses doppelten Lernprozesses, den die 14 Fallstudien des Bandes entfalten, finden sich neben Namen, die man kennt – wie David Friedländer, Salomon Maimon und Rahel Levin bzw. Friedrich Nicolai, Karl Philipp Moritz und Wilhelm von Humboldt – auch relativ unbekannte, die es sich lohnt weiter zu beforschen. Umso mehr, als das symbiotische Experiment Berlin 1800 offensichtlich die Basis für den in der Welt singulären jüdischen Beitrag zur deutschsprachigen Kultur bis 1933 war. https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID_Section=1&ID_Product=1422

<a href="https://intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/enlightenment-studies-oxford-intellectual-history-across-disciplines">https://intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/enlightenment-studies-oxford-intellectual-history-across-disciplines</a>

https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/575134

The chapter compares the debate over Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s call for the ‘civic improvement’ of the Jews (Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 1781) to a discussion of a proposal for confessional union between the Jewish and Protestant communities in Berlin (1799), thereby highlighting the changing languages of political reform in Brandenburg-Prussia from the early 1780s to c. 1800. Various contemporary conceptions of the interrelationship between the state and religious associations are examined; particular attention is dedicated to works by Dohm, Moses Mendelssohn, Wilhelm von Humboldt, David Friedländer, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. https://www.routledge.com/Languages-of-Reform-in-the-Eighteenth-Century-When-Europe-Lost-Its-Fear/Richter-Maissen-Albertone/p/book/9780367427733

In Laocoon, Lessing attempts to cast the poet as ‘elevating’ arbitrary linguistic signs to the status of the natural signs of painting. This chapter sets out to explore the seeming paradox of this position. It argues that Lessing drew upon a wide range of French and German thinkers who downplayed the arbitrariness of language while simultaneously emphasizing its natural features (among them, Rousseau’s projection of a performative ‘language of signs’ on to classical antiquity, Condillac’s ‘language of action’, and not least Diderot’s musings on what he termed ‘poetic hieroglyphs’). The essay consequently demonstrates how the Laocoon takes its inspiration from multiple sources, extending far beyond the intellectual remit of Christian Wolff and his German followers: Lessing’s call for the naturalization of arbitrary signs, and his discussion of ancient poetry in this light, can only be understood against the backdrop of a cross-European debate about linguistic signs. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rethinking-lessings-laocoon-9780198802228

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing first published Laokoon, oder uber die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoon, or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) in 1766. Over the last 250 years, Lessing's essay has exerted an incalculable influence on western critical thinking. Not only has it directed the history of post-Enlightenment aesthetics, it has also shaped the very practices of 'poetry' and 'painting' in a myriad of different ways. In this anthology of specially commissioned chapters - comprising the first ever edited book on the Laocoon in English - a range of leading critical voices has been brought together to reassess Lessing's essay on its 250th anniversary. Combining perspectives from multiple disciplines (including classics, intellectual history, philosophy, aesthetics, media studies, comparative literature, and art history), the book explores the Laocoon from a plethora of critical angles. Chapters discuss Lessing's interpretation of ancient art and poetry, the cultural backdrops of the eighteenth century, and the validity of the Laocoon's observations in the fields of aesthetics, semiotics, and philosophy. The volume shows how the Laocoon exploits Greek and Roman models to sketch the proper spatial and temporal 'limits' (Grenzen) of what Lessing called 'poetry' and 'painting'; at the same time it demonstrates how Lessing's essay is embedded within Enlightenment theories of art, perception, and historical interpretation, as well as within nascent eighteenth-century ideas about the 'scientific' study of Classical antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft). To engage critically with the Laocoon, and to make sense of its legacy over the last 250 years, consequently involves excavating various 'classical presences': by looking back to the Graeco-Roman past, the volume demonstrates, Lessing forged a whole new tradition of modern aesthetics. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rethinking-lessings-laocoon-9780198802228

<p style="text-align:justify;">This chapter explores the hitherto neglected influence of Friedrich Meinecke on Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between a mostly French Enlightenment and its alleged rivals in Germany. Highlighting the structural and terminological similarities between Berlin’s account of the Counter-Enlightenment and Meinecke’s description of the precursors of historicism, it also provides as yet unpublished evidence from Berlin’s correspondence to this effect. Berlin’s endorsement of Meinecke’s dichotomy between Enlightenment and pre-historicism is situated against his distaste for attempts to reveal cross-currents and common themes in eighteenth-century thought. This aversion to the study of transnational links in the Enlightenment is manifest in Berlin’s hostile reaction to Ernst Cassirer’s work on the topic.</p>

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26228682

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been cast as a champion of Enlightenment and a beacon of Romanticism, a father figure of radical revolutionaries and totalitarian dictators alike, an inventor of the modern notion of the self, and an advocate of stern ancient republicanism. Engaging with Rousseau treats his writings as an enduring topic of debate, examining the diverse responses they have attracted from the Enlightenment to the present. Such notions as the general will were, for example, refracted through very different prisms during the struggle for independence in Latin America and in social conflicts in Eastern Europe, or modified by thinkers from Kant to contemporary political theorists. Beyond Rousseau's ideas, his public image too travelled around the world. This book examines engagement with Rousseau's works as well as with his self-fashioning; especially in turbulent times, his defiant public identity and his call for regeneration were admired or despised by intellectuals and political agents. https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/history-ideas-and-intellectual-history/engaging-rousseau-reaction-and-interpretation-eighteenth-century-present?format=PB

https://toronto.degruyter.com/view/title/527719

https://www.hentrichhentrich.de/book-language-as-bridge-and-border.html

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24361819

https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835312555-rousseau-und-die-moderne.html

https://www.routledge.com/The-Poetic-Enlightenment-Poetry-and-Human-Science-16501820/Boyson/p/book/9781138662247

https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/history-ideas-and-intellectual-history/freedom-and-construction-europe-volume-2?format=PB

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilization without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts, and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language and Enlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/language-and-enlightenment-9780198777649

https://www.honorechampion.com/fr/champion/8836-book-08531924-9782745319241.html

https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/book/epicurus-enlightenment

https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/32655