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My project for the year wilI be to work on producing a short book-length scholarly investigation provisionally entitled Sense-Making in Early-Modern Europe, in which the establishment of a system of persuasion or coercion (the “force” of reason) can be traced in its practical and metaphysical deployments in early-modern Europe and its relations with other parts of the world. Considerations and uses of ratio, its cognates and vernacular forms, in the seventeenth century, took many forms, most invoking divine guarantees at some stage as a way of justifying basic intuitions. But these divine guarantees appear to have been ever less invoked in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, reason became routinely accounted a faculty of the mind (prior to the late seventeenth century this description had been relatively unusual). Reason came to rely no longer on the natures of external things, or on God, to underwrite its power; it had now somehow become self-sufficient, or self-enlightening. By representing scientific knowledge as being founded on such transcendental reason, enlightened European thought strove to extend its techniques everywhere, a network of truths linked by asserted self-evidence. My project is one of studying the underlying assumptions of that process.
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