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To Give Providence a Shake

100%

Baczko B.

Przegląd Filozoficzno-Literacki

2007

vol. 6

issue 3-4(18)

217-231

For Enlightenment, in the middle of 18th century, it is significant to understand nature in the categories of physical and moral order. Providence plays special role in it: it guarantees this order, but, at the same time, it is subordinated to the rules of that order rigorously. In this perspective, monsters and natural disasters, i.e. contingent accidents, through which nature seems to negate itself and to question its rational order, are of special interest and, from an epistemological point of view, are quite confusing. Earthquake, which on 1st November 1755 happened in Lisbon, provokes a lot of impetuous discussions. In this essay the author describes polemics in this matter between Voltaire and Rousseau, and the later standpoint by Condorcet.

“ANTIQUISING IMAGINATION” IN THE SERVICE OF POLITICAL EXPANSION: ON THE EVE OF THE “GREAT GREEK PROJECT” OF CATHERINE II

75%

Kamenskikh A.

Konštantínove listy

2023

vol. 16

issue 2

91 - 101

The paper explores the materials of the correspondence of Voltaire and Catherine II for examination the schemes of Enlightenment historical imagination and arguments to history used for conceptualizing and legitimation of current political events and actions during the Russian-Ottoman war of 1768 – 1774. Tropological analysis reveals, among the series of sustained historical arguments having been developed by the “patriarch of the Enlightenment” in his aspirations to persuade the Russian empress to become the “queen of the Greeks” and European countries to support Catherine in her struggle against the Ottoman Empire, an especial type of classicist imaginative schemes (schemes of “antiquising imagination”) which were emerging in the correspondence during the discussion of the Balkan issues. The paper demonstrates how in these schemes, the territories of the Northern Pontic, the Balkans and the Archipelago were imagined and described by the participants of the correspondence in terms of the language which goes back to the texts by Greek classical authors included in the circle of classicist modern European education; analyses the political functions of this language in the texts of the French philosopher and the Russian empress; describes the first outlines of the future “Byzantine idea” in Russian political imagination.

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1 Konštantínove listy

1 Przegląd Filozoficzno-Literacki

1 Baczko B.

1 Kamenskikh A.

1 2023

1 2007

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To Give Providence a Shake

“ANTIQUISING IMAGINATION” IN THE SERVICE OF POLITICAL EXPANSION: ON THE EVE OF THE “GREAT GREEK PROJECT” OF CATHERINE II