Professor Avi Lifschitz

Frederick II of Prussia (1712-1786) was a prolific writer of philosophical discourses, poems, epics, satires, and more, while maintaining extensive correspondence with prominent intellectuals. In this edition, the first to make a wide range of Frederick's writings available to a modern English readership, we can finally appreciate his influential contributions to the European Enlightenment – and his unusual role as a monarch who was also a published author.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing first published 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 this first edited book on the Laocoon in English, leading critical voices reassess Lessing's essay on its 250th anniversary. 

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 explores the diverse responses his writings have attracted from the Enlightenment to the present.

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 centre of 18^th-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.