Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others.

The enlightenment's key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the 'proto-postmodernist' practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through the eyes of Others: Persians, women, Tahitians, Londoners, natives and naïves, the blind, and even imaginary extra-terrestrials. This book aims to show that this self-estrangement, as a means to gain critical distance from one's taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the enlightenment, and remains vital for critical and constructive sociopolitical thinking today.

Matthew Sharpe is associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University. He is the coauthor of Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions (with M. Ure) and author of Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings as well as articles on the history of philosophy, and political, critical and psychoanalytic theory.

Preface: Argument

Introduction: The Enlightenment Beleaguered

Chapter 1: Locke, Bayle, Critique and Toleration

Chapter 2: Paris-Persia: Othering (and Sexing) the Enlightenment

Chapter 3: Voltaire's Smiling Philosophy

Chapter 4: Eyesight from the Blind: Diderot, Saunderson, and Humans Born Blind

Chapter 5: Enlightenment, Race, Slavery, and Anti-colonialism

Chapter 6: The Enlightenment, Sexuality, and Gender

Conclusion: What was Enlightenment?

Bibliography

About the Author