Dr Roger Maioli: The Enlightenment Crisis of Values

Dr Roger Maioli: The Enlightenment Crisis of Values

The Enlightenment Crisis of Values, my second book project, is essentially a discussion of relativism and its consequences in the eighteenth century. The project’s essential premises, therefore, are that, one, there is such a thing as Enlightenment relativism, and, two, it had consequences that matter both for literary studies, which is my field, and intellectual history more broadly. What I will try to do here is give you a sense of what this relativism was and how eighteenth-century authors — both philosophers and imaginative writers — responded to it.