Voltaire Foundation

May 10 2024 9 ep. 48 mins 255

Voltaire Foundation Podcast artwork

The Voltaire Foundation is a world leader for eighteenth-century scholarship, publishing the definitive edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire), as well as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC), the foremost series devoted to Enlightenment studies, and the correspondences of several key French thinkers.

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The Poetics of Text Reuse

May 10 2024 66 mins

The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive First Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies Glenn Roe (Sorbonne University & University of Oxford) The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive

Hegel's Enlightenment

Nov 14 2023 48 mins

Professor Richard Bourke delivers the 2023 Annual Besterman Lecture. Hegel described philosophy as its own time comprehended in thought. For him, that meant understanding the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Examining what the Enlightenment meant for Hegel involves separating its generic meaning as an historical process from its specific sense as a determinate period and its still

Rule-Mania in Enlightenment Paris

Nov 21 2019 72 mins

Professor Lorraine Daston delivers the 2019 Besterman Lecture By the late seventeenth century, Western Europe’s metropolises were in competition with each other to straighten, illuminate, sanitize, broaden, and above all order their thoroughfares, granting the police enormous power. After the creation of the office of the Paris Lieutenant de Police in 1667, the Parisian police be

Writing Rights in 1789

Nov 23 2018 56 mins

Keith M Baker, professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University, explains a Digital Humanities project mapping the debates on the constituent articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. What happened to rights in 1789? I plan to present in this lecture some results of a collaborative research project exploring this question. Digital Hu

Methusela and the unity of mankind: late Renaissance and early Enlightenment conceptions of time

Jul 25 2018 55 mins

Martin van Gelderen delivers a talk for the Besterman Lecture 2018 Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Digital Rhetoric, literae humaniores and Leibniz's dream

Dec 13 2017 42 mins

Willard McCarty, King's College, London, gives the 2017 Besterman lecture. If the digital computer is to be a 'machine for doing thinking' in the arts and letters, rather than merely a way of automating tasks we already know how to perform, then its constraints and the powers these constraints define need to be understood. This lecture explores those constraints and powers across t

Adam Smith, Poverty and Famine

Jun 02 2017 50 mins

A highly critical account of Adam Smith's views on famine, which fail to recognize that you can have starvation in the midst of plenty. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert

Short podcast looking at Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert, housed in the Bodleian Library. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Rousseau: Archive et Invention.

Nov 23 2012 45 mins

Professor Nathalie Ferrand (École Normale Supérieure Paris) gives the 2012 Besterman Lecture for the Voltaire Foundation. This lecture is in French. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/