What Is Enlightenment

A cross-cultural work which reinvigorates the consideration of enlightenment.

Zhang asks to what extent European enlightenment can be regarded as purely philosophical and isolated from political events and, alternately, to what extent the Chinese enlightenment can be split into separate political and intellectual discourses. Her work yields a new set of conceptual questions and practical issues and provides new energy to the dialogue on political to the question "What is enlightenment?" are multiple, pluralistic, dynamic, and self-renewing. Wei Zhang is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida and the author of Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern Thinkers: A Hermeneutics of Cross-Cultural Understanding, also published by SUNY Press.