Logic for Enlightenment? Religion, Society, and the Place of Logic in Enlightenment Discourses

The 18th century represents a historical epoch that largely wanted to be understood as an 'age of reason' and is gladly understood as such even today. However, the contemporary developments of the traditional academic discipline of logic, which stylized itself as a practice oriented towards the cultivation of reason par excellence and at the same time was characterized by manifold attempts at renewal, are not a preferred subject of Enlightenment research. My project inquires into the place and significance of logic within religious and social reform projects, usually perceived as core concerns of the Enlightenment age. More concretely, it focuses on the usages of this discipline in the enactment of religious controversies and debates surrounding the social role of scholars in selected late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century milieus. By considering representatives of all three denominations of Western Christianity (Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism), a deliberate comparative perspective is sought. The aim of the project is to show how, within the universalist rhetoric of the Enlightenment, logic was to function as a fundamental instrument for overcoming religious differences and social tensions in the name of 'reason'. At the same time, however, if one questions its exclusive claim to (unitary) rationality, this instrument can be understood as a particularly subtle mechanism for enforcing particular theological, institutional, and sociocultural concerns.