Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• During, Simon
• Anderson, Amanda
• Shaw, Harry E

Titel

George Eliot and Secularism

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to George Eliot, 2013, p.428-441

Ort / Verlag

Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley-Blackwell Online Books - All Titles (includes Withdrawn titles)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The brief conspectus of George Eliot purposes in her fiction should make it clear that her novels are not really secular at all. Most usually, secularization means the successful critique of revealed religion and supernaturalisms. From this point of view, secularism is the intellectual movement that disproves and delegitimizes religious faith and thought. Rather differently, philosophical secularism offered a non‐supernatural account of nature, human and otherwise, often by arguing that all knowledge is grounded in experience. In modern forms, philosophical secularism was also established in the seventeenth century, by Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others, but its dominant figure was the eighteenth‐century skeptic, David Hume. Because of their secularism, many in the group were disbarred from working in the universities and professions, or for the Church or state‐indeed they could be under some legal jeopardy under blasphemy laws.