On the Limits of Reason in the Age of Reason: Disputes in the 18th Century Philosophy

The concept of reason is one of the key concepts of 18th-century philosophy. However, the conceptions of nature and limits of reason were widely varied, and they appeared as topics of heated debates and discussions. The project focuses on these discussions; it describes the development of the concept of common sense in the 18th century (researching especially the works by Berkeley, Shaftesbury, Reid, and Vico in relation to their 17th-century predecessors and their reception of ancient sources) and two selected applications of the new view of the nature, function, and limits of reason in the Christian apologetics by George Berkeley and in the theory of the relation of passions to imagination presented in the early works by David Hume.