Abstract

This essay discusses the division of knowledge within the context of a popular periodical, the Athenian Mercury (1691-1697). The separation of fields of knowledge in the Enlightenment was merely the prelude to the attempt to establish disciplines on a common basis. I trace a similar process in the Mercury, which treated questions about natural science and moral dilemmas as if they shared an analogous structure--of particular instantiations of universal laws. I argue that this identification of facts and norms constituted the public subject simultaneously as subject to the law and the authority before which the law must legitimate itself.

pdf

Share