Papers presented at the international conference "The use of censorship from the Age of Reason to the Enlightenment," Copenhagen, May 12-13, 2006.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-195) and index.

Preliminary Material / Mogens Lærke -- Introduction / Mogens Lærke -- Suppress Or Refute? Reactions To Spinoza In Germany Around 1700 / Manfred Walther -- Pierre Bayle And Censorship / Hubert Bost -- French Royal Censorship And The Battle To Suppress The Encyclopédie Of Diderot And D’Alembert, 1751-1759 / Jonathan Israel -- Between Lies And Real Books: The Breakdown Of Censorship And The Modes Of Printed Discourse During The English Civil War / Tue Andersen Nexø -- Censorship Of Philosophy In The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic / Wiep Van Bunge -- Diderot And The Publicizing Of Censorship / Colas Duflo -- Toland And The Censorship Of Atheism / Tristan Dagron -- G.W. Leibniz: Moderation And Censorship / Mogens Lærke -- Bibliography / Mogens Lærke -- Index / Mogens Lærke.

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The ambition is of this volume to study the role censorship played in the intellectual culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how it was implemented, and how it affected the development philosophy and literary writing. It contains contributions by intellectual historians, philosophers and literary theorists. The first section studies how Enlightenment thinkers were submitted to censorship, in particular the German Spinozists, Pierre Bayle, and the French Encylopedists. The second section on the institutional aspects of censorship contains an analysis of the breakdown of censorship in England around 1640 and a discussion of the impact of censorship on philosophy in the Netherlands. The final section studies the stand three Enlightenment thinkers, namely John Toland, Denis Diderot, and G. W. Leibniz, took on the issue of censorship.