A review essay on books by (1) Stephen Eric Bonner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia U Press, 2004); (2) Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia U Press, 2003); (3) Katherine Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 2004); & (4) David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 2004).
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Editor's Preface -- A Note on References -- Introduction and Acknowledgements -- 1 What was the Enlightenment? -- 2 The Goal: A Science of Man -- 3 The Politics of Enlightenment -- 4 Reforming Religion by Reason -- 5 Who was the Enlightenment? -- 6 Unity or Diversity? -- 7 Movement or Mentalité? -- 8 Conclusion: Did the Enlightenment Matter? -- Reading Suggestions -- Index.
One of the urgent tasks of modern philosophy is to find a path between the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the relativism of postmodernism. Rationalism alone cannot suffice to solve today's problems, but neither can we dispense with reasonable critique. The task is to find ways to broaden the scope of rational thought without losing its critical power. The first part of this volume explores the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers and shows nuances often absent from the common view of the Enlightenment. The second part deals with some of the modern heirs of Enlightenment, such as Durkheim, Habermas, and Derrida. In the third part this volume looks at alternatives to Enlightenment thought in West European, Russian and Buddhist philosophy. Part four provides, over against the Enlightenment, a new starting point for the philosophy of religion in thinking about human beings, God, and the description of phenomena.
1. The official story -- 2. A different side of Kant -- 3. From Hamann to Burke -- 4. Hegel -- 5. From Strauss to Marx -- 6. Forerunners -- 7. Horkheimer/Adorno; Foucault -- 8. Difference critics -- 9. Foucault, Habermas, Rawls -- 10. Assessing Foucault, Habermas, and Rawls -- 11. In defense of Kantian enlightenment.
Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here-not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associ
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)"A public can only attain enlightenment slowly," Kant famously observed. His use of the term "public" (Publikum), of course, is notoriously slippery, and even now, after decades of academic discussion of Öffenlichkeit and l'opinion publique, it regularly trips up the unsuspecting undergraduate intent on answering Kant's central question: What is enlightenment? And yet it is clear that whatever else he meant, Kant envisioned a central role for the scholar (Gelehrter) in constituting the public, and furthering enlightenment. And so we might say, in a Kantian gloss, that scholars attain enlightenment, and knowledge of the Enlightenment, only slowly.