Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1998"

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Abstract: In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning Edward O Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking He shows how our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos It is a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialisation of knowledge in the last two centuries Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and human scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world

The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change

Abstract: * Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction The Skeleton of Theory * Coalitions in the Mind * General Theory of Interaction Rituals * The Interaction Rituals of Intellectuals * The Opportunity of Structure * The Sociology of Thinking * Networks across the Generations * The Rarity of Major Creativity * Who Will Be Remembered * What Do Minor Philosophers Do? * The Structural Mold of Intellectual Life: Long-Term Chains in China and Greece * The Importance of Personal Ties * The Structural Crunch * Partitioning Attention Space: The Case of Ancient Greece * The Intellectual Law of Small Numbers * The Forming of an Argumentative Network and the Launching of Greek Philosophy * How Long Do Organized Schools Last? * Small Numbers Crisis and the Creativity of the Post-Socratic Generation * The Hellenic Realignment of Positions * The Roman Base and the Second Realignment * The Stimulus of Religious Polarization * The Showdown of Christianity versus the Pagan United Front * Two Kinds of Creativity Comparative History of Intellectual Communities Part I: Asian Paths * Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China * The Sequence of Oppositions in Ancient China * Centralization in the Han Dynasty: The Forming of Official Confucianism and Its Opposition * The Changing Landscape of External Supports * The Gentry-Official Culture: The Pure Conversation Movement and the Dark Learning * Class Culture and the Freezing of Creativity in Indigenous Chinese Philosophy * External and Internal Politics of the Intellectual World: India * Sociopolitical Bases of Religious Ascendancies * Religious Bases of Philosophical Factions: Divisions and Recombination of Vedic Ritualists * The Crowded Competition of the Sages * Monastic Movements and the Ideal of Meditative Mysticism * Anti-monastic Opposition and the Forming of Hindu Lay Culture * Partitioning and the Intellectual Attention Space * The Buddhist-Hindu Watershed * The Post-Buddhist Resettlement of Intellectual Territories * Scholasticism and Syncretism in the Decline of Hindu Philosophy * Revolutions of the Organizational Base: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China * Buddhism and the Organizational Transformation of Medieval China * Intellectual Foreign Relations of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism * Creative Philosophies in Chinese Buddhism * The Ch'an (Zen) Revolution * The Neo-Confucian Revival * The Weak Continuity of Chinese Metaphysics * Innovation through Conservatism: Japan * Japan as Transformer of Chinese Buddhism * The Inflation of Zen Enlightenment and the Scholasticization of Koan * Tokugawa as a Modernizing Society * The Divergence of Secularist Naturalism and Neoconservatism * Conservatism and Intellectual Creativity * The Myth of the Opening of Japan Conclusion to Part I: The Ingredients of Intellectual Life Comparative History of Intellectual Communities Part II: Western Paths * Tensions of Indigenous and Imported Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom * Philosophy within a Religious Context * The Muslim World: An Intellectual Community Anchored by a Politicized Religion * Four Factions * Realignment of Factions in the 900s * The Culmination of the Philosophical Networks: Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali * Routinization of Sufis and Scholastics * Spain as the Hinge of Medieval Philosophy * Coda: Are Idea Imports a Substitute for Creativity? * Academic Expansion as a Two-Edged Sword: Medieval Christendom * The Organizational Bases of Christian Thought * The Inner Autonomy of the University * The Breakup of Theological Philosophy * Intellectuals as Courtiers: The Humanists * The Question of Intellectual Stagnation * Coda: The Intellectual Demoralization of the Late Twentieth Century * Cross-Breeding Networks and Rapid-Discovery Science * A Cascade of Creative Circles * Philosophical Connections of the Scientific Revolution * Three Revolutions and Their Networks * The Mathematicians * The Scientific Revolution * The Philosophical Revolution: Bacon and Descartes * Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality * Secularization of the Intellectual Base * Geopolitics and Cleavages within Catholicism * Reemergence of the Metaphysical Field * Jewish Millennialism and Spinoza's Religious of Reason * Leibniz's Mathematical Metaphysics * Rival Philosophies upon the Space of Religious Toleration * Deism and the Independence of Value Theory * The Reversal of Alliances * Anti-modernist Modernism and the Anti-scientific Opposition * The Triumph of Epistemology * Intellectuals Take Control of Their Base: The German University Revolution * The German Idealist Movement * Philosophy Captures the University * Idealism as Ideology of the University Revolution * Political Crisis as the Outer Layer of Causality * The Spread of the University Revolution * The Post-revolutionary Condition: Boundaries as Philosophical Puzzles * Meta-territories upon the Science-Philosophy Border * The Social Invention of Higher Mathematics * The Logicism of Russell and Wittgenstein * The Vienna Circle as a Nexus of Struggles * The Ordinary Language Reaction against Logical Formalism * Wittgenstein's Tortured Path * Form Mathematical Foundations Crisis to Husserl's Phenomenology * Heidegger: Catholic Anti-modernism Intersects the Phenomenological Movement * Division of the Phenomenological Movement * The Ideology of the Continental-Anglo Split Meta-Reflection * Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas * The Continuum of Abstraction and Reflexivity * Three Pathways: Cosmological, Epistemological-Metaphysical, Mathematical * The Future of Philosophy * Epilogue: Sociological Realism * The Sociological Cogito * Mathematics as Communicative Operations * The Objects of Rapid-Discovery Science * Why Should Intellectual Networks Undermine Themselves? * Appendices * The Clustering of Contemporaneous Creativity * The Incompleteness of Our Historical Picture * Keys to Figures * Notes * References * Index of Persons * Index of Subjects

What is Enlightenment? : eighteenth-century answers and twentieth-century questions

Abstract: This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, 'What is Enlightenment?'. The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present. In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions. Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jurgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke

Abstract: B. W. Young describes and analyses the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England, in particular relation to those developments traditionally described as constituting the Enlightenment. It challenges conventional perceptions of an intellectually moribund institution by contextualising the polemical and scholarly debates in which churchmen engaged. In particular, it delineates the vigorous clerical culture in which much eighteenth-century thought evolved. The book traces the creation of a self-consciously enlightened tradition within Anglicanism, which drew on Erasmianism, seventeenth-century eirenicism and the legacy of Locke. By emphasizing the variety of its intellectual life, the book challenges those notions of Enlightenment which advance predominantly political interpretations of this period. Thus, eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, notably those who contributed to a burgeoning interest in mysticism, are equally integral to this study.

The virtues of liberalism

Abstract: This spirited analysis and defence of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich traditions of political, economic, and social discourse that have informed American democratic culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The Virtues of Liberalism provides a convincing response to critics both right and left. Against conservatives outside the academy who oppose liberalism because they equate it with license, James T. Kloppenberg uncovers ample evidence of American republicans' and liberal democrats' commitments to ethical and religious ideals and their awareness of the difficult choices involved in promoting virtue in a culturally diverse nation. Against radical academic critics who reject liberalism because they equate it with Enlightenment reason and individual property holding, Kloppenberg shows the historical roots of American liberals' dual commitments to diversity, manifested in institutions designed to facilitate deliberative democracy, and to government regulations of property and market exchange in accordance with the public good. In contrast to prevailing tendencies to simplify and distort American liberalism, Kloppenberg shows how the multifaceted virtues of liberalism have inspired theorists and reformers from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison through Jane Addams and John Dewey to Martin Luther King, Jr., and then explains how these virtues persist in the work of some liberal democrats today. Endorsing the efforts of such neo-progressive and communitarian theorists and journalists as Michael Walzer, Jane Mansbridge, Michael Sandel, and E. J. Dionne, Kloppenberg also offers a more acute analysis of the historical development of American liberalism and of the complex reasons why it has been transformed and made more vulnerable in recent decades. An intelligent, coherent, and persuasive canvas that stretches from the Enlightenment to the American Revolution, from Tocqueville's observations to the New Deal's social programs, and from the right to worship freely to the idea of ethical responsibility, this book is a valuable contribution to historical scholarship and to contemporary political and cultural debates.

Theorising Welfare: Enlightenment and Modern Society

Abstract: Introduction PART ONE: ENLIGHTENMENT AND PROGRESS Liberalism Marxism PART TWO: AGAINST ENLIGHTENMENT: QUESTIONS ON POWER AND KNOWLEDGE Neo-Liberalism Poststructuralism PART THREE: POST-ENLIGHTENMENT PROBLEMATICS Political Economy Political Ecology Postmodernism Critiques and Conclusion

France in the Enlightenment

Abstract: Part 1 Times, spaces, powers: knowing France mastery of space time and history peasant France and merchant France the kingdom of exchange - the culture of privilege and the culture of commerce the city, crucible of change the regulated kingdom -Paris and the provinces. Part 2 Powers and conflicts: the king and his subjects the king and the people the end of rebellion God, the king and the churches elites and nobilities public space crises in state and society. Part 3 Enlightenment and society: life triumphant the liberties of individuals consumption and appearance desacralization, secularization, illuminism materializing the intelligence, abstracting things Paris, capital of the Enlightenment.

From Rum Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment, Secularization, and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society, 1453-1821

Abstract: In order to understand the Enlightenment's impact on Ottoman Balkan society, we must consider the relationship between class position and ethnicity. In the pre-1820s Ottoman Balkans, most of the urban strata, mercantile groups, and religious and secular elites were either ethnic Greeks or acculturated into the Greek ethnie. Both the peasantry and the literate and urban Greek-Orthodox groups were \"Greek\" in the sense of being Orthodox. Millenarianism and Orthodox universalism were both common among the Ottoman Orthodox Christians. After 1750, the influence of the Western Enlightenment led to secularization, liberalism, and an undermining of the religious world view of the Eastern Church. With the French Revolution, this trend intensified. Greek-Orthodox intellectuals reconceptualized the Orthodox Rum millet. They argued for a new, secular \"Hellenic\" national identity. Still, their visions of a future state included all Balkan Orthodox Christians.

What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?: Official Memory in German Politics since 1989

Abstract: In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” {Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung?). Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” (Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?), Adorno’s lecture takes issue with tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany to wish away difficult legacies of the Nazi period. Evoking a parallel between Kant’s “enlightenment” (Aufklarung) and the contemporary expressions “coming to terms” or “working through” (Aufarbeitung), Adorno poses a high critical standard for German political culture. According to his diagnosis, the Federal Republic was more concerned with getting beyond the past, with avoiding difficult memory through what Adorno calls “an unconscious and not-so-unconscious defense against guilt,” than with the genuine working through that would be required to “break its spell.” The latter would demand an act of clear consciousness, a difficult process much like the work of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, the defensive unwillingness in the Federal Republic to confront the past—at both the personal and official levels—indicated not the persistence of fascist tendencies against democracy (e.g., neo-Nazi groups) but of fascist tendencies within democracy. The latter, he argues, are much more insidious.

Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment

Abstract: There is a myth-easily shattered-that Western societies since the Enlightenment have been dedicated to the ideal of protecting the differences between individuals and groups, and another-too readily accepted-that before the rise of secularism in the modern period, intolerance and persecution held sway throughout Europe. In Beyond the Persecuting Society John Christian Laursen, Cary J. Nederman, and nine other scholars dismantle this second generalization. If intolerance and religious persecution have been at the root of some of the greatest suffering in human history, it is nevertheless the case that toleration was practiced and theorized in medieval and early modern Europe on a scale few have realized: Christians and Jews, the English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Italians, and Spanish had their proponents of and experiments with tolerance well before John Locke penned his famous Letter Concerning Toleration. Moving from Abelard to Aphra Behn, from the apology for the gentiles of the fourteenth-century Talmudic scholar, Menahem ben Solomon Ha-MeIiri, to the rejection of intolerance in the "New Israel" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Beyond the Persecuting Society offers a detailed and decisive correction to a vision of the past as any less complex in its embrace and abhorrence of diversity than the present.

Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture

Abstract: Enlightenment or Empire is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the culture of European colonialism. The book opens with a bold reconsideration of the relationship between the Enlightenment and colonialism, at the heart of which is an examination of two parallel texts-Captain James Cook's and Georg Foster's accounts of Cook's voyage of 1773. Berman then examines geography, religion, gender, and fiction in the writings of nineteenth-century travelers in Africa. He concludes with a discussion of the alternative anti-colonial traditions of Germany and France. Berman's book is a provocative contribution to current debates about the Enlightenment and its political legacy. In opposition to contemporary critics who argue that the Enlightenment is fully implicated in structures of domination, including colonialism, Berman argues for a more subtle, complex understanding of the political and cultural consequences of the Enlightenment.

The Sociological Revolution: From the Enlightenment to the Global Age

Abstract: By controversially turning away from the current debates which surround social theory, this book provides an historical analysis of the profound burden of sociology and its implications today.

Aspects of Enlightenment: Social Theory and the Ethics of Truth

Abstract: This is an introductory account of social theory and the central role of enlightenment within it. Tom Osborne argues that: contemporary social theory can only fail when viewed as a "science of society", and rather than focusing upon the question of society or even "modernity" should focus on the question of human nature. The most immediate and central topic of such a social theory should be the question of enlightenment.; However, the book departs from traditional accounts locating the vocation of social theory in the system of values established in the original Enlightenment by the French philosophers and others.; Rather it makes a strong argument for the ethical status of enlightenment, going on to analyze particular "regimes of enlightenment" in modernity, namely those associated with the social ethics of science, expertise, intellect and art.

Gender, Development, and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Science

Abstract: Recent “gender, environment, and sustainable development” accounts raise pointed questions about the complicity of Enlightenment philosophies of science with failures of Third World development policies and the current environmental crisis. The strengths of these analyses come from distinctive ways they link androcentric, economistic, and nature-blind aspects of development thinking to “the Enlightenment dream.” In doing so they share perspectives with and provide resources for other influential schools of science studies.

Philosophical meditations on Zen Buddhism

Abstract: 1. Textuality: the 'dependent origination' of Huang Po 2. Reading: the practice of insight 3. Understanding: the context of enlightenment 4. Language: the sphere of immediacy 5. Rhetoric: the instrument of meditation 6. History: the genealogy of mind 7. Freedom: the practice of constraint 8. Transcendence: 'going beyond' Huang Po 9. Mind: the 'Great Matter'of Zen 10. Enlightenment: the awakening of mind Conclusion: Zen in theory and practice.

The genesis of ‘governance’ and Enlightenment conceptions of the cosmopolitan world order

Abstract: fessor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MA 21218, USA. He has written a number of books on the history of the political and social theory of European imperialism. His most recent publications are Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France (1995) and The Idea of Europe: The formation of an identity from the Ancient World to the European Union (forthcoming). The genesis of ‘governance’ and Enlightenment conceptions of the cosmopolitan world order

The Enlightenment project in the analytic conversation

Abstract: Introduction. Appendix: Outline of the Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation. 1. The Enlightenment Project. 2. Analytic Philosophy of Science. 3. Analytic Philosophy and Science. 4. Metaphysics in Analytic Philosophy. 5. Analytic Epistemology. 6. Analytic Philosophy and Language. 7. Analytic Philosophical Psychology. 8. The Enlightenment Project in Analytic Social Science. 9. Analytic Ethics. 10. Analytic Social and Political Philosophy. 11. Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. 12. Beyond the Enlightenment Project. Works Cited. Index.

Inventing Enlightenment's Gender. The Representation of Modernity in Dispute

Abstract: In the philosophical and cultural controversy between modernity and postmodernism one often gets the feeling that 'modernity' is being reduced to an implausible simplicity. This book is an attempt to counter that reductionism and the resulting opposition. It does so with feminist motives. Feminist philosophy has become divided against itself along lines which may be misbegotten from the view of its proper concerns. Instead of having feminism drawn into either of the 'grand narratives', I will employ its proper well-tried strategy of re-interpreting and replenishing the canon of texts involved. The Enlightenment has been made to pose as providing the foundations of modern thought and hence is subject of my study of what exactly is being 'invented' under this title. In this book, feminist scholarship on Enlightenment thought is reviewed, and placed within the context of the debates on modernity versus postmodernity. I propose some novel conceptual perspectives from which to understand Enlightenment's wrestling with the problem of gender. The result is a history of discourses, rather than a history of ideas. The entanglement of 'modern women' in modern politics, society, and aesthetics is described, and various configurations of the modern representation of gender, and the representation of gender in modernity, result. In the first chapter several theoretical issues that arise in interpreting the Enlightenment from a feminist perspective are addressed. Most of these relate to two questions: first, how to make relevant for feminist concerns the notion that we narrate, not find, history, and second, how to grasp the vital motives of critique pertaining to the project of Enlightenment. The chapter concludes with reflections on a notion of feminist politics which does not simply duplicate the identity politics ensuing from modernity's powerful domain of the 'social'. The subsequent chapters are essays on respectively natural rights theory and in particular Thomas Hobbes; Enlightenment's salons and art idioms; eighteenth century civic humanism; David Hume as the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment; and finally Immanuel Kant. The novel conceptual perspectives proposed allow for arguing that in many instances, so-called 'postmodern' themes show up in the texts of the Enlightenment. I will focus on concepts which from postmodern views are not usually associated with the Enlightenment, like irony, contingency, and style, as well as representation in constructionist, not just depictional sense and from nominalist, not just realist concerns. The essays address diverse ranges of thought and various lines of argument, but eventually are principally concerned with reflecting on issues relevant to a feminist political philosophy. 'The Enlightenment' turns out to offer astute reflections on such issues, and sometimes where they are probably least expected, as with Hobbes, republicanism, and Kant. Enlightenment thinkers were hardly oblivious to the notion that the personal is political. This study, then, turns against reductionist depictions of 'the' Enlightenment as a discourse of foundationalist epistemology, dualist codes, abstract universalism and rationalism, and narrowly conceived of identity politics - representations which appear merely to serve heroic counter-assertions. This study invites reactivating the motives of criticism pertaining to enlightenment thought, while granting the rightness of several critical motives guiding postmodern philosophy. It is a philosophical inquiry into a 'contingently determined' problematic of modern gender, in which irony rather than dualism characterizes knowledges about gender, and in the face of which a feminist conception of politics is to counteract the defining powers of 'the social' with respect to identity and knowledge.

Enlightenment and Revolution

Abstract: It has never been easy to know how to deal with the question of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The two terms have usually been joined together in recurrent cycles of retrospective polemic, trapping the history of eighteenth-century political thought within the grand metanarratives of nineteenthand twentieth-century philosophies of history, from idealism and positivism to Marxism and postmodernism. From time to time, however, new information at odds with received ideas has emerged, offering the prospect of a way out of the vicious circularity involved in generating conceptions of the Enlightenment out of assessments of the nature and origins of the French Revolution. The revival of interest in Jansenism over the past fifteen years is a case in point. As knowledge of the eighteenth-century ramifications of a seventeenth-century Catholic heresy has grown, familiar postrevolutionary evaluations of Enlightenment political thought have begun to dissolve in the light of discrepancies between new knowledge and received ideas, opening up new possibilities for the study of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century and its bearing on the politics of the French Revolution. Finding out what lies behind such discrepancies may be one way of moving away

Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law

Abstract: ions, has in fact permeated not only legal but also literary history. Nervousness about the agency of the personified corporation echoes the nervousness Enlightenment writers felt about the personifications dreamed up by the poets. As Steven Knapp puts it in his book Personification and the Sublime: Allegorical personification-the endowing of metaphors with the agency of literal persons-was only the most obvious and extravagant instance of what Enlightenment writers perceived, with a mixture of admiration and uneasiness, as the unique ability of poetic genius to give the force of literal reality to figurative "inventions." More important than the incongruous presence of such agents was their contagious effect on the ostensibly literal agents with which they interacted."' The uncanniness of the personification, then, was derived from its way of putting in question what the "natural" or the "literal" might be. What the personification of the corporation ends up revealing, paradoxically enough, is that there is nothing "natural" about the natural person often taken as its model. The natural person, far from being a "given," is always the product of a theory of what the given is. This point may be made more clearly through an extreme version of corporate personhood. In a study of corporate rights, Meir DanCohen goes so far as to create the notion of a "personless corporation," a corporate "person" entirely controlled by computers, which would nevertheless still possess a "will" and a "personhood" of its own."2 Similarly, we might now ask how it has come to seem "natural" that the "natural person" with which the corporate person is compared is somehow always a "genderless person"; that unnatural genderless person who serves to ground both anthropomorphism and rational choice. We have finally come back to the question of whether there is a difference between anthropomorphism and personification, which arose at the end of the discussion of the essay by Paul de Man. It can now be seen that everything hangs on this question. Anthropomorphism, unlike personification, depends on the givenness of the essence 111. STEVEN KNAPP, PERSONIFICATION AND THE SUBLIME 2 (1985). 112. MEIR DAN-COHEN, RIGHTS, PERSONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS: A LEGAL THEORY FOR BUREAUCRATIC SOCIETY 46-51 (1986). 1998] 25 Johnson: Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1998 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 10: 549 of the human; the mingling of personifications on the same footing as "real" agents threatens to make the uncertainty about what humanness is come to consciousness. Perhaps the loss of unconsciousness about the lack of humanness is what de Man was calling "true 'mourning."'113 Perhaps the "fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible" is exactly what legislators count on lyric poetry to provide: the assumption that the human has been or can be defined. The human can then be presupposed without the question of its definition being raised as a question-legal or otherwise. Thus the poets truly would be, as Shelley claimed, the "unacknowledged legislators of the world,"'14 not because they covertly determine policy, but because it is somehow necessary and useful that there be a powerful, presupposable, unacknowledgment. But the very rhetorical sleight of hand that would instate such an unacknowledgment is indistinguishable from the rhetorical structure that would empty it. Lyric and law are two of the most powerful discourses that exist along the fault line of

Classical readings in culture and civilization

Abstract: In recent times, especially under the influence of postmodernism, culture has often been construed as a critique of modernity. This wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of readings shows that such issues have always been at the centre of thought about the relationship between culture and civilization The readings are divided into three sections, linking the civilization debate to political theory, to the cultural debate and to the sociology and anthropology. The substantial extracts included give students a rare chance to engage at length with classic texts to appreciate the nature of the battle between the Enlightenment and its critics which has shaped current thought. Classical Readings on Culture and Civilisation presents essays from Immanuel Kant, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Nietzche, Georg Simmel, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Febvre, Alfred Weber, Robert E. Park and Norbert Elias.

The Hermeneutic Circle vs. the Enlightenment

Abstract: Although it encompassed a variety of positions, the Enlightenment was unified by the common belief that reason could transcend contingency to establish universal “truths” and thus guarantee progress. Yet for much of the Enlightenment, reason was still dependent on prior sources for its authoritative claims, e.g., nature or natural law, human desires, or interests. Kant broke with this by insisting that reason had to be “autonomous” if it was to claim unconditional authority. In this reformulation of the Enlightenment's concept of reason, Kant argued that reason must subject itself to constant self-criticism, so as to determine the limits of its own authority and thereby provide the basis of its own legitimacy.

Why We Are Not Nietzscheans

Abstract: "To think with Nietzsche against Nietzsche." Thus the editors describe the strategy adopted in this volume to soften the destructive effects of Nietzsche's "philosophy with a hammer" on French philosophy since the 1960s. Frustrated by the infinite inclusiveness of deconstructionism, the contributors to this volume seek to renew the Enlightenment quest for rationality. Though linked by no common dogma, these essays all argue that the "French Nietzsche" transmitted through the deconstructionists must be reexamined in light of the original context in which Nietzsche worked. Each essay questions the viability of Nietzsche's thought in the modern world, variously critiquing his philosophy of history as obsessed with hierarchy, his views on religion and art as myopic and irrational, and his stance on science as hopelessly reactionary. Contending that we must abandon the Nietzsche propped up as patron saint by French deconstructionists in order to return to reason, these essays will stimulate debate not just among Nietzscheans but among all with a stake in modern French philosophy. Contributors: Alain Boyer, Andre Compte-Sponville, Vincent Descombes, Luc Ferry, Robert Legros, Philippe Raynaud, Alain Renault, and Pierre-Andre Taguieff.Luc Ferry is professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the University of Caen. He is author or co-author of six volumes published by the University of Chicago Press, most recently "The New Ecological Order." Alain Renault is professor of political science at Caen. He is co-author of several books with Luc Ferry, and author of "Sartre, Le Dernier Philosophe."

Rousseau's Socratism

Abstract: Rousseau is one of the greatest of modern writers to strike a "Socratic" stance, thus forging a link between his own project and that of the founder of political philosophy. In the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the work that established his reputation, Rousseau appeals to Plato's Apology and Socrates' alleged defense of virtue-"the sublime science of simple souls"-against the pretensions of "Enlightenment" Upon examination, however, Rousseau's endorsement of Socrates proves so ambiguous as to imply the replacement of the Platonic version by a Rousseauan one Rousseau's presentation of the role of the philosopher in society is at the same time more "populist" and more "elitist" than that of Plato It is more populist in its vindication of "ignorance" as the basis of virtue and more elitist in its suggestion that even the defense of ignorance must rest with an avant-garde of philosophers.