Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1999"

Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James

Abstract: Fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, possession. Believers have long viewed these and similar involuntary experiences as religious--as manifestations of God, the spirits, or the Christ within. Skeptics, on the other hand, have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics, or other natural causes. In this sweeping work of religious and psychological history, Ann Taves explores the myriad ways in which believers and detractors interpreted these complex experiences in Anglo-American culture between the mid-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries.Taves divides the book into three sections. In the first, ranging from 1740 to 1820, she examines the debate over trances, visions, and other involuntary experiences against the politically charged backdrop of Anglo-American evangelicalism, established churches, Enlightenment thought, and a legacy of religious warfare. In the second part, covering 1820 to 1890, she highlights the interplay between popular psychology--particularly the ideas of "animal magnetism" and mesmerism--and movements in popular religion: the disestablishment of churches, the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy, the expansion of Methodism, and the birth of new religious movements. In the third section, Taves traces the emergence of professional psychology between 1890 and 1910 and explores the implications of new ideas about the subconscious mind, hypnosis, hysteria, and dissociation for the understanding of religious experience. Throughout, Taves follows evolving debates about whether fits, trances, and visions are natural (and therefore not religious) or supernatural (and therefore religious). She pays particular attention to a third interpretation, proposed by such "mediators" as William James, according to which these experiences are natural "and" religious. Taves shows that ordinary people as well as educated elites debated the meaning of these experiences and reveals the importance of interactions between popular and elite culture in accounting for how people experienced religion and explained experience.Combining rich detail with clear and rigorous argument, this is a major contribution to our understanding of Protestant revivalism and the historical interplay between religion and psychology.

Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories

Abstract: Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally. In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.

Modern Historiography: An Introduction

Abstract: Modern Historiography is the essential introduction to the history of historical writing. It explains the broad philosophical background to the different historians and historical schools of the modern era, from James Boswell and Thomas Carlyle through to Lucien Febure and Eric Hobsbawm and surveys: the Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment Romanticism the voice of Science and the process of secularization within Western intellectual thought the influence of, and broadening contact with, the New World the Annales school in France Postmodernism. Modern Historiography provides a clear and concise account of this modern period of historical writing.

Geography and Enlightenment

Abstract: Explores both the Enlightenment as a geographical phenomenon and the place of geography in the Enlightenment. From disciplinary and topical perspectives, contributors consider the many ways in which the world of the long 18th century was brought to view and shaped through map and text, exploration and argument, within and across spatial and intellectual borders. The first set of chapters charts the intellectual and geographical contexts in which Enlightenment ideas began to form, including both the sites in which knowledge was created and discussed and the different means used to investigate the globe. Explorations of maps created during this period show how these new ways of representing the world and its peoples influenced conceptions of the nature and progress of human societies, while studies of the travels of people and ideas reveal the influence of far-flung places on Enlightenment science and scientific credibility. The final set of chapters emphasizes the role of particular local contexts in Enlightenment thought.

Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder

Abstract: In this book, one of the world's leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism." Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek historiography-Herodotus's broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides' contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question. The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley's highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past.

Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Abstract: This study moves beyond the treatment of the original enlightenment doctrine as abstract philosophy to explore its historical dimension. Drawing on a wealth of medieval primary sources and modern Japanese scholarship, it places this discourse in its ritual, institutional and social contexts, illuminating its importance to the maintenance of traditions of lineage and the secret transmission of knowledge that characterized medieval Japanese elite culture.

Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract: Plots of Enlightenment explores the emergence of the English novel during the early 1700s as a preeminent form of popular education at a time when educators were defining a new kind of "modern" English citizenship for both men and women. This new individual was imagined neither as the free, self-determined figure of early modern liberalism or republicanism, nor, at the other extreme, as the product of a nearly totalized disciplinary regimen. Instead, this new citizen materialized from the tensile process of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "regulated improvisation," a strategy of performed individual identity that combines both social orchestration and individual agency. This book considers how the period's diverse forms of educational writing (including chapbooks, conduct books, and philosophical treatises) and the most innovative educational institutions of the age (such as charity schools, working schools, and proposed academies for young women) produced a shared concept of improvised identity also shaped by the early novel's pedagogical agenda. The model of improvised subjectivity contributed to new ways of imagining English individuality as both a private and public entity; it also empowered women authors, both educators and novelists, to transform traditional ideals of femininity in forming their own protofeminist versions of enlightened female identity. While offering a comprehensive account of the novel's educational status during the Enlightenment, Plots of Enlightenment focuses particularly on the first half of the eighteenth century, when novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox were first exploring concepts of fictional character based on educational and moral improvisation. A close examination of these authors' work illustrates further that by the 1750s, the improvisational impulse in England had forged the first perceptible outlines of the fictional subgenre later called the novel of education or the Bildungsroman. This book is the first study of its kind to account for the complex interplay between the individualist and collectivist protocols of early modern fiction, with an eye toward articulating a comprehensive description of socialization and literary form that can accommodate the similarities and differences in the works of both male and female writers.

Religious conversion : contemporary practices and controversies

Abstract: Part 1 Conversion - theoretical perspectives: converting -stages of religious change, Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian conversion, inward and outward, Donald Taylor conversion - up from evangelicalism or the pentecostal and charismatic experience, Frank K. Flinn. Part 2 Conversion in the world's religions: conversion as a process leading to enlightenment - the Buddhist perspective, Christopher Lamb conversion to Judaism - a tale of the good, the bad and the ungrateful slanders or saviours, Rabbi Rodney Marriner conversion from within and without in Chinese religion, Jordan Paper contra conversion - the case of the Zoroastrians of India, Homi B. Dala conversion - a Hindu/Ghandian perspective, K.L. Seshagiri Rao conversion to Islam - the Qur'anic paradigm, Yasin Dutton conversion in the Sikh tradition, Doris R. Jakobsh. Part 3 Conversion in Christianity: conversion in Christianity - from without and from within, M. Darrol Bryant charismatic conversion in the light of Augustine's confessions, Karla Poewe conversion in an African tradition, Irving Hexham the Benedictine vow "Conversio Morum", Dame Macrina Sitzia. Part 4 Contemporary cases of conversion: coming home and coming out pagan (but not converting), Graham Harvey continuing conversion - a personal journey, Father Tim Edgar the story of Darshan Singh, a French convert, Darshan Singh Rudel belonging to a cult or new religious movement - act of freewill of mind control, Rev Martin Eggleton being Hindu in North America - the experience of a western convert, Tamai Krishna Goswami cult conversions - controversy and clarification, Lorne L. Dawson rediscovering Islam - a Muslim journey of faith, Sophie Gilliat.

Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, revolution and counter-revolution; a eurosceptical enquiry

Abstract: As part of a programme of disintegrating and re-assembling the concept or concepts of �Europe�, there is offered (1) a revision of Franco Venturi's exceptionalist account of England's place in Enlightenment, (2) an alternative to Isaiah Berlin's account of the movement through Enlightenment to historicism. The objective is to enhance the British and English role in European intellectual history, while showing that we must rewrite the concept of �Europe� in order to do so. There persists the �Eurosceptical enquiry� whether �Europe� is interested in history at all.

Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism: Russia in the North Caucasus, 1550–1800*

Abstract: Good old Russia! So it really does belong to Europe. And I'd always thought that was just a mistake of the geographers. (Alexander Pushkin [quoted from Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy [Cambridge, 1994], p. 86)

Spinoza, Locke and the Enlightenment Battle for Toleration

Abstract: Of the two principal traditions of toleration theory in seventeenth-century Europe, what have been termed the ‘Arminian’ and the ‘republican’, the first culminates in Locke and the second in Spinoza. Both theories were products of the late seventeenth-century European intellectual ferment, both were deployed in England during the public debate about toleration in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, and both were destined to exert a pervasive influence in intellectual debate throughout Protestant and Catholic Europe during the eighteenth century. Yet an immense philosophical and ideological gulf separates the two – one might almost say rival – conceptions of toleration, a gulf which becomes greater the more it is considered. For if ‘we should be wary’, as Dr Davidson observes in chapter 12 of this volume, ‘of equating a call for religious toleration too easily with a call for unlimited freedom of belief’ it was generally true of Enlightenment Europe that religious toleration in the sense expounded by Le Clerc, Van Limborch and Locke, or at least something approaching it, gained much wider acceptance than did freedom of thought and expression in Spinoza's sense and that of the radical Deists. What was deemed the acceptable face of toleration, the toleration of Locke and Le Clerc, was aptly characterized by the Venetian theologian, Daniel Concina, in 1754, in a work identifying Spinoza and Spinozism as the backbone of the Deist threat to Christianity, as in essence a ‘ tollerantismo between the Christian churches’.

Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious 'soul' was replaced first by a philosophical 'self' and then by a scientific 'mind'. The authors show that many supposedly contemporary theories of the self were actually discussed in the eighteenth century, and recognize the status of William Hazlitt as one of the most important Personal Identity theorists of the British Enlightenment, for his direct relevance to contemporary thinking. Now available in paperback, Naturaliazation of the Soul is essential reading for anyone interested in the issues at the core of the Western philosophical tradition.

By nature equal : the anatomy of a Western insight

Abstract: Acknowledgment and ApologyForewordIntroduction: In Search of a Descriptive Human Equality3Pt. IHuman Equality: What does it Mean?171What Has Been Said?222The Host Property393Making the Host Property Uniform66Pt. IICould the Philosophers Believe in Human Equality?914Could the Enlightenment Believe? Individualism, Kant, and Equality1015Nature, Natural Law, and Equality123Pt. IIICould the Christians Believe in Human Equality?1456The Framework for a Christian Obtensionalism1487Repaving the Road to Hell: The Pelagian Issues1648The Repaving Project, Part II: An Equal-Opportunity Creator191Pt. IVGood Persons and the Common Good2159Harmonies of the Moral Spheres21810Harvests of Equality232Notes261Index349

Republican Theory in Political Thought: Virtuous or Virtual?

Abstract: Acknowledements Introduction Early Modern Republicanism Enlightenment Republicanism Mechanical Republicanism: The American Case Contemporary Republicanism in What Used to be called the 'First World' Prospects for Republicanism Elsewhere Conclusion Bibliography Index

Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method

Abstract: When the Catholic Inquisitors persecuted Galileo for teaching that the Earth moves through space, they did so because Galileo insisted that this was the truth. The Church was quite prepared to tolerate the notion of a moving Earth, so long as it was regarded as an instrument useful for calculation, as true merely within a particular framework which might be adopted or discarded for reasons of convenience. For centuries Galilieo has been seen as a heroic fighter for enlightenment against benighted tyranny, but strangely enough, recent years have seen the rise, within Western philosophy, of a wave of relativism, according to which Galileo was wrong and his persecutors were correct. In the view of this new relativism, which has roots in both the continental and analytic traditions, there are no universal or trans-cultural standards of rationality. Among the sources of the new relativism are the failure of logical positivism and the shift within anthropology from a single evolutionary model to several models for understanding human culture. In this critique of relativism, Professor Harris turns the techniques of relativism against relativism, showing that it is ultimately self-refuting or ineffectual. A number of methodological points are stressed in the book. Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction appeals to the very analytic truths Quine hopes to dispel. The relativism arising from Goodman's "grue paradox" is innocuous, since the paradox is not really concerned with induction. Kuhn's theory of paradigms must be either self-refuting or incomprehensible. Winch grossly distorts Wittgenstein's theory and fails to show that basic notions of rationality are culturally relative. Rorty cannot avoid presupposing the epistemological principles he is attacking. Finally, feminist criticism of science can exert a welcome corrective, but the notion of a distinctive "feminist science" is indefensible (and counter-productive for feminism).

Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy

Abstract: The concept that art must hart no instrumental function is a doctrine traditionally traced back to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Jonathan Hess proposes that this concept of autonomous art marks not a withdrawal from the political realm but the ultimate embodiment of Enlightenment political culture, a response to a crisis in the institution idealized by Jurgen Habermas as the bourgeois public sphere.

Pragmatic liberalism and the critique of modernity

Abstract: Introduction: the question of modernity Part I. Richard Rorty: The Rudiments of Pragmatic Liberalism: 1. The philosophy of representations 2. Knowledge without representations 3. Justification as a social practice 4. The problem of truth 5. Davidsonian therapy 6. Truth and science 7. Ethics without foundations 8. Liberal ironism Part II. Alasdaire MacIntyre: A Modern Malgre Lui: 1. MacIntyre's critique of the enlightenment 2. Which enlightenment? 3. In defense of enlightenment humanism 4. The lure of tradition 5. The tradition of the virtues 6. MacIntyre and modernity 7. MacIntyre versus pragmatic liberalism Part III. Charles Taylor: An Augustinian Modern: 1. Taylor's historical project 2. Locke and the radical enlightenment 3. The primacy of everyday life 4. Beyond the enlightenment: evil, romanticism, and poetic truth 5. Taylor's critique of naturalism 6. Williams and objectivity 7. Naturalism and hypergoods: pragmatic liberalism Conclusion.

The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era

Abstract: Part I Introduction: from the re-interpretation of humanistic Marxism to pragmatic neo-conservatism - Chinese intellectuals' pluralistic exploration of modernity. Part II Legitimation versus transcendence - the dilemmas facing China's neo-rationalists: Li Zehou and his enlightenment philosophy Wang Meng's hard porridge and the paradox of reform in China. Part III The avant garde and cultural iconoclasts - radical challenges to the official ideological and cultural order: Bei Dao's "13 Happiness Street" and the young generation's quest for the "Unknowable" absurdity, senselessness and alienation - Xu Xing's literary reflections on the contemporary human condition. Part IV Moral crusaders and idealists - the struggle for spiritual salvation: Liang Xiaosheng's moral critique of China's modernization process individual salvation and ultimate concerns - Liu Xiaofeng's pursuit of transcendent human universality. Part V Neo-nationalism a pragmatic new national ideology? from "River Elegy" to "China Can Say No" - China's neo-nationalism and the search for a collective national identity. Part VI Conclusion: from the center to the periphery - the development of Chinese intellectuals' "New Identity" and "Self awareness".

The History of Spain

Abstract: Foreword Preface A Note on Usage Chronology of Spanish History Spain Today The Foundations of Spain Reconquest Union and World Empire Imperial Spain Tradition and Enlightenment Six Troubled Decades A Search for Stability A Troubled New Century Republic and Civil War Dicatorship Democracy Brief Biographies Bibliographic Essay Index

Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Abstract: An examination of the forces that attracted many social and intellectual leaders of 18th-century Russia to Freemasonry as an instrument for change and progress. By "working the rough stone" of their inner thoughts and feelings, such men sought to become champions of moral enlightenment and to create a vision of social action that could bring about change without challenging the social and political precepts on which Russia's stability depended. In addition to exploring the rituals and inner workings of Russia's Masonic lodges, the author's research also reveals how Freemasonry became a part of a larger social transformation that saw the development of salons, literary circles, learned societies and social clubs as Russia and Europe approached their rendezvous with the French Revolution. As quiet shelters for men of learning and social conscience, these institutions helped to prepare the way for the birth of a civil society in Russia and offered a social alternative to life at the Tsarist Court. By challenging a number of long-held notions about Russian society, Smith attempts to broaden the reader's understanding of the complex processes of Westernization and modernization that shaped the history of 18th-century Russia. Illustrated with engravings of Masonic life and ritual, this book should appeal to reader interested in Russia, Europe, the Enlightenment and the history of Freemasonry.

The Politics of Genre in Beloved

Abstract: Sherley Anne Williams, in the preface to her novel about slavery, Dessa Rose, writes that African-Americans have been "betrayed" by "literature and writing" (ix). Likewise, Toni Morrison has said that her novel of slavery, Beloved, is "outside most of the formal constricts of the novel" (qtd. in Gilroy, Small 181). In "Memory, Creation, and Writing," Morrison writes that she refuses the credentials that literary references can bestow because these are inappropriate to the type of fiction she wishes to write-a fiction that is "not ... merely literary" but that imagines its ideal audience as "an illiterate or preliterate reader" (387). In this way, Williams and Morrison both disavow the literate and literary mode that forms each author's chosen medium of expression. This paradox, which forms the subject of my paper, seems all the more striking because each novelist has written a neo-slave narrative revisiting an era and a genre marked by immense faith in the emancipatory promise of print literacy. As Henry Louis Gates has observed, the nineteenth-century slave narratives constitute a body of literature "that was propelled by the Enlightenment demand that a 'race' place itself on the Great Chain of Being primarily through the exigencies of print" ("Introduction" v). If the slave narratives affirm the democratizing potential of print literacy, equating, to quote Gates again, "the rights of man with the ability to write" (xxix), much of the African-American literary tradition has been galvanized by the faith that literature can help press the case for full black participation in American democracy.1 Revisiting the historical era of slavery, the neo-slave narrative loops back to the origins of the African-American literary tradition and reassesses, from a contemporary vantage point, the political promise of literacy that fueled this tradition. Through this recursive move, the neo-slave narrative participates in a widespread revaluation of the legacy of modernity, especially as this is ratified by the ideologies and institutions of print literacy. Novels such as Beloved and Dessa Rose reconsider the dawning of the modern legacy from the perspective of a present moment when its political promise is widely felt to have been exhausted and betrayed. Their skepticism is signaled through a strong discomfort with their own literary modality. Few African-American writers over the last two decades or so have been able

Theorizing Classical Sociology

Abstract: Dimensions of the social - an introduction enlightenment, reason and science Comtean positivism and sociology reason's revolt thunders Durkheim, differentation and morality critiques of positivism German critiques of capitalism Max Weber - the triumph of reason? in conclusion - prospect and retrospect.

(Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Germaine de Staël's Subversive Women

Abstract: Political theorist Lori Marso explores an alternative vision of citizenship in the writings of French Enlightenment figures Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Stael. This critique transgresses the boundary between political philosophy and literature in turning explicitly to fictional texts as the site of an alternative conception of self, citizenship and democratic politics. Marso departs from much feminist scholarship on Rousseau by reading "Emile" and "La Nouvelle Heloise" from the perspective of his women characters. Tracing the words, gestures and even the silence of the women characters in Rousseau's text, Marso argues that these women display an uncanny ability to deconstruct the qualities and dictates of scholarship for which Rousseau is infamous. Germaine de Stael builds on the perspective of Rousseau's women to uncover the radical potential of the feminine as a way to reconceptualize citizenship. Based on her experience of the French Revolution, Stael demonstrates the limits of establishing strict identities as prerequisites for citizen participation. In Stael's novels, "Delphine" and "Corrine", Marso locates a citizenship practice premised on the recognition of individuals in terms of their concrete histories and situations.

Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a great deal of attention to the emergence of nationalism in late-eighteenth-century Europe, and critics such as Seamus Deane have drawn particular attention to the way in which the new nationalist narratives tended to displace the older cosmopolitan narrative of universal subjects and universal reason. As Deane points out, Enlightenment forms of narrative (like the philosophical tale) were threatened by a "newly assertive nationalism, predicated on notions of national character."'1 The kind of national thinking-and narrative-that he has in mind is represented by a figure like Edmund Burke and his well-known argument anchoring national identity in attachment to one's "little platoon."2 But the same Anglo-Irish milieu that produced Burke also produced Maria Edgeworth, who offered a rather different reading of national identity in the same period. Her writing on Ireland, especially her early Irish tales, offers an important rearticulation of Burkean local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered (like nations based on historical premises such as blood or inheritance) nor borderless (like those based on rational notions of universal inclusion). This effort to rethink nationness makes Edgeworth more than the colonial writer who figures in current criticism.3 Having herself been both immersed in Continental Enlightenment thought and personally affected by the nationalist upsurge of the 1798 Rebellion, she used herwriting to reconsider the meaning of the denomination "AngloIrish."4 And through her interrogation she reinterpreted both cosmopolitan and national definitions of belonging so as to reconstitute "Anglo-Irish" less as a category than as an ongoing mediation between borders. In his influential formulation of national identity in Reflections on the French Revolution, Burke attempts to increase the political distance be-

The Alchemy of Domination? Some Ash arite Responses to Muʾtazilite Ethics

Abstract: In his provocative essay Knowledge and Politics,1 Harvard Law School professor Roberto Unger undertook what has since become a familiar critique of the contemporary social and political order. Beginning with the main postulates of Enlightenment epistemology, Unger contended that our acceptance of "liberal philosophy" has divided us, as moral beings, between the private world of value and desire and the public world of rules and reason. Since, moreover, reason functions as the medium of public (and ostensibly egalitarian) discourse, its inevitable exaltation over desire threatens, where it does not undermine, our sense of self and personality. Modern man, according to Unger, is inextricably ensconced between the irreconcilable poles of individuality and citizenship. From religious fundamentalism to Afro-centrism, from classical and radical feminism to multi-culturalism, modernity is evolving into an endless concatenation of reactions against the threat of domination2 that lurks beneath the demand to justify personal values and predilections through the impersonal language of reason, a medium over which some of us possess greater mastery than others, even if, as moderns (or perhaps post-moderns) we recognize that reason is not autonomous but can operate only in the interest of values already present. The key element in the triumph of liberal philosophy, which according to Unger began with Hobbes in the 17th century,3 was the rejection of the classical doctrine of "intelligible essences," according to which the world constituted an objective reality that could be apprehended as such, regardless of the judgments or predilections of the individual observer. A stone, on this understanding, was distinguishable from a plant because it was the repository of an objectively intelligible "stoneness." Against this view, liberal philosophy insisted that there was no objectively validatable perception of the world. Rather, the most the mind could achieve would be the organization of experience in such a way that rendered it significant or serviceable to the observer. "Facts," on this understanding, could be experienced only as reflections of the categories through which the mind ordered the world.4 In the field of ethics, this led to the conclusion that all claims of objective good and evil were unavoidably deceptive and naive. In the end, however, it would be precisely to objectivity or some