Enlightenment

About: Enlightenment is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6845 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116832 citations.

Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease

Abstract: Helmut Illbruck traces the concept of nostalgia from the earliest uses of the term in the seventeenth century to today as it evolves with different meanings and intensities in the discourses of medicine, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Following nostalgia s troubled relations to the philosophical project of the Enlightenment, Illbruck s study builds a cumulative argument about nostalgia s modern significance that often revises and thoroughly enriches our understanding of cultural, literary, and intellectual history. Illbruck concludes with an attempt at a reinterpretation and defense of nostalgia, which seduces us to read and think with, rather than against, nostalgia s wistful yearning for the past. "Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease "is a comprehensive, insistent, and profound interdisciplinary investigation of the history of an idea. It should appeal to readers interested in the cultural makings of the Enlightenment and modernity or in the histories of medicine, literature, and philosophy."

The philosophical case for economic democracy

Abstract: One of the most important and widely-held moral beliefs in the modern world is a belief in the principle of equal liberty. According to this principle individuals should have the maximum freedom that is compatible with an equal freedom for all other individuals. Ever since the Enlightenment the principle of equal liberty has provided a basic moral reference point against which the legitimacy of social and political institutions has been judged. And it is, I think, indisputable that this continues to be true today.

Taylor on Self-Celebration and Gratitude

Abstract: In The Sources of the Self, as in his earlier Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Charles Taylor takes on two principal sets of opponents: reductionist naturalists, heirs of the Enlightenment, on the one hand and self-involved expressivists, heirs of Romanticism, on the other . Taylor sees the naturalists as caught in self-referential inconsistency, unable to account for their own passionate belief that we ought to uncover the irreducible reality behind the reducible appearances. "Theories of Enlightenment materialist utilitarianism," he says, "are hard to bring into focus. They have two sides-a reductive ontology and a moral impetus-which are hard to combine." (p. 337) Taylor thinks that any movement with the size, strength and endurance of reductive naturalism must have been motivated by some sense of what he calls a "hypergood," a "constitutive good." There must be something which functions as "moral source"-that is, as "something the undistorted recognition of which empowers us to do the good." (p. 342 ) On Taylor's view, it is "a recognizable feature of the whole class of modern positions which descends from the radical Enlightenment" the class of which Marxism is paradigmatic-that "their principal words of power are denunciatory. Much of what they live by has to be inferred from the rage with which their enemies are attacked and refuted." Such a position "draws its moral ideals, if not directly from its enemies, at least from a moral culture which they have better articulated." (p. 339) So it is parasitic on a hypergood which it refuses to acknowledge. Taylor admits that "the mere fact that a position may be at its inception parasitic on moral sources it cannot itself acknowledge doesn't prove that it is unfit to build a new world. It may have resources which are yet to flower." (p. 340) But he makes little attempt to explore the possibility of a non-reductive naturalism, one which would reject "the disengaged subject" and takes account of what he calls the "situatedness" of the self-and of all the antiCartesian and anti-Kantian lessons we have learned from Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and Polanyi. (p. 514, esp. n. 27) This was the