Enlightenment

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

Postmodernism and the search for enlightenment

Abstract: Ever since the explosion in relationships of power during the 1960s, the humanities have become a battlefield. What had previously been thought of as merely academic concerns have spilled over academic boundaries and attracted the attention of politicians, government officials, members of the media, and, ultimately, the general public. As a way of addressing this turmoil, Karlis Racevskis considers the legacy of the Enlightenment and re-evaluates modernity's claims for objective knowledge and the traditional model of reason. How relevant, he asks, are the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy and equality in today's attempts to understand society and gauge the prospects for civilisation? What responsibility can or should intellectuals assume in promoting Enlightenment values? What, in the end, constitutes a humanistic education? Drawing largely on the work of Foucault, Racevskis elucidates the philosophical and political problems at issue in the debate and the changes taking place in our ways of seeing ourselves and our relations with others. He shows how the theme of enlightenment has been a central component in the conflicts that have pitted modernists against postmodernists, Marxists against post-Marxists, and liberals against conservatives, and he juxtaposes the arguments in such a way as to place reason and enlightened action in a new perspective. One result of the upheaval, argues Racevskis, is a sense of renewed purpose and intensity in the study of the humanities that constitutes a fundamental reorientation in our ways of understanding society. Viewing the tension between the chaos of current theories and the comfort of traditional values not with horror, but with excitement, he suggests how postmodem criticism can be seen as a dynamic and promising development in the renewal and expansion of the liberal arts. This wide-ranging book should have general appeal across a broad spectrum of disciplines - among them, literature and the arts, philosophy, social and political theory, and intellectual history.

Marx's Ecology and the Left

Abstract: One of the lasting contributions of the Frankfurt School of social theorists, represented especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment , was the development of a philosophical critique of the domination of nature.… Yet their critique of the Enlightenment exploitation of nature was eventually extended to a critique of Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure, especially in relation to his mature work in Capital .… So all-encompassing was the critique of the "dialectic of the Enlightenment" within the main line of the Frankfurt School, and within what came to be known as "Western Marxism"…, that it led to the estrangement of thinkers in this tradition not only from the later Marx, but also from natural science—and hence nature itself. Consequently, when the ecological movement emerged in the 1960s and '70s, Western Marxism, with its abstract, philosophical notion of the domination of nature, was ill-equipped to analyze the changing and increasingly perilous forms of material interaction between humanity and nature. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The English Catholic Community, 1688-1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology

Abstract: The half-century following the Glorious Revolution has been viewed as a time of retreat and withdrawal for English Catholics: the response to tightening penal laws, periods in exile and the failures of the Jacobite cause. This book argues that the perception has arisen because research has been directed into the wrong places. It aims to recapture the eighteenth-century Catholic 'recusant' imagination through a study of hitherto unexplored treatises, manuscript literature and private correspondence preserved in family and religious archives. Contrary to the image of seclusion, Catholic lives were penetrated by questions of national identity, religious liberty and the authority of an international church: conflicts experienced not merely within their own nation, but in the European courts, seminaries and universities that supported them in exile. Their writings can be understood as commentaries on the state of a community trapped between the political, cultural and intellectual divisions that cut across the Roman Catholic world. Many were actively promoting change in church and state within Britain and Europe, and their arguments shaped the emergence of a 'Catholic Enlightenment' that outlasted the commitment to Jacobitism. The English Catholic Community investigates Catholic education and family life, scholarship, poetry and spirituality. It offers a fresh contribution to debates surrounding the history of the Jacobite movement, the construction of British national identity, and the origins of the Enlightenment. Gabriel Glickman is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick.

Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance

Abstract: To borrow and adapt the title of Stanley Cavell's essay on Emerson,1 what's the use of calling Alfred North Whitehead a postmodernist? This is a question that David Ray Griffin has been pursuing, seriously and affirmatively, for decades, both in his own writing and in the SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought that he edits. Taking up the issue again, his most recent philosophical book provides a two-fold answer: viewing Whitehead as a postmodern philosopher, Griffin argues, effectively emphasizes important aspects of his process philosophy as a critique of modern philosophy and also demonstrates its superiority over other versions of postmodernism. The title thus suggests three related topics: the contemporary relevance of Whitehead s philosophy, its particular status as a postmodern philosophy, and its radical difference from other postmodern philosophies. As a general analysis of Whiteheadian thought as a comprehensive and coherent rethinking of the problems of modern philosophy, the book is considerably more convincing in its treatment of these first two issues than the third. Griffins study is divided into three parts. Introducing the basic ideas and arguments that tie the whole book together, the first discusses Whitehead s postmodern philosophy in relation to the enlightenment. Chapter one defines what in principle makes Whiteheads thought postmodern while locating it within the general history of postmodernism, which Griffin understands as having undergone a transformation. There is an early postmodernism, identified with the term as employed in the 1960s and 1970s, with which Whiteheads philosophy is compatible, and then there is a later version as formulated in the 1980s and 1990s. The latter usage of the term represents "a radically different meaning, one that made Whiteheadian philosophy seem more an opponent than an exemplification" (vii). This more contemporary form of postmodernism appears throughout the book as the subject of Griffins scorn, but unfortunately, other than occasional references to Richard Rorty, it remains unclarified to any great extent. Instead, he describes this deleterious postmodernism only generally in terms of its "dominant image" (12): mechanistic in its denial of human freedom and Kantian in its insistence on sensationism as the only form of knowledge, it takes all discourses to be equally groundless and thus nihilistically rejects all metaphysics, all kinds of realism, all rationalist views, all conceptions of truth as correspondence, and all comprehensive explanations of the world. While the two do share certain ideas in ui