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This collection of ten essays offers the first systematic assessment of JürgenHabermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a book that defended the rational potential of themodern age against the depiction of modernity as a spent epoch. The essays (of which four are newlycommissioned, five were published in the journal Praxis International, and one -- by Habermas --first appeared in translation in New Critique) are divided into two sections: Critical Rejoindersand Thematic Reformulations.An opening essay by d'Entrèves sets out the main issues and orients thedebate between Habermas and the postmodernists by identifying two different senses ofresponsibility: a responsibility to act versus a responsibility to otherness (an openness todifference, dissonance, and ambiguity). These are linked with two alternative understandings of theprimary function of language: action-orienting versus world-disclosing. This is a fruitful way oflooking at the issues that Habermas has raised in his attempt to resurrect and complete the projectof Enlightenment.Habermas's essay discusses the main themes of his book in the context of a criticalengagement with neoconservative cultural and political trends. The main body of essays offer aninteresting collection of points of view, for and against Habermas's position by philosophers,social scientists, intellectual historians, and literary critics.SECTIONS & CONTRIBUTORS :Introduction, Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves. Modernity versus Postmodernity, Jürgen Habermas.Critical Rejoinders : Fred Dallmayr. Christopher Norris. David C. Hoy. James Schmidt. JoelWhitebook. Thematic Reformulations : James Bohman. Diana Coole. Jay M. Bernstein. DavidIngram.
This book probes the sources and nature of the ‘discontents of modernity’. It proposes a new approach to the philosophic-critical discourse on modernity. The Enlightenment is widely understood to be the foundational moment of modernity. Yet despite its appeal to reason as the ultimate ground of its authority and legitimacy, the Enlightenment has had multiple historical manifestations and, therefore, can hardly be said to be a homogenous phenomenon. The present work seeks to identify a unitive element that allows us to speak of the Enlightenment. To do so, it enjoins the concept of ‘ethos’ and its relation to the ‘discontents of modernity’. This book proposes a new theoretical framework for the examination of the interrelationships between ‘critical thought’ and ‘modernity’, based on a fundamental distinction between criticism and negation. It will appeal to scholars and students of critical theory, the history of ideas, philosophy, the sociology of knowledge, and political science.
Few studies of Foucault have examined his thought from a sustained interdisciplinary perspective. Through the interpretative prism of the concept of the ‘Totality of Reason’, this book suggests an original analytical reading of Foucault's thought. This book addresses Foucault’s characterizations of the Enlightenment, asking whether the developmental history of the modern conception of knowledge – from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment – warrants the conclusion he draws. From the perspective of a critical evaluation of Foucault's thesis on ‘the crisis of modernity’, the book examines whether Foucault, the philosophical and social critic, truly belongs to those intellectual trends known as a ‘deconstruction’ and ‘post-modernism’ that advocate a wholesale rejection of the project of modernity, demonstrating how a classification of this kind contributes to an impoverishment of our understanding of Foucault's thought. This book will attract the attention of readers interested in Foucault, and what is broadly perceived to be the ‘crisis of modernity’. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students of sociology, political philosophy and political science, psychology, philosophy, interdisciplinary studies and cultural studies.
Das Lehrgedicht über den Menschen von Alexander Pope (1688-1744) gilt als eines der herausragenden literarischen Zeugnisse seiner Zeit. Bald nach seinem Erscheinen 1733/1734 in viele Sprachen übersetzt, spiegelt es den moralphilosophischen Optimismus der frühen Aufklärung wider. Diese Ausgabe enthält den englischen Originaltext samt Angabe von Textvarianten und eine deutsche metrische Übertragung. Durch Register und zahlreiche erläuternde Anmerkungen wird der Zugang zum Text erleichtert.
This book focuses on the genealogy of modernity as it has been articulated by the original contributions of Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault, in their respective conceptions of truth, power, and ethics. The author seeks to show that in order to articulate a philosophical discourse on modernity one must not only refer to cultural, historical events associated with modern conceptions of truth, power, and ethics, but one must also undertake an analysis of how these different axes concur to determine what we call 'modernity'. Such is in effect the genealogical thrust of this study, which is explicitly based upon Foucault's readings of Kant and Nietzsche, so as to show that critique and genealogy constitute a highly original contribution of Foucault's social philosophy to the study of modernity. The 'genealogy of modernity' is shown to constitute the major thesis of a Foucauldian 'philosophical discourse of modernity' which, contrary to Habermas's criticisms, does not evade questions of truth, normativity, and value, but rather problematises them. The genealogy of modernity is itself made possible by the articulation of the three axes of truth, power, and ethics that determine the historical a priori of our modern ethos as the condition of who we are, that is, the formation of modern subjectivity with its regimes of veridiction and jurisdiction, modes of subjectivation and practices of freedom.
What should Christian discourse look like after philosophical modernity? In one manner or another the essays in this volume seek to confront and intellectually exorcise the prevailing elements of philosophical modernity, which are inherently transgressive disfigurations and refigurations of the Christian story of creation, sin, and redemption. To enact these various forms and styles of Christian intellectual exorcism the essays in this volume make appeal to, and converse with, the magisterial corpus of Cyril O’Regan. The themes of the essays center around the gnostic return in modernity, apocalyptic theology, and the question of the bounds and borders of Christian orthodoxy. Along the way diverse figures are treated such as: Hegel, Shakespeare, von Balthasar, Przywara, Ricouer, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Kristeva. Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O’Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity is a veritable feast of post-modern Christian thought.
In this new collection of recent essays, Habermas takes up and pursues the line of analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. He begins by outlining the sources and central themes of twentieth-century philosophy, and the range of current debates. He then examines a number of key contributions to these debates, from the pragmatic philosophies of Mead, Perice and Rorty to the post-structuralism of Foucault. Like most contemporary thinkers, Habermas is critical of the Western metaphysical tradition and its exaggerated conception of reason. But he cautions against the temptation to relinquish this conception altogether. In opposition to the radical critics of Western philosophy, Habermas argues that postmetaphysical thinking can remain critical only if it preserves the idea of reason while stripping it of its metaphysical trappings. Habermas contributes to this task by developing further his distinctive approach to problems of meaning, rationality and subjectivity. This book will be of particular interest to students of philosophy, sociology and social and political theory, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the continuing development of Habermas's project.
David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision. In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live.
