ISBN-13: 9781412940238 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 108 str.
From science to politics, the era of the the Enlightenment is widely recognized as a crucible for modern Western culture. It has shaped vast portions of the Western world view, including our conceptions and experiences of happiness, family life, the nation-state, and religious and ethnic identities. However, in recent years, scholars from both the sciences and the humanities have debated the question of how we should understand, and to what extent we should endorse, our debt to the Enlightenment.
The January 2006 issue of American Behavioral Scientist offers rigorous engagement of pro-Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment perspectives, continuing a debate that began in the late eighteenth century. The opening essays by James Schmidt and Graeme Garrard offer historically and linguistically nuanced defenses of plural uses of the term "enlightenment"-- especially to capture the distinction between the process of enlightenment and the era of the Enlightenment. The remaining articles more closely
examine several questions about the Enlightenment's legacy for contemporary life: