Let's get enlightened 2

February 23, 2007

Is there a chance, for once, of correcting and disabusing analytic philosophy of the canard that the Frankfurt School was hostile to the ideals of reason, freedom, democracy and so on, in Simon Blackburn's review of Jonathan Israel's book on the Enlightenment?

The school's beef wasn't with such values, but with the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries' Cartesian, aka positivist, versions of them: unhistorical, fixed, undialectical and unreflexive, and based on a simplistic, binary, either-or logic.

David Rodway.
Woldingham, Surrey

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