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 closelyexamine several
questions about the Enlightenment's legacy for contemporary life:
Are we living out the aspirations of the Enlightenment in a
critical or tacit manner? Are we witnessing the end of the
Enlightenment's pervasive influence on intellectual paradigms,
social practices, and nation-states or making room for its further
articulation? Which, if any, of these relationships to the
Enlightenment are sociologically accurate or normatively
preferable?
The remaining essays by Darrin M. McMahon, Eileen Hunt Botting,
Adam Sutcliffe, Russell Arben Fox, and Damon Linker review these
questions from different perspectives and assess the value of the
Enlightenment's legacy in various spheres of human life. McMahon's
essay focuses on the Enlightenment s impact on the modern
understanding of happiness and social welfare. Botting's essay
concentrates on how Mary Wollstonecraft s Enlightenment philosophy
contributed to the development of the "modern social imaginary" of
the egalitarian family. Sutcliffe and Fox illustrate how Western
conceptions of religious, ethnic, and national identities have been
shaped in critical dialogue with, or in opposition to, the
rationalistic, universalistic strands of Enlightenment thought.
Linker argues that we should resist Heidegger's rejection of the
philosophical process of enlightenment and that we should instead
embrace the Enlightenment s promotion of the normative ideal and
political practice of critical public discourse about our
relationships to one another and the world around us.
This issue of American Behavioral Scientist offers an accessible
survey of current research on the contemporary relevance of the
Enlightenment and should be in the library of every political
scientist, sociologist, historian, humanist, philosopher, and
student "
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