Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason (Volume 32)

Countless human beings have sought a path to "enlightenment." While history records a fantastic array of offers to lead the search, we customarily identify a single, and in its origin predominantly European, event in history as the Enlightenment. The global repercussions of that event surely attest to its success. At the same time, however, growing uncertainty about the goodness of "modernity" raises doubts about our use of the definite article. The essays in this volume pose the question common usage has obscured: was "the Enlightenment" truly enlightened or enlightening?

Scholarly investigation has sometimes avoided the question by confining itself to historical particulars of eighteenth-century Europe. Yet the most visible proponents of the Enlightenment, the philosophes, insisted that their project originated a century earlier, in the writings of the first self-proclaimed modern philosophers. This volume seeks philosophical clarity of modernity's enlightenment by beginning with Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes. Consideration of Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, Lessing, and Kant-all philosophical critics, or reformers, of the Enlightenment-furthers the study of its legacy by displaying its diversity. Finally, the book indicates the Enlightenment's vitality by outlining ways it continues to hold philosophical sway in this century.

The contributors discuss several themes pertaining to the ambition of Enlightenment reason: justice, tradition, and authority; the mastery of nature; metaphysics and scientific method; enlightened and unenlightened "dogmatism"; the utilitarian revision of the common good and the commonly true; Christianity and the limits of enlightened theology; "theodicy"; aesthetics and political rhetoric; myth, history, and human freedom.

In addition to the editor, the contributors to the volume are: Paul J. Bagley, Nicholas Capaldi, F. J. Crosson, Richard Kennington, Alan Charles Kors, Pamela Kraus, Robert P. Kraynak, Terence E. Marshall, Philippe Raynaud, Kenneth L. Schmitz, and John R. Silber.

John C. McCarthy is associate professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America.