Campus eBookstore Logo

Skip Navigation LinksEBook Details

Aspects of Enlightenment

Aspects of Enlightenment
Author: Thomas Osborne
Price: $57.50
ISBN-10: 074257086X
ISBN-13: 9780742570863
Get It!:
Format: EPub
Delivery: BibliU Reader
Duration: Lifetime

Note:
Copy Selections To Clipboard: Copying content to the clipboard is completely disabled
Printing Pages: Printing pages is completely disabled

Description

Aspects of Enlightenment is an attempt to reconfigure the terrain of contemporary social theory. Critical of sociologistic approaches in that discipline and of vague concepts such as modernity and postmodernity, the book argues that the proper subject matter of social theory is enlightenment itself. Dismissing for the most part the conflicts in social and critical theory between realist and relativist approaches, the book argues for the merits of various limited kinds of anti-foundationalism that would guide fieldwork in specific areas of enlightenment. As a means of illustrating this approach, the book focuses on case studies that consider critical attitudes to scientific, therapeutic and aesthetic kinds of enlightenment. A key theme throughout the book is the status of the social sciences themselves with regard to the question of enlightenment, as well as with the nature of the vocation of the intellectual as the embodiment of particular kinds of critical ethos. Finally, the book in an oblique homage to the work of Michel Foucault who figures here, along with Max Weber, as an exemplar of the critical attitude to enlightenment.