Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism Revisited

by Gene Callahan (Editor), Kenneth B. McIntyre (Editor)

Overview

This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume (including, among others, Pascal, Vico, Schmitt, Weber, Anscombe, Scruton, and Tolkien) do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences.

The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place the person in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031052286
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	09/10/2022
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	339
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gene Callahan teaches at New York University. He is the author of Economics for Real People (2002), Oakeshott on Rome and America (2012), and co-editor of Tradition v. Rationalism (2018).

Kenneth B. McIntyre is Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. He is the author of The Limits of Political Theory: Michael Oakeshott on Civil Association (2004), Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics (2012), and Nomocratic Pluralism: Plural Values, Negative Liberty, and the Rule of Law (2021), and co-editor of Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism (2021).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Conservatism and Social Criticism: Pascal on Faith, Reason, and Politics.- 3. Giambattista Vico and Democratic Pluralism: Lessons for Deliberative Democracy.- 4. A Modest Spinozist: George Eliot and the Limits of Rationalism.- 5. Projections Upon the Void: Irving Babbitt’s Critique of Naturalism.- 6. Carl Schmitt's Exceptional Critique of Rationalism.- 7. Moral Man in a Morally Irrational World: Max Weber and the Limits of Reason.- 8. The Moral Personality of Mikhail Bulgakov.- 9. Nec Spe Nec Metu: Philosophic Catharsis in Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History.- 10. Metaphor, Meaning, and Mind: Knowledge and Imagination in Owen Barfield.- 11. Rings and Rationalism: Tolkien’s Tales Against Domination.- 12. Shedding the Shackles of Rationalism.- 13. Beautiful Minds: Gregory Bateson on Ecology, Insanity, and Wisdom.- 14. Robert Nisbet: Art, History, and the Anti-Rationalism of Sociological Methodology.- 15. Elizabeth Anscombe on Rationalism.- 16. A.C. Graham on Rationalism, Irrationalism, and Anti-Rationalism (“Aware Spontaneity”).- 17. Intention, Intellect, and Imagination: Stuart Hampshire’s Pluralism.- 18. Rationality and Tradition in Roger Scruton’s Thought.- 19. A Counter-Enlightenment of the Present: A Defense of John Grays' Modus Vivendi Liberalism.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This ‘sequel’ to Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism contains all the virtues of the first volume. It includes essays that not only provide an overview of many (more) critics of the Enlightenment, but also engage deeply and thoughtfully with their criticisms so as to provoke reflection on the similarities and differences among these critics across the centuries. In addition, this collection adds to the first volume by including voices from novelists, sociologists, economists, and philosophers that greatly contribute to our understanding of the tradition of the modern skepticism of rationalism.”

—Jeffrey Church, Professor and Chair of Political Science, University of Houston, USA

“Gene Callahan’s and Ken McIntyre’s second volume of essays, like the first, covers a wide variety of anti-rationalist intellectuals. The collection is even more eclectic than the first volume. The eighteen essays range from analyses of the anti-rationalism of Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century and Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth, and then on through a diverse group of literary, sociological, political, economic, and philosophical writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including, perhaps surprisingly, George Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien), and ends with studies of two contemporary philosophers, the late Roger Scruton and John Gray. Readers of both volumes will recognize the editorial wisdom in adopting such a broad conception of Enlightenment Rationalism, a conception similar to Oakeshott’s idea of modern rationalism, with its seeds sown by Bacon and Descartes in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This broad conception allows them to explore opposition strategies to the complex, multilayered contours of an intellectual fashion whose inexorable progress over the past four centuries has done so much to render contemporary public culture the arid wasteland it often seems to be. But one of the many positive messages that readersmight usefully take away from the very eclectic sources examined in these volumes is the fact that so many of the thinking classes (as they used to be called) have always rejected with powerful arguments the dull mediocrity and simplistic, self-destructive ideas of our contemporary equivalents of mere sophists, economists, and calculators.”

—Martyn P. Thompson, Professor of Political Science, Tulane University, USA

“What recommends this volume is not merely the quality of the contributions but its breadth. The variety of authors, subjects, fields, themes, and reflections here testify to the fact that reaction to Enlightenment rationalism was afoot across a spectrum of thoughtful individuals. Anyone interested in exploring insightful and lively critiques that there is a science, or a ‘correct’ response to the human condition, will want to read these essays.”

—Eric S. Kos, Professor of Political Science, SienaHeights University, USA