October 20, 2005
Just how does analytic philosophy understand modernity? As a continual process of enlightenment towards the truth and freedom?
It is committed to the project of the Enlightenment is it not? If so, then how does it deal with Weber's iron cage of modernity? Surely it no longer pretends that society doesn't exist and that everything can be reduced to the entities of mathematical physics? Surely it now acknowledges that it, as a particular historically formed school, exists in a liberal capitalist society in the 20th century?
I guess what the school denies is that the history and development of the tradition of analytic philosophy has not been affected by the history of late modernity.
|
The question is valid. Isn't the core issue here the inability of analytical philosophies to conceive of history as something other than external to its discipline? They don't even discard history - how can they when they know not what it is?
Cue Habermas: he, too, has difficulty bringing history (and the project/question of modernity) into his project.