The attacks on the Enlightment and "modernity": notes

I have posted a page over at modernity.aule-browser.com as part of an exploration of the requirements and desiderata for a useful research browser for the humanities. The APSA paper is available as a PDF.

The paper is made available at allacademic.com but was not the paper which first caught my attention: that paper was A Critique of Modernity: On Positivism, and Phenomenology and, like the paper posted, was presented at a recent Political Science convention in the USA. [I have since located that paper in PDF and posted a text version for analysis.

When I was staying in Marburg some years ago, I was struck by the pro-Palestinian sentiments of students studying in a German univeristy town where Heidegger had made his academic reputation and where there was as yet no sign for the many tourists of where one of the great synagogues of Europe had stood.  I was from leftist universities myself (U. Regina and L'UQAM) but at least at the former there was no shortage of left-wing New Yorkers who were at least raised as ethnic Jews and often presented themselves as such.  Montreal was a more complex case, with some French-speaking Moroccan Jews attending all the universities  but with deeply engrained anti-Semitism in the guise of "anti-English" and "anti-Westmount" or "anti-West Island" - all of which signified areas notably Jewish - as compared to Ukrainian Rosemount or Italian St. Léonard.  Montrealers are not at ease with their anit-semitic past and present or their language mania (banning the use of the French word "hangar" for exterior coal sheds which were a feature of Montreal's miles of old cold-water flats, the French word "stopper" from "Stop" signs, etc, etc.)  Montreal is also notable as the home of one of the most virulent attacks on the scientific worldview of the western world, that being the political philosophy and cultural history of Charles Taylor at McGill University.

There are other hotbeds of leftist rhetoric in smaller Canadian universities or some campuses of urban universities or province-wide universities and some small colleges - rather like Macalister College here in Minneapolis-St. Paul or the home campus of "philosopher" Angela Davis in California.  The usual rhetoric stems from sources such as Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas and to a lesser extent, Gadamer and Derrida.  Simple irrationalism is always a ready import from Paris and invited speakers make for a real challenge to the comprehension of any English-speaking audience as I can attest when hearing some of the "Greats" of Paris at U de Mtl during my first year "in French" while already conversant with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Habermas, Dilthey, Heideger and Taylor in English.

Taylor is a special case: I now see that his attack on "modernity" must be clearly distinguised from MacIntyre's defense of the Thomistic tradition.

First MacIntyre.  A.M. would have his reader believe that an entire tradition fell into neglect.  It remains for an historian to refute this: it was not in neglect among Jesuits teaching high school in Regina or Catholic philosphers teaching at the religious colleges affiliated with our two Saskatchewan universities.  There is no basis for the claim with regard to the school in Quebec City where the political luminaries of late 20th Century all studied or at Laval University.

Taylor's lines of argument comes out of a different background than those of MacIntyre and I am sure Taylor would not want this hermeneutical asoect to be over-looked. [...]

Many of us look at behaviorism and operationalism in social science and now think that the answer was to wait for the wave to pass: no head-long attack would be effective.  But this may not be the case in political commentary, where insight can pass for research.  This appears to be the case with the lasting adoration of Adorno if addresses to Political Science conferences as preserved at allacademic.com are any indication.

In the past, unpublished papers tended to vanish at retirement of the author (not the case with at least one of Taylor's own "grey" articles).  While conference papers are sometimes said to be "peer-reviewed" what is more often meant if "accepted for reading by a peer" or "reader invited by a peer".  Nothing else, presumably, could explain the papers which I am now reading.

In the on Rappa paper, the most distressly line might be

because it is the very nature of capitalism to deny the fullness of any aesthetic
that cannot be exploited to the Jewish for its pie-making possibilities.

but there is no way of knowing if he read that line to the audience at that conference.