Brendan Sweetman

This work, translated from the German, is divided into nine chapters with a preface plus a very helpful introduction by the translator. There is also a postscript by Habermas, as well as a reprinting of two earlier papers on related topics. The book is intended as a contribution to contemporary political philosophy, and, as such, Habermas accepts certain assumptions in advance and does not attempt to argue for them at any length. The first is the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, the antirealist view that all knowledge is in some sense constructed by human culture and language. The second is the failure of natural law theory. Hence, his task is to engage in political philosophy in a “post-metaphysical age,” an age which requires a “procedural reason... that puts itself on trial”. Against this background, the political philosopher must avoid the twin pitfalls of subordinating law to a transcendentally grounded morality and of identifying law with a particular tradition’s view of the good life.

The discussion between Ernan McMullin and Alvin Plantinga concerning evolution and religion, which first appeared in Christian Scholar’s Review in September 1991, is an enlightening airing of many of the issues that arise with regard to this complex, controversial topic. Overall, Plantinga favors a confrontational view of the relationship between religion and evolution, while McMullin favors a dialogue model. The two thinkers disagree about the evidence for evolution, about what Plantinga calls “theistic science,” about methodological naturalism, and about biblical interpretation. McMullin accepts a mainstream view in several important respects, holding that: (i) evolution is true; (ii) Genesis is not to be read literally; (iii) science should be separated from theology; (iv) we should accept “methodological naturalism”; and (v) we should reject “creation science.” Plantinga disagrees with all of these claims. This article explores the differences between the two thinkers by means of an exposition of the main points, and offers a few important critical observations on key questions.

The main objective of this book “is to reinstate a marginalized intellectual culture to its proper place in the intellectual history of early modern Germany”. In order to do this, Hunter offers an account of two independent intellectual cultures—two “rival enlightenments”—of civil and metaphysical philosophy in early German intellectual history. The first of these rival versions is the current mainstream view: that the enlightenment influences in modern Germany became gradually unified, through Kant’s formalization of the notion of enlightenment which treats it as human reason’s recovery of its own intellectual and moral laws, and through Hegel’s dialectical historicisation of the concept, which allows reason’s self-clarification to occur in time as the transcending reconciliation of a series of fundamental historical oppositions. This conception of enlightenment had a significant influence on, among other things, the notion of the modern secular, pluralist state. It was also a conception of enlightenment that relied upon philosophy for its identification and elaboration.

This article provides, through a discussion of the work of Jacques Derrida, an examination of the philosophical basis of postmodernism. The first section identifies and explains the positive claims of postmodernism, including the key claim that all identities, presences, etc. depend for their existence on something which is absent and different from themselves. The second section further illustrates the positive claims through an analysis of Derrida's "deconstructionist" reading of Plato. The final section raises a number of critical problems for postmodernism: that it confuses aesthetics with metaphysics; that it mistakes assertion for argument in philosophy; that it is guilty of relativism; and that it is self-contradictory.

The emergence of modernity in Western thinking entails a new, radically different worldview from the past, one dominated by secular understandings of history and tradition, and of new forms of what Cochran calls “collective consciousness.” Modernity also requires a rethinking of the role of human knowledge in the world. Cochran’s aim is to explore the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of these developments by looking at the ideas of a variety of thinkers, and by focusing in particular on the rise of the print medium, the book, as the dominant medium for recording, preserving, and disseminating thought. By modernity, Cochran means the world’s “relative disengagement from a theologically grounded view of human history”. His approach is fundamentally postmodernist, although he mentions few postmodernists in his exposition; he is inspired mainly by critical theory, especially Gramsci. He wants to challenge the traditional view of the progress of knowledge, which he believes was strongly influenced in terms of its theoretical understanding by Leibniz and Kant. This is the view that history is linear: that we are always adding to the sum total of knowledge, which inevitably opens a distinction between the present and the past; that we learn from the past, and project toward a better future. This view is fundamentally against the relativistic tendencies of the modern age, and it contributed to the emergence of several concepts that became central to our understanding of culture: the totality of human knowledge, adding to knowledge, the university as center of knowledge, the scholarly expert, the emergence of the subject, the expert informing the public, and so on.