Recommendations from our site
“I wanted to recommend a couple of Foucault books here. He’s going through a less fashionable phase now, but I think he’s one of the most exciting, innovative thinkers of the twentieth century. I also wanted to show that part of post-structuralist thinking in the twentieth century – i.e. what went on to become cutting-edge modern philosophy – was still deeply indebted to the Enlightenment. Something amazing happened in the last years of the seventeenth century that somebody in the 1960s was still thinking through. And I suppose that the question Foucault asks is, how, after the catastrophes of the twentieth century—the Holocaust, the world wars, the economic depression—are we going to reground ourselves? How are we going to find an intellectual framework from which we can understand what we’ve done to ourselves and establish the foundations of an ethical life?” Read more...
The best books on The Enlightenment
Sophie Gee, Literary Scholar
