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This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of "Enlightenment rationalism." The subjects of the volume-including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs-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 that thinker in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State.- 3. Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship between Reason and Freedom.- 4. Kierkegaard's Later Critique of Political Rationalism.- 5. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello.- 6. "Pagans, Christians, Poets".- 7. Wittgenstein on Rationalism.- 8. Heidegger's Critique of Rationalism and Modernity.- 9. Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems.- 10. Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism.- 11. C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man.- 12. Hayek: Postatomic Liberal.- 13. "Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical Tradition: Situating Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics".- 14. Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism.- 15. Michael Oakeshott's Critique of Modern Rationalism.- 16. Isaiah Berlin on Monism.- 17. Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence.- 18. Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities.- 19. Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre's Critique of Modern Moral Philosophy.
About the author
Eugene 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) and
Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics (2012).
