from PART I - INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
One of the most distinctive features on the intellectual landscape of the last decades of the twentieth century is the intensity with which doubts have been raised about the conceptual foundations of Western modernity. Hard questions have emerged about the predominant modern understandings of reason, subjectivity, nature, progress, and gender. With the exception of the last topic, one might argue that these questions emerged in this century in their most powerful form within two streams of German philosophical reflection. In the immediate post-World War II years, Martin Heidegger wrote his “Essay on Humanism” (1946) and “The Question Concerning Technology” (1949), and he continued for the next thirty years to articulate a thorough critique of most of what the modern West has held dear. In 1947 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer published their Dialectic of Enlightenment, developing the claim that the systematic pursuit of enlightened reason and freedom had the ironic long-term effect of engendering new forms of irrationality and repression. These critiques had an immense impact both on the initial shape of the work of Jiirgen Habermas and on its continued evolution.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.