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Reason and Culture (New Perspectives on the Past) 1st Edition

5.0 out of 5 stars 1 customer review
ISBN-13: 978-0631137115
ISBN-10: 0631137114
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Product Details

  • Series: New Perspectives on the Past
  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (August 3, 1992)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0631137114
  • ISBN-13: 978-0631137115
  • Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 6 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,625,029 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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By Luc REYNAERT on November 2, 2005
Format: Paperback
Ernest Gellner's book is a magisterial summary of Western philosophy:

Descartes's individual reason against collective culture.

Hume's sensualism against reason: ideas are residuals of qualia and habit determines the world structure.

Kant's idealism against sensualism: the world can be constructed by pure reason and the subject is the centre of the world. But a problem persists: the antinomy between individual freedom and the laws of physics.

Durkheim's importance of rites for morality.

Hegel and Marx: truth is the historical process.

Schopenhauer: nature is evil, blind insatiate passion and aggression.

Nietzsche's upheaval of Schopenhauer: acceptance of nature, no slave morals.

Darwin and the all importance of biology.

Freud: sexuality and irrationalism, but no philosophical coherence.

Weber: the importance of a certain form of rationalism for capitalism.

Chomsky: language structures are innate.

Popper: no laws, only falsifications.

The excesses of Popper's followers: anything goes (Paul Feyerabend).

Wittgenstein: Gemeinschaft (community) against Gesellschaft (society).

The enemies of reason (tradition, authority, experience, emotions, unsystematic experiments) put its position in our society in danger. Rational research discovered that our habits (also language) are irrational and based on a heap of sensory perceptions. Humans are biological beings.

Nevertheless, reason is needed for the functioning of our society. It should impose a limit on irrationality by a 'modus tollens': all ideas which are in contradiction with the facts should be rejected.

This rather small book is a very profound overview of fundamental philosophical problems.

A must read.

I also highly recommend the works of Bryan Magee.
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