Being fully rational requires taking stock of the whole. To focus exclusively on good (or bad) is to make a partial judgment. To deny the Enlightenment's responsibility for anything bad after, say, 1750 while giving it credit for everything good thereafter is a double standard.
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But even the ideas that are attributed to the Enlightenment are much more ancient than the Enlightenment itself. Philosophically and historically, it doesn't make any sense to place their origins at that point.
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Don't then? I don't think anyone claims this, do they? This was why we needed 10,000 words. It's well known that the Enlightenment closely connected to the Renaissance which was heavily informed by Ancient Greece. This might be of interest academically but is not really point.
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Why not? It's extremely important in tracing the basis to our moral values.
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Go for it. I am also interested in this. The Renaissance is my period of study. However, the history of ideas found in the Enlightenment need not inform our every moral decision now.
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Yes, but if you say that things like reason, individualism, progress, science, and so on, inform our current values, then what I answer is that those ideas are much more ancient than the Enlightenment.
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OK, you can answer that if you think it adds anything. Then we can continue discussing the claim that things like reason, individualism, progress, science, and so on, inform our current values?
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Yes, but I was not denying the fact that they do. Just that: 1 - It doesn't come all from scientific facts. Scientific facts by themselves don't create moral values. They can inform them, of course. 2 - Those ideas are much more ancient than the Enlightenment.
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OK. This is certainly something to tell people who claim that scientific facts by themselves create moral values and that ideas which became dominant during the Enlightenment never appeared before in any form anywhere. If that's all the convo is about, I will move on.
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Yes, I read that and wrote a two-part response. Here’s the first if you’re curious:http://quillette.com/2017/12/07/impasse-modernism-postmodernism/ …
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I think what you called Modernity Pinker called Enlightenment. It is fair to say it would have been the same book had he called it Banana (to make the historians happier), but the process is the point. That E was complex is not.
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