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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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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1/ There was some of that. But the connection between the two is where the interesting part was. If you can’t get values from empirical facts about nature, where can we discover them? Modern philosophers tried to find them in passions (sympathy: Hume) or reason (Kant).
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But are we including our evolved brains as an empirical fact about nature? Because I think it's clear morality comes from them. If not, where? A soul? Remove the frontal lobe & morality is gone. I think I see why James was referencing magic now.
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Those who advocate the continuation of the Enlightenment project or of modernity or of liberal secular democracy or of WEIRD culture or all of those aren't usually making statements like 'These ideas are unique to this time & everything that happened in that time was great'
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Agreed - it's a straw man to say "You say the brave men of the Enlightenment invented this stuff out of whole cloth." >
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Let's not forget that little 1000+ year period when heresy got you burned at the stake and the aristocracy lorded it over the miserable proles. Heads rolled (literally) to change that, so that the supercilious could mock the resulting freedoms.
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Actually what am I saying: the Enlightenment invented science. Before 1789 particles would do whatever TF they wanted.
End of conversation
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