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.
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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No, not a soul. But let's say that through an iterative collective process, based on our biology (including our moral sentiments) morality develops as a part of human culture. And that's not the same as the moral sense itself or the facts.
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No, its a lot of moral senses and reason all working together.
End of conversation
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1/ Many are pedantic when they make the historical point against Pinker. Just to be clear, I’ve never done that, nor would I start now. My point—which wasn’t about Pinker here, but I’m happy to adapt it—is that his constricted view of Reason compromises what he’s able to do.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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2/ By knowing the original notion of Reason of which, day, the British Empiricist one is an image, you can see more clearly its limits and how it can be superseded by the Platonic alternative. I make the critique more specific around 24-25 minutes here:https://youtu.be/iYrueaQy-0s
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