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2018, Metascience, vol. 27, issue 2, pp. 347-350
Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment NOW" is in many ways a terrific book, from which I have learnt much. But it is also deeply flawed. Science and reason are at the heart of the book, but the conceptions that Steven Pinker defends are damagingly irrational. And these defective conceptions of science and reason, as a result of being associated with the Enlightenment Programme for the past two or three centuries, have been responsible, in part, for the genesis of the global problems we now suffer from, and our current inability to deal with them properly. There is not a glimmering of an awareness of any of this in Pinker’s book. This flaw in Enlightenment NOW is serious indeed.
2020 •
This essay series, titled “Huxley, Dewey, and Pinker: Evolution, Science and Enlightenment - The Critical Virtue of Inquiry” examines the effort of Thomas Huxley, John Dewey, and Steven Pinker to account for and justify the transformative impact of Darwinian evolution upon the intellectual, emotional, and moral lives of humanity. The series explores the struggle of humanity first, to understand the cosmos that was revealed by the discoveries of Darwinian evolution, second, to manage the intellectual, emotional and moral implications of these discoveries, and third, to assess the dangers and the benefits of the processes of inquiry that created the revolution within which we all now must live.
Book Review of Steven Pinker's _Enlightenment Now_
Enlightenment 2.0
Enlightenment 2.02018 •
It has always been about understanding. Be it the news, the weather forecast or the speech one encounters, understanding was and is the key to a success in life. Over the past nearly 3,000 years since the written tradition was established in the Middle East knowledge began to play a crucial role in the life of individuals and their socio-political establishments and relations. The ability to not just read, thus reproducing mechanically what you read but actually understand what you read in detail and in depth became a truly desired art. That was the very subject of education-mastering the art of understanding and not just comprehending, i.e. literacy. The method of critical thinking established by the Enlightenment along with the mass literacy of individuals, however diminished in value over the past two decades as information channels and moreover their speed and nature changed dramatically the everyday life of all human beings. In the age of Internet, the very core of humanity is threatened by phenomena like "post-truth", fake and false news. The solution is simple as usual-we must speed up in every possible way the process of Enlightenment 2.0 to counter fight the lack of functional illiteracy among humans which deprives them of their imagination and freedom of thinking.
A Partial Enlightenment What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us About Living Well Without Perfection
A Partial Enlightenment (excerpt from introduction)2021 •
In many ways, Buddhism has become the global religion of the modern world. For its contemporary followers, the ideal of enlightenment promises inner peace and worldly harmony. And whereas other philosophies feel abstract and disembodied, Buddhism offers meditation as a means to realize this ideal. If we could all be as enlightened as Buddhists, some imagine, we could live in a much better world. For some time now, however, this beatific image of Buddhism has been under attack. Scholars and practitioners have criticized it as a Western fantasy that has nothing to do with the actual experiences of Buddhists. Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world. Finding unexpected affinities across world literature—Rudyard Kipling in colonial India, Yukio Mishima in postwar Japan, Bessie Head escaping apartheid South Africa—as well as in his own experiences living with Tibetan exiles, Alpert shows how these stories illuminate a world in which suffering is inevitable and total enlightenment is impossible. Yet they also give us access to partial enlightenments: powerful insights that become available when we come to terms with imperfection and stop looking for wholeness. A Partial Enlightenment reveals the moments of personal and social transformation that the inventions of modern Buddhism help make possible.
2020 •
Modern phenomena express the limitations of the Enlightenment ideals. Science and technology, the two sources of modern truth, cannot answer questions about meaning, subjectivity, or existential matters. Loneliness and political division are on the rise, but few have proposed how these concerns intrinsically relate to modernity's deficient approach to the world. Across disciplines, several overarching themes can be perceived such as particularization, isolation, sectorization, fragmentation and an unbridgeable dualism. Despite good intentions, the barren world created by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is a path towards emptiness. Jean Gebser (1905-1973), a German-Swiss cultural critic, explains that modern phenomena are manifestations of a deficient consciousness structure. To permanently resolve these issues, contemporary consciousness must be shifted. The current mental-rational-perspectival structure must be transcended. The wholeness realized in the emerging integral structure can save humanity from the Enlightenment's one-sided bequeathal.
2022 •
In the Preface to Rationality, Steven Pinker remarks that "we are smart enough to have … articulated the rules of reason that we so often flout" (p. xiv). Unfortunately, Pinker does not get the rules of reason right in this book. Pinker defends a damagingly irrational conception of reason. But despite this rather drastic failure, there is much of interest in this book, even if at a rather elementary level.
Presented at a political philosophy symposium organised in honour of Professor Tim O'Hagan on the occasion of his retirement, at UEA in September 2010. Unpublished because plans to publish from this symposium fell through. (I'd actually forgotten I'd written it.) Completed and corrected version uploaded 11.02.15. New postscript added 17.02.15.
2024 •
Dong Thap University Journal of Science
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International Studies Quarterly
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Psychology & Health
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