Crisis of Critique of Reason

3 credits · Undergraduate

There is a tendency, widespread in our day, to deny that we can know with certainty the conditions of any claim to knowledge, and as a result to doubt that we can say anything true about the world and ourselves. This class reconstructs the history of this critique of reason with a view to understanding the profound changes that have overtaken the social disciplines in the course of the past few decades. The class spans a couple of centuries. We discuss amongst other things the relationship between scepticism and truth, the practical character of human rationality, and the role of the language in the formation of our scientific theories, our ethical and political thinking, and our aesthetic sensibilities. FORMATS: Seminar