Word: kant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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According to Grass, "literature has an explosive quality at its root, though the explosions literature releases have a delayed-action effect...How long did it take the European Enlightenment from Montaigne to Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Lessing and Lichtenberg to introduce a flicker of reason into the dark corners of scholasticism?...But when the light finally did brighten things up, it turned out to be the light of cold reason, limited to the technically doable, to economic and social progress, a reason that claimed to be enlightened but that merely drummed a reason-based jargon (which amounted to instructions for progress...
Literature alone does not change the world, because it does not produce new knowledge. Human beings and their passions have not changed since the time of the Sumerians. Literature may apply and interpret the new knowledge but only science can produce it. Men of letters like Kant and Voltaire were commentators on a radical change in the way the West thought about humans and their world. Their influence was significant but the credit for initiating change does not lie with them...
...very suave but very ignorant self-satisfaction," Purdy says of the Exeter atmosphere. "There was this sense of casual entitlement." Later he was admitted to Harvard, where he became, in his own dramatic phrase, "obsessed with ethics." Listening to Purdy describe his zeal for Kant and Hegel, it's easy to see why certain critics can't help poking fun at him. Why so serious? And considering the status of Purdy's heroes--from the great French essayist Montaigne to the brave Polish dissident Adam Michnik--the objects of his derision seem like straw men. Purdy singles out for special...
...exactly the problem with the book: for every statement that seems knowing, there are three that seem naive or exaggerated. Shalit attacks Prozac and the Pill as antithetical to female nature and argues that sexual harassment is better addressed by courtly standards than by legislation. Say what? She wields Kant and Kierkegaard in defending the past; for modern times, however, her shaky authorities tend to be women's magazines. And though she properly skewers those who ridicule women who say no, her modesty can't handle the complex motivations of those who sometimes...
Probably not. Instead, we'll reach again for a time-tested moral notion, one sometimes called the Golden Rule and which Immanuel Kant, the millennium's most meticulous moralist, gussied up into a categorical imperative: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; treat each person as an individual rather than as a means to some...