What we today call enlightenment?

The book contains the proceedings of a conference, in Beijing (Peking) took place in 2008 and was jointly organized by the philosophical institutes of the Peking University and the Free University of Berlin.

Opened is the band with a tight and enjoyable concise introduction by the editor HANS FEGER (I). The following, mostly English essays are divided into the following topics:. II concept of enlightenment, III. Enlightenment and critique of religion, IV. Politics, Aesthetics and Religion, V. Enlightenment in China, VI. Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.

From a total of 27 texts on various aspects of education from skepticism to the ideology critique and Enlightenment from Descartes to Foucault I take out two that seem to be particularly revealing of the intercultural scope of the topic to me.

TZE-WAN KWAN is based on an internal stress in the process of philosophy itself, focusing on the relationship between education and enlightenment critique can refer (or counter, or even anti-Enlightenment): philia stands for love and indeed all feelings while Sophia Wisdom and everything to do with the mind refers. These two poles are not only reflected in Aristotle distinguish passive from active reason, which can work together peacefully in practice, as well as in Kant's two tribes of cognition (thinking and perceiving, concept and intuition) as in Pascal's logic of the heart, which he the logic of the intellect subordinates, in Hume's view of reason as a slave of the passions, to Heidegger's opposition between philosophy and life and, in extreme expression, vernunftdefaitistischer in Unamuno's theory of reciprocal fighting both poles.

Important for Kwan's understanding of enlightenment is now, that this open and unfinished project (including Kant and Habermas) can only be continued successfully if it reason and emotion be conceived not as irreconcilable opposites, but as partners who are dependent on each other: by becoming more passionate, reason can become more sensitive and reasonable (65).

The philosopher MONIQUE CASTILLO again distinguishes between two philosophical and historical and cultural significance of the Enlightenment: the narrower Kantian paradigm of liberation from prejudice and traditions, the more anti-modern paradigm of a radical critique of reason (Horkheimer / Adorno) and the historical-cultural paradigm of enlarged thinking ( Kant). The latter takes our present cultural relativism seriously and come to the necessity of freedom and science [in a new way, UM] connect (297). This new, anti-dogmatic universalism of the Enlightenment is the opposite of cultural or ethnological reductionism. With only instrumentally understood rationalization he has nothing to do. Rather, it relies on rationality as a deepening of the conscience that can only arise within the horizon of all peoples shared future (298). CASTILLO describes this enlightenment advocated by her as a moral attitude of generosity: generosity, each and every one, even the enemy or dissidents, freedom, dignity and equality to ensure a rational reasoned fundamental rights.

Such generosity may serve this evocative band. It could be even better if he does not disintegrate during the reading into individual sheets. Here the Enlightenment has saved in the wrong place.

Dr. Ulrich Müller (Berlin)