Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

The rationalists and the empiricists had jointly struck a blow to the Enlightenment confidence in reason. Reason works with concepts. But now we were to accept either that reason’s concepts have little to do with the world of sense experience—in which case, science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble—or we were to accept that reason’s concepts are merely provisional and contingent groupings of sense-experiences—in which case science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble. Thus, by the time of Kant, the Enlightenment philosophers’ account of reason was faltering on two counts. Given their analysis of sense-perception, reason seemed cut off from direct access to reality. And given their analysis of concepts, reason seemed either irrelevant to reality or limited to merely contingent truths.