descartes | Pandaemonium

TO CAST THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN A RADICAL LIGHT

June 20, 2013 by Kenan Malik

There is no period of history that has been more analysed, debated, celebrated and disparaged than the Enlightenment. Unlike, say, the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment is not simply a historical moment but one through which debates about the contemporary world are played out. From the role of science to the war on terror, from free speech to racism, there are few contemporary debates that do not engage with the Enlightenment, or, at least, with what we imagine the […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: christianity, descartes, dualism, enlightenment, ernst cassirer, hobbes, jonathan israel, kant, locke, max horkenheimer, monism, peter gay, radical enlightenment, reformation, religion, religious freedom, spinoza, theodor adorno

DESCARTES’ GHOST

May 12, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In completing my book on the history of moral thought I had to reduce the original manuscript by some 30,000 words to get it to a reasonable size. Much of what has been lost is better off left on the cutting room floor. There are, however, some sections coherent enough to be worth reading. So, I am running an occasional series publishing some of the more cogent ‘lost pages’ from the book. The first was on Machiavelli. This extract is on Descrates and […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: descartes, dualism, history of ideas, history of moral thought, human nature, renaissance

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 14]: SARTRE AND THE ANGUISH OF FREEDOM

March 25, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism. ‘Existence comes before essence’. So claimed Sartre in his celebrated 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a phrase that gets to the heart (one might even say the essence) […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aristotle, camus, consciousness, darwin, descartes, existentialism, free will, human agency, human nature, humanism, kierkegaard, marx, morality, religion, sartre

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 10]: SPINOZA’S ETHICS

November 6, 2011 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts I’m running from my still-being-written book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 11, which explores the ethical claims of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. The rise of the market economy and the growth of religious scepticism had, by the seventeenth century, corroded the ability of both God and community to warrant moral behaviour. Who or what could now authorize moral rules? This was the question now facing moral philosophers. One answer was […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: descartes, history of moral thought, hobbes, human agency, human nature, kenan malik's books, morality, spinoza