The Ethos of the Enlightenment and the Discontents of Modernity

Matan Oram is a Professor of Political Science at The Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo; his lectures and research focus on political philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas. His publications address a wide range of topics of the philosophical discourse on modernity, and contemporary socio-political thought. His most recent book is Modernity and Crisis in the Thought of Michel Foucault ( 2017).

Introduction

PART I: The Philosophical Beginnings of Critical Thought

1. The production of Knowledge, Rationality and the Critical Spirit

2. The Enlightenment's Horizon of Progress

PART II: Modernity and its Discontents

3. The Human Condition: Nietzsche's Psycho-critical Discourse

4. Being and Crisis: Husserl's Phenomenological Concept of the Lifeworld

5. Modernity as Culture: A Contextual Reading of Freud's Concept of Discontents

PART III: Knowledge and Totality

6. The Open-Society and the Enemies of the Enlightenment: Popper's Critical-analysis of Scientific Theory – Historicism and Totalitarianism

7. Pathologies of Anti-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School

8. The Moral Horizon of the Enlightenment: Habermas' Rational Reconstruction

PART IV: The Changing of the Consciousness of Modernity

9. Two Critical Readings: Between Foucault and Habermas

10. Toward a Reconstructive Concept of Progress

11. Deciphering the Enigma: The Prefix 'Post'

Conclusion