Towards a New Enlightenment - The Case for Future-Oriented Humanities

by Markus Gabriel

What role can the humanities play in shaping our common future? What are the values that guide us in the 21st century? How can we unleash the potential the humanities offer in a time of multiple crises? This volume tackles some of these fundamental questions, acknowledging and developing the changing role of academic discourse in a turbulent world. This timely book argues that the humanities engender conceptual tools that are capable of reconciling theory and practice. In a bold move, we call for the humanities to reach beyond the confines of universities and engage in the most urgent debates facing humanity today - in a multidisciplinary, transformative, and constructive way. This is a blueprint for how societal change can be inclusive and equitable for the good of humans and non-humans alike.

81 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 30, 2022

About the author

Markus Gabriel was born in 1980 and studied in Heidelberg, Lisbon and New York. Since 2009 he has held the chair for Epistemology at the University of Bonn; and with this appointment he became Germany's youngest philosophy professor. He is also the director of the International Center for Philosophy in Bonn.

Reviews

[Sandro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book which captures the critical role that the humanities can play in the 21st century. Arguing that to deal with our twenty-first century challenges we need to develop a 'New Enlightenment'—an enlightenment that reckons with its predecessor's anthropocentrism and hegemonic structures, and which combines collective, disciplinary efforts in designing problem-based solutions—the authors present a taxonomy of principles under which the humanities might showcase their societal relevance today. The modal constructions in my writing might already hint to the few criticisms I have: the book reads like a manifesto, therefore presenting little practical advice and/or examples of how the vision of the New Enlightenment could be instituted, and consequently, it puts forward a universalist argument (falling into the same trap as its 17th/18th-century predecessor) about the humanities as one shared discipline. Even within the humanities we find different epistemologies, ideologies, methodologies, all the -logies, really! To put them all in one cauldron risks undermining the power that specific examples would have had in materialising the book's argument on the page. Nevertheless, as someone who believes in the power of transdisciplinary discourse to meet the challenges of the future, I believe this book to be an important and valuable contribution to current humanistic scholarship. Also, it's a quick read, yet doesn't sacrifice complexity for it--yay!

[Tom Leonhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the most accessible book, but there are a lot of very interesting and even inspiring approaches laid out.