Philosophy in the times of late modernity

Reflections on György Márkus’s Culture, Science, Society

Bibliographic Data

ID4482069
AuthorsJános Kis (Central European University, Hungary, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume126
Issue1
Pages7-18
Publication date2015-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThesis Eleven (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0725513614566545
OpenAlexW2321171261
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited2

It is a central claim of György Márkus's philosophy of (modern) culture that the Enlightenment project ended up in deep, apparently irresolvable antinomies. But, unlike the majority of 'postmodern' thinkers, Márkus insists that the commitments of the Enlightenment cannot and should not be given up. This tension between the failure of the Enlightenment to produce a society of free and equal persons, each leading their lives autonomously, drawing on the resources of rational high culture, and the impossibility and undesirability of the abandonment of the commitments of the Enlightenment finds an expression in what Márkus calls 'the antinomies of late modernity'. This paper offers an interpretation of Márkus's conception; it identifies a certain ambiguity in Márkus's use of the term 'antinomies' (a wobbling among three different senses as 'pairs of opposites', 'conflicts of values' and 'conceptual incoherence'), and suggests that Márkus's ambition is compatible with maintaining the first two but is failed by the third one which should, therefore, be abandoned

Aesthetics · Ambiguity · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Impossibility · Modernity · Political science · Postmodernism · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies · Law · Philosophy

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