From: Philip Goetz (philgoetz@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 27 2006 - 18:15:26 MDT
On 4/25/06, turin <turin@hell.com> wrote:
> I haven't been keeping up but I'm responding to Jeff Albrights earlier discussion of objective and subjective values.
>
> The whole Enlightenment ideal was that eventually if you get enough people in the right place all talking together everyone could come to the "truth" or at least to an agreed upon solution to a set of goals which makes sense to everyone. That is a subtext for democracy in some places...
The Enlightenment could perhaps be better characterized in the
opposite way. It occurred in the context of societies that believed
they already knew all the important truths with absolute certainty.
Enlightenment thinkers argued that the agreed-upon truths were often
invalid. They did believe in truth, but they were fighting against
two ways of arriving at truth - receiving it from a book, and arriving
at it "democratically" (though they didn't use that word) via common
consensus. They might even have said that a truth that everyone
agreed on was inherently suspect.
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