This post makes a straightforward analytic argument clarifying the relationship between reason and experience. The popularity of this post suggests that the ideas of cultural accumulation of knowledge, and the power of reason, have been politicized into a specious Hegelian opposition to each other. But for the most part neither Baconian science nor mathematics (except for the occasional Ramanujan) works as a human institution except by the accumulation of knowledge over time.
A good follow-up post would connect this to the ways in which modernist ideology poses as the legitimate successor to the European Enlightenment, claiming credit for the output of Enlightenment institutions, and then characterizing its own political success as part of the Enlightenment. Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” might be a good foil.
This post makes a straightforward analytic argument clarifying the relationship between reason and experience. The popularity of this post suggests that the ideas of cultural accumulation of knowledge, and the power of reason, have been politicized into a specious Hegelian opposition to each other. But for the most part neither Baconian science nor mathematics (except for the occasional Ramanujan) works as a human institution except by the accumulation of knowledge over time.
A good follow-up post would connect this to the ways in which modernist ideology poses as the legitimate successor to the European Enlightenment, claiming credit for the output of Enlightenment institutions, and then characterizing its own political success as part of the Enlightenment. Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” might be a good foil.