Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Book | Chapter

196990

Abstract

Is critique a machine invented in the seventeenth century, an instrument among many others designed to destroy the remains of a feudalist and theological worldview? Is it a machine that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constantly adapted itself to new challenges, feeding itself on targets produced by the very modernity from which it issued? Is critique a machine that today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, has finally run out of steam, as Bruno Latour has recently suggested?1 And if critique may seem to have come to a standstill, is this because it does not find new targets anymore or rather because it has torn to pieces the very possibility of distinguishing between a truth grasped by the critic, a set of norms to be criticised and masses in need of enlightenment? Has critique thereby devoured its very condition of possibility?

Publication details

Published in:

Boer Karinde, de Boer Karin, Sonderegger Ruth (2012) Conceptions of critique in modern and contemporary philosophy. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pages: 1-9

DOI: 10.1057/9780230357006_1

Full citation:

de Boer Karin, Sonderegger Ruth (2012) „Introduction“, In: K. Boer, K. De Boer & R. Sonderegger (eds.), Conceptions of critique in modern and contemporary philosophy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1–9.