The Enlightenment heritage has meant that we have tended to conceive of tradition as inevitably opposed to reason, and that the exten sion of one as a major constitutive element in social affairs, implies the retraction of the other. However, this paper attempts to conceive the relationship between tradition and reason in a more articulated context, suggesting that this dichotomy between reason and tradition may itself be what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls an 'Enlightenment prejudice'. By drawing on the work of thinkers (...) within a broad hermeneutic tradition, this paper attempts to articulate an alternative means of thinking about the relation ship between reason and tradition, which suggests that it is only when we adopt a particular Enlightenment perspective that we are hermeneutically confined to confirming Enlightenment presuppositions that there is such a dichotomy between reason and tradition. Key Words: constitutive • . Enlightenment • . justification • . legitimacy • . rational • . reason • . reflective • . tradition • . unreflective • . validity. (shrink)

The prefix “post” in the terms “postmodern,” “postmodernism,” and “postmodernity” implies that in some way modernity has been relegated either to a historical past or a moral obsolescence. This supposed transition from modernity to postmodernity, however, is inherently ambiguous, because modernity's limits are by no means self-evident. Its finality, therefore, is by no means clear. This is due, not least, to the fact that the very meaning of modernity as either a historical epoch or a normative project is open to (...) question. Thus, the boundaries of modernity, which would have to be transcended by a distinctive postmodern period, are contested.…. (shrink)