Abstract

A very readable, scholarly, and provocative book by Louis Dupré gives a new interpretation and meaning to the passage to modernity. Dupre gives a fascinating hermeneutic analysis of the creative revolution achieved by the early and late humanists and thinkers of the Renaissance in rethinking reality in terms beyond the ancient and medieval ontotheological synthesis of God, the human, and the Cosmos. The book analyzes how the break leading into modernity took place at that time and prior to the second modern revolution--the Enlightenment, when the transcendent component was disowned in favor of the human subject. Later, both were deprioritized in favor of the cosmos.