Abstract

These critiques and the ways of thinking made possible in their wake tend to be called post-modern, a term which is vague and even a little irritating. It would be more precise and descriptive to speak instead of post- Enlightenment critiques of reason. Hume is arguably the first post-Enlightenment thinker, and after Hume these critiques of reason developed further in Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and were then taken up by many lesser, 20th century thinkers. If the Enlightenment was the age in which human reason in the form of argument and evidence superseded authority in the form of church and state, in the grounding of scientific, philosophical, moral, and political claims, then the critiques of reason I want to talk about are all post-Enlightenment.