As Stephen A. McKnight says in his introduction, this substantial collection of twenty-one original essays “explores the development of Eric Voegelin’s distinctive approach to politics and history from its early formulation in the 1930s to its culmination in the 1980s”. Yet this volume is more than a chronological survey of Voegelin’s thought; it is a thoughtful and orderly reflection on and careful application of Voegelin’s general analysis and theoretical vocabulary to recent historical and political currents and trends in literary criticism. (...) Reflecting this, the essays are divided into four headings: “ Die politischen Religionen,” “Political Religions in a Secular Age,” “ Order and History: Themes and Variations,” and “Voegelin’s ‘Implicit’ Theory of Literary and Modern Cultural Criticism.”. (shrink)

Lacking a subtitle as it does, the name of this work might lead one unfamiliar with Stephen Toulmin’s previous writings to expect an extended criticism and condemnation of postmodern thought and its skeptical excesses; although postmodernity also is implicitly caught in the dragnet of the argument, the book’s target is in fact modernity. Expanding upon a theme introduced in his previous books The Uses of Argument and Cosmopolis, in Return to Reason Toulmin reflects on the origin and spread of the (...) Cartesian obsession with demanding mathematical rigor in every inquiry seeking to be dubbed “science,” from the birth of mathematical physics in the seventeenth century to economics, sociology, and ethics in the nineteenth and twentieth. Explicitly stated in the introductory chapter, Toulmin’s thesis is that this modern focus on what he calls “rationality” has eclipsed the more moderate, and in fact ancient, goal of “ reasonableness,” meaning “substantive argumentation” that “has the body and force needed to carry conviction” and “to put a conclusion ‘ beyond a reasonable doubt’”. Following a semiautobiographic approach—anyone expecting a theoretical analysis, he explains, “misses the point. …The only way to proceed, … is to go behind all the rival theoretical positions and present a narrative with a personal perspective” —Toulmin’s aim is “to steer a middle way, and to show how the idea of Reasonableness [sic] lets us keep on an even keel” that will allow us to “reestablish the proper balance between Theory and Practice, Logic and Rhetoric, Rationality and Reasonableness”. Thus the work is not only a critique of modernity, but also an outline of how we can undo, and in many ways are already undoing, its latent errors. (shrink)

In spite of the subject matter, however, Nightingale takes pains to explain that she does not intend to be doing philosophy per se. She is not offering a “philosophical analysis” of the epistemology of Plato and Aristotle, but rather an investigation of “the foundational construction of theoretical philosophy in its intellectual and its cultural context”. Likewise, although she admits to exploring “the philosophical and historical ramifications” of Plato and Aristotle’s appropriation of theoria, Nightingale’s emphasis is more sociological and political than (...) philosophical—witness her recurrent theme of Plato and Aristotle’s trying to package and sell their version of theoria to the aristocratic segment of Greece. (shrink)