Socrates’s legacy is one of philosophy as intervention and enlightenment of public life. Could contemporary academic philosophers play a similar role? The Enlightenment’s legacy, still alive in the academy today, sees philosophers as the holders of reason and the guides of progress. But those are philosophical myths best left behind. What is called for is a new Enlightenment, one that interrogates grand buzzwords like “reason” and “progress”, is more historically grounded and pragmatic, writes Michale Hampe.
Should academics in philosophy promote an enlightened way of life? As academics they can see themselves as experts who advance a particular academic field and represent it in public, but who have not more and no less to contribute to the improvement of human conditions than physicists or papyrologists, sociologists or psychologists, insofar as the latter act publicly as citizens or "public intellectuals".
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