Ted McCormick - Steven Pinker's Enlightenment

Описание: My guest today is Associate Professor Ted McCormick. Ted is a specialist in intellectual history and the history of science at Concordia University in Canada. He examines the intersections between science, technology, economy and empire in the early modern era.

Recently, he has taken an interest in how the concept of “the Enlightenment” has been taken up as something of an ideological cause by some popular writers. In particular he has critiqued the way the Enlightenment has been portrayed by Steven Pinker in his books The Better Angels of Our Nature and, particularly, his more recent work Enlightenment Now which Pinker has subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”. As a historian of the Enlightenment, Ted has serious problems with the way Pinker – a non-historian – characterizes the Enlightenment and the rhetorical purposes to which he puts his version of history.

Ted's suggested reading on the Enlightenment:

The best current overview that combines accessibility with discussions of academic historiography is Dorinda Outram, "The Enlightenment", 4th ed. (Cambridge, 2019).
A readable synthesis emphasizing the role of sociability and the transnational nature of Enlightenment is Margaret C. Jacob, "The Secular Enlightenment" (Princeton, 2019).
A learned discussion of some of the ambiguities of the Enlightenment as an object of study and commentary from Kant's day to the present is Vincenzo Ferrone (trans. Elisabetta Tarantino), "The Enlightenment: History of an Idea"(Princeton, 2015).
Judith Zinsser's "Emilie du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment" (Penguin, 2006) is an engaging biography of a key figure that illuminates the status and gender politics of the philosophes' world.
Jessica Riskin's "Science in the Age of Sensibility" (Chicago, 2002) does a great deal to undermine the idea of a simple scientific rationalism, while David Sorkin's "The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna" (Princeton, 2008) complicates the idea of Enlightenment as a secularizing movement.