What We Talk about When We Talk about the Enlightenment: Wigs and Underpants
Author(s) Predrag Krstić Publisher Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade Published 2016 ISBN 978-86-6081-026-9 Pages 211 Edition What We Talk AboutThe book presents the various dilemmas surrounding the content of the term ‘Enlightenment’. It turns out that even fixing its meaning and establishing rules of legitimate use of the term is a source of much debate and uncertainty. The author suggests differentiating between three basic meanings: one, general, ‘infinite’ notion of Enlightenment or Enlightenment in the broad sense, in which it refers to a particular state or process of any situation; one, ‘definite’, narrower meaning or historical Enlightenment referring to the localized intellectual movement in the eighteenth century; finally, a kind of synthetic expansion of the previous two, an Enlightenment in a splintering, but provocative meaning of a ‘modern’, ‘European’, ‘rationalist’ endeavor or even the entire Greco-Occidental civilizational ‘movement’.