Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity

by Ferrara,Alessandro

• ISBN13: 9780415130615
• ISBN10: 0415130611
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-10-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

As people look for a way to ground their judgments of moral, political, aesthetic claims in the face of the postmodernists who claim nothing can be grounded, Reflective Authenticity attempts to rescue some of the critical ideals of the Enlightenment without falling prey to those who say that the Enlightenment's tenets of objectivity, reason, liberalism makes this impossible and in the face of multiculturalism, difference, and the death of subject, are outdated. Alessandro Ferrara suggests that the notion of reflective authenticity offers the key to a new kind of exemplary universalism which, different from the generalizing universalism typical of modern thought, does not fall under the critique of foundationalism articulated by postmodernist thinkers.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
1 Authenticity and validity	1	(21)
The caravan at the ford	2	(3)
Autonomy and authenticity	5	(5)
The universalism of authenticity	10	(3)
Authenticity and intersubjectivity	13	(9)
2 Postmetaphysical phronesis	22	(15)
The relevance of phronesis: consonances and dissonances	22	(4)
Phronesis revisited	26	(4)
A non-rationalistic rationality	30	(7)
3 From Kant to Kant: a normativity without principles	37	(13)
The question and the answer	38	(3)
The normativity without principles of the judgment of taste	41	(4)
Oriented reflective judgment	45	(5)
4 Reflective authenticity and exemplary universalism	50	(20)
Authenticity as a normative category	50	(3)
Models of authentic subjectivity	53	(7)
Exemplary universalism: Simmel's lesson	60	(10)
5 Post-modern eudaimonia: dimensions of an authentic identity	70	(38)
The case for a postmetaphysical notion of eudaimonia	71	(3)
Individual identity and self-fulfillment	74	(6)
Dimensions of the authenticity of an individual identity	80	(26)
Concluding remarks	106	(2)
6 The fulfillment of collective identities	108	(19)
The nature of collective identities	108	(4)
Coherence	112	(6)
Vitality	118	(3)
Depth	121	(2)
Maturity	123	(2)
Concluding remarks	125	(2)
7 Authenticity, the text and the work of art	127	(21)
The "author's intention" approach	128	(3)
Interpretation as "fusion of horizons"	131	(2)
Interpretation as "making the most" of a text	133	(3)
The text as a symbolic identity	136	(3)
Interpretation as judgment on the fulfillment of a symbolic identity	139	(2)
The identity of the work of art	141	(5)
Concluding remarks	146	(2)
8 Rethinking the project of modernity	148	(17)
Authenticity and the project of modernity	148	(5)
Radical reflexivity: metaphysical and postmetaphysical	153	(9)
"Here we stand. We can do no other"	162	(3)
Notes	165	(8)
References	173	(10)
Index	183