Another fleeting thought

[fpb]

France, and to a lesser extent Germany, lay claim to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as to a kind of national treasure and heritage; and the rest of the West tends to agree. Yet those elements of the Enlightenment that had a permanent, positive and enduring impact on the West came neither from Paris nor from the university towns of Germany, but from Edinburgh (Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations), Milan (Cesare Beccaria's Crimes and Penalties) and from the fledgling, English-speaking United States of America. No work of any French or German author, not even Voltaire or Kant, compares.

Comments

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

I think you are probably right as far as the direct world of fact is concerned, but I'm not sure I'd read out
Kant so quickly. His influence on modern philosophy was overwhelming, and via the Hegelians, Marxists, and theorists of liberal democracy had a real world impact, at least in Europe.

Have you read Logicomix? I enjoyed it even if it was a NY Times bestseller. The authors argue that the foundational crisis in mathematics led (via Turing and Von Neumann) at least indirectly to the computer age. And the foundational crisis might never have happened if Kant had not gotten European philosophy started on the limits of possible human knowledge.

I admit I have less than no qualifications to be untangling theses threads of intellectual history.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The derivation of Hegel from Kant is a matter of debate - Popper, for one, saw it as Hegelians co-opting Kant in their own tradition when he really had nothing to do with them. And even if that were not the case, would you call Hegelism and its derivates a positive and constructive element in Western history?

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

Positive and constructive? No. Long lasting, yes. Permanent and enduring - I hope not.