ABSTRACT
The draft of a typescript on the ‘Enlightenment P roject’ was found amongst fragments for Sylvan’s proposed monograph. W hilst it is unclear exactly where this was to be included, we have reproduced the fragment below. It was last worked on only a few days before his death. [Editors]
17.1 The impact of alternative systems on the Enlightenment Project
There is a recent debate, arising out of older debates, concerning logic, rationality, truth, science and, more sweepingly, the Enlightenment Project. It is a debate where the concentrated intellectual superpower formed from those substantially committed to the Project is matched against dispersed anti-or counter-Enlightenment forces, and so confronted with protracted guerilla activity. Historically furthermore, the scattered and diverse counter movement has taken various different forms at different times. In the main respects the recent debate has crystallised into one between definite realism and an egalitarian relativism (as revealed in a useful working example, the debate in Albert 1992). Let’s call these sides realism and relativism for short, though the divisions are more complex than that, as will appear (for one reason, because ‘realism’ comprehends an idealist ‘anti-realism’, and ‘relativism’ includes ‘constructive’, ‘deconstructive’ and diffuse ‘post modern’ forms). Let us consider first a compact condensed form of the debate, before venturing on to fuller, more diffense issues.
