Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture by LOUIS DUPRE - September 1993

Yale University Press, September 1993. Paper Back Paper Back. New. If Louis Dupre is correct in this important new appraisal of modernity as an unfinished project, perhaps it is too early to so easily be talking about ''post-modernity.'' Dupre describes the shattering of the classical worldview and the origins of modernity in the early Renaissance's emphasis on human creativity, the efforts of some philosophers and theologians, such as Cusanus, Bruno, Ignatius of Loyola and Francis de Sales, to ''reunite the human, cosmic, and transcendent components,'' and the subsequent resumption of the disintegrating forces of Renaissance humanism after this brief respite. The present task, Dupre hints, is to find a principle of reintegration. So much for description of this book. As for evaluation, we simply stand aside for our betters: ''Louis Dupre has written a brilliant, unsettling, and provocative essay about the genesis of modernity. He identifies not one, but two distinct moments at which Western thinkers severed important links with their premodern past, challenging theses advanced by Heidegger and Blumenberg, among others. Whether it turns out to be true or false, his thesis has to be taken very seriously.'' -- Alasdair MacIntyre. ''This brilliant work challenges all the more familiar portraits of modernity. No philosopher or theologian can afford to ignore this extraordinary study of our common heritage. It is one of those rare works that change one's vision of our central questions.'' -- David Tracy. ''... a magisterial study of the project and revolution that was modernity. Tracing through the histories of philosophy and theology the movement towards an anthropomorphic center of culture, this capacious work will be found intriguing and provocative in its reading of this history and indispensable for future inquiries into modernity. I recommend it highly.'' -- Michael J. Buckley, S.J. 300 pp.