Читать книгу Lope de Aguirre, Hugo Chávez, and the Latin American Left - Alfredo Ignacio Poggi - Страница 7

In an essay titled “The Horizon of Modernity is Shifting,” Jürgen Habermas argues that contemporary thought is, in large part, the product of four philosophical ruptures with the past: the situating of reason, the linguistic turn, post-metaphysical thinking, and the overcoming of logocentrism. In fact, these ruptures not only transformed the field of philosophy but also shifted the foundations of all the humanities, forcing them to respond to new challenges. In light of these events, twenty-first century research in the humanities that does not take these ruptures into account must inevitably raise suspicions of anachronistic, theoretical errors; its relevance will be called into question.

Academic disputes over each of these ruptures have been the subject of extensive publications throughout the last decades and generally lie outside the framework of this book. We can only gesture toward the causes and consequences of these four ruptures, and their interpretations and appropriations, which have generated deep disagreement within the humanities. Yet it is also true that in the academic world there is some consensus on the four breaks, even if scholars call them by different names and propose alternative means of overcoming them. In this investigation, references to the four ruptures have a descriptive function, as cardinal points orienting us to the theoretical map we shall use in our study of Lope de Aguirre; and they will serve, I hope, simply to demonstrate the soundness and relevance of this research within contemporary intellectual debates.