Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment

Metaphilosophy 50 (5):729-742 (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the ‘Endarkenment’ (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Non-specialists need to defer to such authorities as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position, and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and we urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time.

Other Versions

No versions found

Analytics

Added to PP
2019-06-20

Downloads
798 (#32,062)

6 months
123 (#46,397)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Joseph Ulatowski
University of Waikato

Citations of this work

Help! Virtue Profiles and Horses for Courses.David Lumsden & Joseph Ulatowski - 2022 - Australasian Philosophical Review 6 (2):196-203.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Foundations of Language 13 (1):145-151.
Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 2017 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

View all 14 references / Add more references