Jean Petitot’s New Enlightenment

Jean Petitot’s New Enlightenment praises the value of Kantian critical rationalism, understood as an approach that is preferable to both the positivist tradition and the postmodern relativist philosophy of science. Petitot renews and actualizes Kant’s transcendental philosophy. He shows us how this philosophy matches modern fundamental physics, complexity theory, Thom’s morphodynamics, enactive cognitive science, the idea that the mind is a complex self-organizing system, and the naturalization of the forms of perception, action, and language. Moreover, his New Enlightenment defends the emancipatory value of science and technology, the mathematical modeling of the social sciences, and the assumptions of the open society and the classical liberal tradition. To strengthen these assumptions and reject the dogmatism and anti-modern worldviews rooted in Hegelianism and revolutionary messianism, Petitot considers the political consequences arising from the finitude of human reason from a novel standpoint.