“Are We Modern?” - Joshua Kates

Modernity, a notion with many parents and offspring, seems especially significant in the St. John’s context; there it is sometimes called on to account for why what is believed prior to coming to St. John’s—that multitudes and magnitudes are interchangeable, or all aesthetic or ethical judgements relative—is believed. Yet modernity, if it is an historical notion, seems in tension with St. John’s own ethos, its laudable distance from history and its refusal to historicize intellectual work and texts. Modernity’s character, then, invites questioning: is it finally or wholly a historical conception; is the transformation of viewpoint modernity indicates genuinely corrigible? This talk examines two related accounts of scientific modernity’s advent—those of Jacob Klein and Alexander Koyré—both powerful framings of modernity, to try to better work out modernity’s status and conception.

Joshua Kates is a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and is Professor emeritus at Indiana University. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Annapolis and was a tutor on the Santa Fe campus from 1991-2005. He has written extensively on Jacques Derrida’s early works and their relation to phenomenology, as well as on the philosophy of history and the philosophy of language. He is currently working on a book on modernity.