The goal of this assessment is to help you sharpen your reading and analytical writing skills. To that end, you will do the following passages and reconstruct the author’s explanation or defense of the position articulated in that passage. In order to explain the authors’ point as clearly and concisely as possible, you will need to draw on ideas and arguments found in other parts of the texts we’ve read from these authors, but you will not need to do any additional research.
Question: ‘The philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked religion in the name of reason; in the end what they killed was not the church but metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself’ (Horkheimer, Eclipes of Reason ‘Means and Ends’).
A complete reconstruction of the author’s position should:
1) clearly explain the point articulated in the passage in your own words;
2) provide a generous explanation of why the author maintains the position he does by drawing on the fundamental concepts developed in the relevant text or texts;
3) explain how this position stands in critical relation to the primary themes or ideas of the enlightenment, which we discussed in the first three weeks of the unit; and
4) be expressed in well-organized, technically- and stylistically-polished prose.
Important: For the purposes of this assessment, I am not interested in whether you find the author’s position and argument compelling. We will get to that in the final paper. For now, I want you to focus on providing the a generous, accurate, clear, and concise reconstruction of a complex philosophical position articulated by another author.