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In this final chapter Ryall summarises the salient factors which place Kant's transcendental philosophy at odds with the Copernican world-view, at the same time as he mounts a defence of enlightenment thinking against the pseudo-intellectual movements of post-modernism and cultural relativism and their assaults on those norms of rationality which have been the bedrock of Western science and civilisation through the ages. These movements, beholden as they are to that "immanentized" mode of thinking the origin of which can be traced back to Kant, have dangerously undermined these once solid foundations, although it is in Kant's own example, in his alternative incarnation as a champion of the Enlightenment, that the defence of an unfettered and fearless exercise of our rational faculty is to be modelled.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-56771-6_9

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