Three Spanish academics defend reason, freedom, and science with ambitious works in several volumes, and a German philosopher culminates a trilogy on 20th-century thought glimpsing the dawn of a new Enlightenment. The philologist Darío Villanueva has published El atropello a la Razón, wrapping up a vibrant defense of Enlightenment values in the face of political correctness, science denialism, or intellectual impostures; an argument which began to take shape in the two volumes preceding this one: Morderse la lengua (2021) and Poderes de la palabra (2023). The historian of ideas Benigno Pendás carries on his colossal Biografía de la libertad, which started with a tome on the Renaissance and now continues with Barroco: el gran libro del mundo, and announces a third part on the Enlightenment, to keep advancing toward a total of six. The historian of philosophy Wolfram Eilenberger concludes his narrative on the avatars of ideas over the course of the past century with Geister der Gegenwart, an exploration of the 1948-1984 intellectual scene that follows Zeit der Zauberer (about 1919-1929) and Feuer der Freiheit (1933-1943); and the physicist and historian of science José Manuel Sánchez Ron has published book two of the monumental Historia de la física cuántica, which with the first part released in April and the third expected in November celebrates the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, declared by the UN to honor what the author calls “one of the great monuments of the history of humanity.”
Villanueva’s work goes through the vicissitudes of a reason besieged even in Enlightenment times, and through Nietzsche and Heidegger up to Foucault, Derrida, and postmodernity. Defending the Kantian legacy with eloquence, he polemicizes with the representatives of ‘French Theory’ and extends his critique to epistemological nihilism and the scientific relativism of Kuhn and Feyerabend, the feeble thinking of Vattimo, or the gender theses of Judith Butler or Paul B. Preciado. The culture of complaint, multiculturalism, and posthumanism are objects of devastating analyses, grounded as much on the bibliography as on references to press news. The book, which reaches all the way to the dangers that the post-truth of Trump or Putin pose for the future of democracy, ends by bringing up a 1935 lecture of Husserl, which warned of Europe’s falling into decadence as it lost its rational sense of life, and judged that its rebirth would come from the spirit of philosophy “through the heroism of reason.”
Pendas’s book, as impressionist and wise as the one which explored Renaissance thought, tackles the Baroque weaving historical-political concepts with great cultural protagonists, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Velázquez or Bach, and elegantly confronts the period’s ill repute “in the face of 21st-century democratic opinion.” He singles out Wölfflin’s role in the aesthetic rescue of the Baroque, although he considers his contribution less determinant than that of his master Burckhardt, ‘inventor’ of the Renaissance and inevitable guiding thread of the author’s previous book. Attention is also given to Gracián, whose reinstatement as a political thinker is called for, and Calderón, Góngora, and Quevedo figure in a recap of the culture of Spanish Baroque, associated with the Counter-Reformation. The French Grand Siècle, the laboratory of English political theory, and the Rome of Bernini, Borromini, and Caravaggio are tiles of a mosaic where mercantilist economics and the science of Newton, Galileo, or Kepler – product of freedom – are decisive for “the triumph of reason.”
Eilenberger’s volume, engaging and lucid like the two previous ones, likewise interweaves the biographies and ideas of four figures with the historical vicissitudes they had to live, in all cases composing a rich tapestry of philosophical and political threads. In this case Theodor W. Adorno, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, and Paul K. Feyerabend are the main characters in a narrative which from Frankfurt to Berkeley walks us through the physical and intellectual ruins of events like the postwar, the sexual revolution, or May 68 to shed light on a new age of thought, not far removed from the epistemological impact of science, through Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, or Marie Curie. Adorno’s aesthetic, the transition of Kuhn’s paradigm to Foucault’s epistema, and Feyerabend’s defense of myth against logos join Sontag’s influential intellectual and political militancy to paint a fresco where these four “spirits of the present” are put forward as “exemplary incarnations of a life in accord with the Enlightenment.”
Finally, Sánchez Ron’s great trilogy describes the colossal physical and philosophical adventure of quantum mechanics, an endeavor of the best minds of the 20th century. The second tome tackles the central chapter of this epic of thought, between the first formulation of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg in 1925 – a feat we now observe the centenary of and in which Bohr also took part – and the publication in 1935 of two articles: one where Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen argue that quantum mechanics could not be a complete theory, and the other in which Schrödinger presents the paradox of the cat that is at once alive and dead in a thought experiment which opened the door to the superposition of states and the intertwining of particles: an amazing achievement of reason and science.
