The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, and Gender

This post-colonial and feminist reading of the Enlightenment explores the proto-postmodernist practice of examining one’s conclusions through the eyes of the Other. Self-estrangement to gain critical distance from one’s taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the Enlightenment, and remains vital for critical sociopolitical thinking today.

Matthew Sharpe is associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University. He is the coauthor of Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions (with M. Ure) and author of Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings as well as articles on the history of philosophy, and political, critical and psychoanalytic theory.