#ernest gellner

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Ernest Gellner, via the new edited volume Ernest Gellner's Legacy and Social Theory Today. The book appears to be open access. At least, a PDF of the introduction is available from Springer without a paywall here.

Anthropologists often work while clutching cups of caffeine to their heads. Only Ernest Gellner is open enough to admit this fact in a portrait.

[villings]

La filosofía es explicitud, generalidad, orientación y valoración.

Ernest Gellner

[toobaa]

‘You keep on saying to Akbar…why don’t you accept the human origin of your religion? Well, he can’t’, Ernest Gellner said sharply, coming to my rescue, in a television discussion on Islam. ‘Islam has not’, he further explained, ‘been secularized. This is the great mystery about it. All the other world religions have softened, have permitted the ambiguity of meanings.’ Gellner was right. For those who believe in Islam, the choice is between being Muslim and being nothing: there is no other choice.

Akbar S. Ahmed (Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise)

[third-nature]

"Max Weber thought that rational industrial production brought with it the cold 'disenchanted' vision of the world...A really advanced industrial society does not any longer require cold rationality from its consumers; at most, it may demand it of its producers...[R]e-enchantment itself is now mass-produced, standardised, and rationalised."

—Ernest Gellner—

[villings]

Es el nacionalismo el que engendra naciones, y no al contrario.

Ernest Gellner

[epitaphus]

“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”

-Ernest Gellner

[fireydelta]

"Philosophical anthropology on the grandest scale. . . .Gellner has produced a sharp challenge to his colleagues and a thrilling book for the non-specialist. Deductive history on this scale cannot be proved right or wrong, but this is Gellner writing, incisive, iconoclastic, witty and expert. His scenario compels our attention."—Adam Kuper, New Statesman "A thoughtful and lively meditation upon probably the greatest transformation in human history, upon the difficult problems it poses and the scant resources it has left us to solve them."—Charles Larmore, New Republic

[psycheapuleius]

“Knowledge which…transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.”

— Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture (1992)