The Meaning of the Concept in This Book
Mohammed Arkoun presents emergent reason as a critical reason that keeps its distance from both tradition and modernity, and that recognizes the historicity of knowledge and its limits. It is a plural, comparative, and mobile reason, one that does not aspire to closed certainty so much as it works to unsettle self-evidences and keep questions open.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
The concept appears within Arkoun’s argument in Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Foundationalism, where foundationalism is not sufficient as a return to a fixed origin, because foundationalism itself remains historical and unfinished. From here, emergent reason appears as an alternative form of closed reason: a reason capable of confronting rigidity, of reading the two historical failures that constrain it, and of recognizing that the great taken-for-granted assumptions are difficult to overcome.
How It Works within the Atlas
This concept is tied to a series of issues distributed throughout the book: keeping questions scientifically open, calling for an exploratory reason, and warning that exploratory reason itself may become rigid if it loses criticism, humility, and transcendence. It is also connected to the idea of the new reason as a plural, critical reason that goes beyond closed centralities, and to the idea of expanding thought beyond the West without reproducing the same boundaries.
In this sense, emergent reason functions within the atlas as a tool for reading the transformation that Arkoun proposes: a reason that learns from criticism, acknowledges historical limits, and recovers the value of reason in moving beyond tradition without falling into a simplistic break with it.