TEHRAN - Stephen Darwall is of the opinion that philosophical thoughts blossomed in the eighteenth century compared to the 1900s.

“It (the eighteenth century) featured two philosophical giants, Immanuel Kant and David Hume, and a great deal of truly revolutionary work,” Darwall, a professor of philosophy, told the Mehr News Agency.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: Is the 20th century the best century in the history of philosophy? Why?
A: I doubt that the twentieth century will prove to be the most important in the history of philosophy, although it certainly featured much excellent philosophy. Ludgwig Wittgenstein was probably the most brilliant and most important twentieth-century philosopher, but I'm not sure what place his ideas will have in the long run. In my field, moral and political philosophy, the biggest development was the work of John Rawls in political philosophy, which I believe will prove to be among the greatest work in the history of that field. I would say, however, that the eighteenth century was more important philosophically than the twentieth. It featured two philosophical giants, Immanuel Kant and David Hume, and a great deal of truly revolutionary work. The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were dealing with extraordinary intellectual and political/cultural changes--the scientific revolution and fundamental political and economic changes--whose implications they were trying to understand and whose foundations they were attempting to articulate. Kant, for example, made the dignity and incomparable worth of the individual person the foundation of his moral and political philosophy in a way that made it possible for someone like Rawls later to develop a more adequate theory of political justice based on it.
Q: Which agents and arrangements can shape the identity in personal and national levels in globalized era?
A: This is a very interesting and important question. ‘Globalization’ generally refers to the steadily increasing mutual awareness, interaction, and influence of individuals and peoples all over the globe, for example, through international markets and media. So it would seem that these economic, political, and economic forces would lead us increasingly to a common identity as human beings. I fervently hope that this is right, since there are huge global problems, for example, climate change and the use of energy, that can be solved only if we embrace this common identity. On the other hand, the new media, the Internet, the vast array of video sources, and ever more finely-tuned targeting of publications and media, mean that people all over the world are likelier to interact with, and get their news and information from sources that already share their own particular outlook, thereby cementing particular political, religious, ethnic, and cultural identities and decreasing genuine exchange of ideas and opinions across political, religious, ethnic, and cultural lines. I’ll give you one very depressing example of this from the United States. When I was growing up, most people got their news from newspapers, radio, and television stations that aimed to be objective and to represent no particular political perspective, liberal or conservative, say. In the last twenty or thirty years, what the American sociologist, Robert Putnam calls the cyberbalkanization of the Internet, together with the explosion of cable television and Fox News’s denigration of television news, have steadily undermined the public space necessary for genuine political debate across ideological and party lines. And there are of course, international versions of this also. The irony is that even as the Internet and new media bring us closer together in some ways, they can also confirm us in our own comfortable differences and make it more difficult to achieve a genuinely common understanding.
Stephen Darwall is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Department of Philosophy, Yale University. He was president of American Philosophical Association. He is author of many books such as “Impartial Reason”, ”Philosophical Ethics” ,”Welfare and Rational Care” and “The Second Person Standpoint: Respect ,Morality, and Accountability”