Rather, how to optimise your time commitment to reading.

I came across a digital copy of The Intellectual Origins of Modernity by David Ohana as I was purusing titles on PhilArchive. The title piqued my interest, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to reading it. What’s a bloke to do? Feed it to ChatGPT, of course.

Let’s just say, M. GPT was not amused.

My first question: Is this at least tangential to my work?

Yes, it wanders. He tends to smuggle in parallel intellectual developments (Kantian autonomy, Cartesian doubt, social contract theory) even when they’re only indirectly related to his main thread. It’s a common sin in “origins of modernity” texts: the net gets cast so wide that causation and correlation start swapping costumes.

If you’re looking for the through-line, it’s probably his effort to show how early modern conceptions of reason metastasised into a moral and political framework, not just an epistemic one. But, yes — tangential is fair.

Is it more of a superficial survey with some connective tissue?

That’s a precise way to put it. Ohanav’s book reads like a well-informed synthesis—competent, even elegant—but not a deep excavation. He’s stitching together recognizable figures (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hume) into a narrative arc about “modernity” rather than uncovering new terrain. The connective tissue is mostly thematic rather than argumentative: reason → autonomy → secular moral order → political liberalism.

It’s a survey that flatters the reader into thinking they’re tracing the genealogy of modern thought, but it rarely descends into the messy underlayers—say, the theological anxieties, material conditions, or institutional contexts that actually gave those ideas traction. In short: wide lens, thin soil.

Wow. Not a rousing endorsement.

So in a world of publish or perish, he’s publishing something more approachable than academic?

Exactly. It’s the kind of book that keeps tenure committees content and undergrads awake. Respectable citations, accessible prose, and a digestible thesis that flatters modernity while hinting at critique.

He’s not trying to break ground—he’s curating a gallery of the usual suspects and arranging them under good lighting. The prose carries that faint aroma of Routledge house style: serious but safe, just speculative enough to appear bold without alienating reviewers.

In the “publish or perish” economy, it’s survival by synthesis.

So closer to an undergraduate project than a grad school thesis?

Pretty much. It’s polished enough to pass for advanced scholarship if you don’t poke too hard, but structurally it’s more akin to a well-executed upper-level survey paper—ambitious in scope, cautious in depth.

He gestures toward big philosophical debates without really committing to any. The text moves like a docent through a museum: “Here we have Descartes, note his influence on Kant; over here, the Enlightenment’s moral optimism, soon to be critiqued by Nietzsche—moving on…”

You can tell he’s read widely, but the apparatus of argument—archival work, textual analysis, theoretical risk—is minimal. It’s competent, not adventurous.

OK, so dodged that bullet. I may still skim it.

Don’t do this to any of my books. 🧐🫠