Reading through, I see [edit: she—I apologize] later writes:
Above all else, right or wrong, at least I want to make this debate as plain and easy to understand as I possibly can. That’s why I’ve tried to avoid the academic style, riddled with ambiguous jargon. That’s a style tailor-made to talk yourself into preposterous notions you’d see right through immediately, if, instead, they were stated plainly. Besides, the subject is tricky enough without being made even more obscure by unnecessary cant.
I agree—I’ve only skimmed the first few chapters but so far I find it quite clear-minded amongst very murky subject matter. There are some hilarious quotes in the first chapter. I don’t know enough about postmodernism to know whether she’s really addressing their core arguments.
I wouldn’t defend postmodernism but the treatment of modern philosophy, particularly Humean phenomenalism, is pretty bogus. Just putting the two in the same camp is a mistake as far as I’m concerned. I’ve only skimmed the book (and of course I can’t see parts of it) but it looks like she is systematically misunderstanding skeptical arguments (to the point where I really do doubt she has read Descartes closely) and then falling back on G.E. Moore type Here is a hand! idiocy. I do wish I could see her treatment of the burden of proof issue, though, since so much of her discussion relies on it. Part of the problem is that she is conflating around two dozen distinct positions. No real person would ever defend every single one of the positions this “Professor” defends! And every time the Professor just gives in after the Student refuses to accept one or more obvious premises. It’s actually pretty frustrating to read. I probably don’t accept more than a handful of the positions attributed to the professor though, so it’s hard for me to tell if this is the case with all the arguments.
Jack, this is actually part of an ongoing debate with a friend and I would quite like to be better informed about what the various postmodern positions actually are. Can you recommend a good overview/starting point given that I don’t have a very great amount of time to invest? Or is it simply too broad a subject to ever get a reasonable birds-eye view?
I’ve little formal philosophical training other than a little logic and what I’ve picked up out of my own personal interest.
The debate is about whether the general public’s surprise when scientific consensus turns out to be wrong is explained by a misconception of realism. My counter-claim is that science attempts to approximate, and hopefully gets closer over time to, truth, and that no one should be overly surprised when a scientific theory is overturned in light of new evidence.
Readings for the topic. You can probably get by reading Wikipedia Entries and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entries, for the purposes of your debate. Start with the Hacking, then the SEP articles then Kuhn, then Feyerbend and any other interesting names that come up.
Thomas Kuhn- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Summary)
I wouldn’t call any of the above postmodernist. Hacking just discusses “The Science Wars” from sort of a pox on both their houses perspective. Postmodernists are on the extreme social constructionist end of the debate but the best arguments don’t come from there. Kuhn is classic and must read.
For general philosophy:
Descarte’s Meditations on First Philosophy. Read, Meditations 1, 2 and 6. Read the middle ones only if you enjoy exercises in futility (you’ll have to give Descartes the existence of God for #6 to make sense though).
David Hume Enquiry Concernign Human Understanding/Treatise of Human Nature Book One. Also, his critique of the Watchmaker argument if you haven’t already heard it from Dawkins.
Kant and Hegel say some smart important things but basically not enough to justify their length and obscurity. If you can find good second hand summaries and descriptions of their views, do that. Hegel does seem to be really crucial for postmodernism.
Thom missed a couple of postmodernist forerunners. Between, Marx and the pomos, there whole Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, Adorno and Horkheimer are still canon I think, especially Dialectic of Enlightenment. And more recently Habermas (who is not close to being a postmodernist and actually is worthwhile if you’re interested in political philosophy).
Postmodernists also take a lot from Freud and especially Lacan, for whom there are decent introduction out there. And then there is Derrida who really is a huge sack of bullshit. You could probably just wikipedia him and get the same out of it.
Contemporary analytic: Armstrong, McTaggart, Putnam, Quine, Frankfurt, Rawls, Nozick, Lewis, Parfit, a bunch more that will come to mind ten minutes after I publish this comment.
Postmodernism’s intellectual founding fathers: Hegel, the least comprehensible philosophy of the modern world, Freud, whose theories either make no predictions of have been falsified with few exceptions and Derrida who basically just did silly things with words.
If you don’t have much experience with philosophy, I would not recommend starting with anything postmodernist, or anything along those lines. Before bothering to try to understand what those folks are up to (not much, in my opinion) you might as well look at more worthwhile stuff, like:
Logic. Learn sentential (propositional), predicate, and modal logic. Learn how the recursion theorem guarantees a function to exist which maps freely-generated syntax to semantics.
Ancient. Read some (Socrates) Plato / Aristotle. “The trial and death of Socrates” plus the Republic is a good package of Plato, and Nicomachean Ethics is enough Aristotle.
American. Read everything by Emerson, and some Peirce and James. Also Wittgenstein—he counts.
Contemporary. Dennett is always a good read. Also probably some other stuff.
Existentialists. I’m not quite sure what they’re doing, but it’s weirdly thought-provoking. Read whatever Nietzsche you’d like (other than Will to Power), some Sartre, and whatever else falls off the shelf. Now you’re getting dangerously close to postmodernism, so expect a lot of it to not make any sense.
Utter nonsense. If you’re serious about taking postmodernism seriously, you need to read a lot of their forerunners. Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger are particularly bad examples. You can skip Marx, since practically everything he said about economics was wrong, and everything he said about anything else was already said better by Hegel.
Postmodernism. Feel free to complete the descent into madness by reading actual postmodernism, or just read whatever shows up here. Also consider looking in the dark places of the world, invoking the True Name of one of the elder gods, and ripping the skin off your flesh with your fingernails while blood eyeballs leak from the ceiling ichor Nyogtha permeates my face
The Will to Power is a posthumous publication of some of Nietzsche’s notes ordered, selected and occasionally revised by his nationalistic and anti-semitic sister. It’s widely thought to be not at all representative of anything he believed.
It’s funny. I think this list is probably both overkill and underkill. No Hume?!?!?!
You can skip Marx, since practically everything he said about economics was wrong, and everything he said about anything else was already said better by Hegel.
Nothing ever said by someone other than Hegel was better said by Hegel.
Also, Heidegger was an existentialist and Sartre just took his stuff and watered it down.
Also, Heidegger was an existentialist and Sartre just took his stuff and watered it down.
I’m pretty sure Heidegger asserted that he was not an existentialist (and that he was an existentialist), and he specifically said that Sartre got him entirely wrong. Though when I actually go back to find such claims, I find very few places where Heidegger actually seems to be expressing a proposition. But then, I read English translations—we all know German philosophers make more sense in the original French. And Sartre said some things that had nothing to do with Heidegger.
Nothing ever said by someone other than Hegel was better said by Hegel.
I agree with the sentiment, but a study of some Hegelians should demonstrate otherwise.
No Hume?!?!?!
What in Hume is valuable? If you want to read interesting stuff about causality, read Judea Pearl. I didn’t think a section on political philosophy led down the right road (for humor), and I’d recommend Locke and Mill before Hume. For empiricism, the Pragmatists really should do well enough. And surely you wouldn’t want people reading Hume directly in order to understand economics? What else is there?
The phenomenalism, the argument against induction, and frankly giving Judea Pearl’s book to someone who has barely even thought about causality is a little ridiculous. Hume is a far more manageable, math-free introduction. Then there is the classic response to the Watchmaker argument, written before Darwin. People here should be familiar with Hume, if only as an intellectual forbearer.
The question of how and why the general public reacts seem to be a question of psychology or sociology, not philosophy. So why are you asking about postmodern philosophical positions? worse, why are you discussing how people should react?
The question of how and why the general public reacts seem to be a question of psychology or sociology, not philosophy.
Completely agree.
So why are you asking about postmodern philosophical positions?
Well my friend seems to think that it all comes down to a misplaced belief in objective reality. I disagree, but it’s hard to counter-argue when I don’t know what the philosophical positions she refers to actually are.
I have to concede − 87% of my knowledge of postmodernism consists of reading Edward Slingerland’s What Science Offers the Humanities, which is yet another refutation.
Reading through, I see [edit: she—I apologize] later writes:
...a sentiment reminiscent of Orwell’s thoughts.
I agree—I’ve only skimmed the first few chapters but so far I find it quite clear-minded amongst very murky subject matter. There are some hilarious quotes in the first chapter. I don’t know enough about postmodernism to know whether she’s really addressing their core arguments.
I wouldn’t defend postmodernism but the treatment of modern philosophy, particularly Humean phenomenalism, is pretty bogus. Just putting the two in the same camp is a mistake as far as I’m concerned. I’ve only skimmed the book (and of course I can’t see parts of it) but it looks like she is systematically misunderstanding skeptical arguments (to the point where I really do doubt she has read Descartes closely) and then falling back on G.E. Moore type Here is a hand! idiocy. I do wish I could see her treatment of the burden of proof issue, though, since so much of her discussion relies on it. Part of the problem is that she is conflating around two dozen distinct positions. No real person would ever defend every single one of the positions this “Professor” defends! And every time the Professor just gives in after the Student refuses to accept one or more obvious premises. It’s actually pretty frustrating to read. I probably don’t accept more than a handful of the positions attributed to the professor though, so it’s hard for me to tell if this is the case with all the arguments.
Jack, this is actually part of an ongoing debate with a friend and I would quite like to be better informed about what the various postmodern positions actually are. Can you recommend a good overview/starting point given that I don’t have a very great amount of time to invest? Or is it simply too broad a subject to ever get a reasonable birds-eye view?
Everyone feels this way, including postmodernists.
Maybe. Can you give me a better idea of A) what the debate is about exactly and B) what your background is with philosophy?
Fair point :)
I’ve little formal philosophical training other than a little logic and what I’ve picked up out of my own personal interest.
The debate is about whether the general public’s surprise when scientific consensus turns out to be wrong is explained by a misconception of realism. My counter-claim is that science attempts to approximate, and hopefully gets closer over time to, truth, and that no one should be overly surprised when a scientific theory is overturned in light of new evidence.
Readings for the topic. You can probably get by reading Wikipedia Entries and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entries, for the purposes of your debate. Start with the Hacking, then the SEP articles then Kuhn, then Feyerbend and any other interesting names that come up.
Thomas Kuhn- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Summary)
Paul Feyerabend- Against Method (SEP Entry)
Ian Hacking- The Social Construction of What?
Some highly relevant SEP articles:
Social constuction
The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge
Social epistemology
I wouldn’t call any of the above postmodernist. Hacking just discusses “The Science Wars” from sort of a pox on both their houses perspective. Postmodernists are on the extreme social constructionist end of the debate but the best arguments don’t come from there. Kuhn is classic and must read.
For general philosophy:
Descarte’s Meditations on First Philosophy. Read, Meditations 1, 2 and 6. Read the middle ones only if you enjoy exercises in futility (you’ll have to give Descartes the existence of God for #6 to make sense though).
David Hume Enquiry Concernign Human Understanding/Treatise of Human Nature Book One. Also, his critique of the Watchmaker argument if you haven’t already heard it from Dawkins.
Kant and Hegel say some smart important things but basically not enough to justify their length and obscurity. If you can find good second hand summaries and descriptions of their views, do that. Hegel does seem to be really crucial for postmodernism.
Thom missed a couple of postmodernist forerunners. Between, Marx and the pomos, there whole Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, Adorno and Horkheimer are still canon I think, especially Dialectic of Enlightenment. And more recently Habermas (who is not close to being a postmodernist and actually is worthwhile if you’re interested in political philosophy).
Postmodernists also take a lot from Freud and especially Lacan, for whom there are decent introduction out there. And then there is Derrida who really is a huge sack of bullshit. You could probably just wikipedia him and get the same out of it.
Contemporary analytic: Armstrong, McTaggart, Putnam, Quine, Frankfurt, Rawls, Nozick, Lewis, Parfit, a bunch more that will come to mind ten minutes after I publish this comment.
Postmodernism’s intellectual founding fathers: Hegel, the least comprehensible philosophy of the modern world, Freud, whose theories either make no predictions of have been falsified with few exceptions and Derrida who basically just did silly things with words.
If you don’t have much experience with philosophy, I would not recommend starting with anything postmodernist, or anything along those lines. Before bothering to try to understand what those folks are up to (not much, in my opinion) you might as well look at more worthwhile stuff, like:
Logic. Learn sentential (propositional), predicate, and modal logic. Learn how the recursion theorem guarantees a function to exist which maps freely-generated syntax to semantics.
Ancient. Read some (Socrates) Plato / Aristotle. “The trial and death of Socrates” plus the Republic is a good package of Plato, and Nicomachean Ethics is enough Aristotle.
American. Read everything by Emerson, and some Peirce and James. Also Wittgenstein—he counts.
Contemporary. Dennett is always a good read. Also probably some other stuff.
Existentialists. I’m not quite sure what they’re doing, but it’s weirdly thought-provoking. Read whatever Nietzsche you’d like (other than Will to Power), some Sartre, and whatever else falls off the shelf. Now you’re getting dangerously close to postmodernism, so expect a lot of it to not make any sense.
Utter nonsense. If you’re serious about taking postmodernism seriously, you need to read a lot of their forerunners. Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger are particularly bad examples. You can skip Marx, since practically everything he said about economics was wrong, and everything he said about anything else was already said better by Hegel.
Postmodernism. Feel free to complete the descent into madness by reading actual postmodernism, or just read whatever shows up here. Also consider looking in the dark places of the world, invoking the True Name of one of the elder gods, and ripping the skin off your flesh with your fingernails while blood eyeballs leak from the ceiling ichor Nyogtha permeates my face
Why do you single out the Will to Power among Nietzsche’s works?
The Will to Power is a posthumous publication of some of Nietzsche’s notes ordered, selected and occasionally revised by his nationalistic and anti-semitic sister. It’s widely thought to be not at all representative of anything he believed.
Yes, what Jack said exactly.
It’s funny. I think this list is probably both overkill and underkill. No Hume?!?!?!
Nothing ever said by someone other than Hegel was better said by Hegel.
Also, Heidegger was an existentialist and Sartre just took his stuff and watered it down.
I’m pretty sure Heidegger asserted that he was not an existentialist (and that he was an existentialist), and he specifically said that Sartre got him entirely wrong. Though when I actually go back to find such claims, I find very few places where Heidegger actually seems to be expressing a proposition. But then, I read English translations—we all know German philosophers make more sense in the original French. And Sartre said some things that had nothing to do with Heidegger.
I agree with the sentiment, but a study of some Hegelians should demonstrate otherwise.
What in Hume is valuable? If you want to read interesting stuff about causality, read Judea Pearl. I didn’t think a section on political philosophy led down the right road (for humor), and I’d recommend Locke and Mill before Hume. For empiricism, the Pragmatists really should do well enough. And surely you wouldn’t want people reading Hume directly in order to understand economics? What else is there?
The phenomenalism, the argument against induction, and frankly giving Judea Pearl’s book to someone who has barely even thought about causality is a little ridiculous. Hume is a far more manageable, math-free introduction. Then there is the classic response to the Watchmaker argument, written before Darwin. People here should be familiar with Hume, if only as an intellectual forbearer.
Thank you very much for this Tom.
The question of how and why the general public reacts seem to be a question of psychology or sociology, not philosophy. So why are you asking about postmodern philosophical positions? worse, why are you discussing how people should react?
Completely agree.
Well my friend seems to think that it all comes down to a misplaced belief in objective reality. I disagree, but it’s hard to counter-argue when I don’t know what the philosophical positions she refers to actually are.
I have to concede − 87% of my knowledge of postmodernism consists of reading Edward Slingerland’s What Science Offers the Humanities, which is yet another refutation.