On Critical Theory
Via The Quill:
On Critical Theory: One of the big frustrations of my academic career has been my uneasy relationship with critical theory. We both seem to have always been talking at cross-purposes. Critical theory says, “X is really important, and we must work toward it. Y isn’t so much important as X is.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself, “X isn’t [...]
Excellent article by one of my best friends. I have felt the same frustration at times. The following is a re-print of a comment I left:
Excellent article. I often felt the same way in my philosophy classes in college. Everyone has to make basic assumptions about the world, from which all conclusions spring. The thing about assumptions is that they are just that, presuppositions.
I totally agree that the penchant for modern academia to take these humanistic presuppositions and re-cast them as (deductively) proven fact must lead to a kind of schism between them and those of us that do not accept their re-casting, for they are ultimately being philosophically dishonest. From that sort of dishonesty, there is no defense since they have, by the very nature of their dishonesty, removed from us any tool we might have at our disposal for defending our (differing) position.
It would be so much better if we were all able to civilly sit down and compare the merits of our differing presuppositions and the consequences on the result set that they have in the grand ole’ philosophical style. But alas I fear that all civility has gone not only out of academia-at-large, but out of society-at-large as well.
What would Socrates say about us, I wonder? Nothing too complimentary, I think.
I like this a lot. There is a lot at stake in what you are saying and I also find Christian’s who argue along the same lines: each type of thought is grounded in its own presuppositions and we cannot really talk across these presuppositions because they are what form the rationality built on top of them. The way we speak, the rules of engagement, how we speak, what we speak about and how we argue are said to follow from the foundational presuppositions. The post-liberal theologians like Stanley Hawerwas (spelling?) do this all the time and it drives me nuts. The philosopher Donald Davidson is correct in saying that to even be able to speak with each other at all means that we share more beliefs and knowledge about the world and reality than not; and this means we have some basis from which to engage each other even when we disagree.