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To: untenured
Goddamn right. I am an admitted leftist and also a philosophy major but nothing angers me like pseudo-philosophers like Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Eco, Foucault, Husserl, Zizek, Adorno, Marx, Lacan and others being past off as thoughtful analysis, even philosophy. Even worse is when otherwise intelligent people get pulled into the snares of postmodernist thought (a term I use to describe pretty much anything related to continental philosophy, so areas like phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, real post-modernism, deconstructionism, most feminist works, and critical theory). All of them are intellectual rubbish. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do not have the time to study all of their works and point out all of the failures in scholarship, but luckily we have people like EO Wilson and Alan Sokal (who initiated the Sokal Affair and wrote Fashionable Nonsense afterwards, a GREAT read).
11 posted on 07/24/2006 12:58:42 PM PDT by droptone
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To: droptone

That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with. Hermeneutics is just a facny word for textual interpretation. Structuralism is a theory of language that's decided not postmodernist. Pomo was a reaction against it. It's been quite fruitful in other field as well (anthropology etc..).


12 posted on 09/19/2006 12:34:16 PM PDT by Borges
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