r/badphilosophy • u/as-well • Aug 19 '20
Reading Group Book Review of "Cynical Theories"
This pile of shit masquerading as a book was bound to turn up on this sub any minute now. So let me call dips by unironically cynically posting a book review I just found on Twitter which neatly points out just how bad it is: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-cynical-theorists-behind-cynical-theories/
I for one welcome a new misreading of postmodernism in book "book" form, certainly that will not increase the amount of bad philosophy on this planet one iota.
EDIT: Some extra fun! As the review points out, the part on Fricker is weird, cause Fricker is quite vocally against postmodernism - for some of the same reasons that Lindsay shares!! Here's what she has to say about the subject (pages 2 and 3 in her book on epistemic injustice):
[t]he extremist bent in so much postmodernist writing led too often to reductionism, and the driving force behind the postmodernist spirit emerged as more a matter of disillusionment with untenable ideals of reason than any real will to bring questions of justice and injustice to bear in reason’s entanglements with social power.¹ Suspicion of the category of reason per se and the tendency to reduce it to an operation of power actually pre-empt the very questions one needs to ask about how power is affecting our functioning as rational subjects; for it eradicates,or at least obscures, the distinction between what we have a reason to think and what mere relations of power are doing to our thinking. If one has an interest in how questions of justice might present themselves in relation to our epistemic practices, then the reductionist tendencyobscures essential distinctions between, say, rejecting someone’s wordfor good reason and rejecting it out of mere prejudice. Far from opening up theoretical space in which to explore questions of justice and power in epistemic practices, then, postmodernism effectively pre-empted such questions, and so what it had to say of an epistemological bearing did not ultimately lead in a progressive direction at all, but was if anything orientated towards conservatism.
Well ok I highlighted the points Lindsay won't agree with, but they are better anyway. Analytic philosophy for life!
Edit2: extremely relevant follow up tweet: https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1296175205002297344?s=19
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Aug 19 '20
the book clearly missed the opportunity to criticize the pernicious postmodernism of Heraclitean metaphysics of fluidity and of Averroist double truth epistemology, smh
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
I would also like to point out that pragmatism, with its notably very different undrestanding of truth from most everyone nowadays, would be an excellent candidate for a right-wing grift: https://twitter.com/KevinZollman/status/1293893759231561734
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Aug 19 '20
excellent choice, and everything of Pragmatism that doesn't fit into this Patriotric Pragmatism can be explained away as the pernicious Continental influence of Pearce's French gf and of William James' New Age philosophy
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u/Acuate I would prefer not to. Aug 19 '20
puts sunglasses on in Richard Rorty*
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u/Greg_Alpacca Aug 25 '20
Overnight America became a historicist, nominalist culture, using new slightly more racist final vocabularies all because they discovered that ironism is an American cultural product. The next day, a swathe of representationalists recanted. First came John Searle, who apologised for mocking postmodernists in that one discussion he had with Rorty, because he did not realise how American postmodernism is, next Chomsky recognised that his nativist inclinations were just dead metaphors, and he abandoned his dirty inverted Platonism, finally Quine rose from his grave to visit his publishers at Harvard University Press to have them find and replace all instances of the term ‘web of belief’ with ‘centerless web of desires and beliefs.’ Also all books were burned that were incoherent with epistemological behaviourism. The United States of Antipodeans sang the C-Fibre blues and tried to hold back their unexplained yet ontologically ungappy raw feels as they carved Rorty’s face onto Mt Rushmore. Thank you Rorty, you’ve done it again you mad lad.
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about but as the good european I am, I do not hesitate to state I am happy I have never learned about this decadent new world ideology.
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Aug 19 '20
oh, I feel sorry for your suffering under the tyranny of free universal healthcare, but can you please tell your postmodernist friends Voltaire and Rousseau to stop destroying Western Civ with their grievance philosophy
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
Only if you tell Hume to stop doubting causation
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u/quasimomentum9 Aug 19 '20
or is he?
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
Depends which parts you read!
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u/DaneLimmish Super superego Aug 19 '20
w...where do they get the idea that Kant is anti-enlightenment? That's a novel approach, and it's making me think they are even more deeply unserious people than I first assumed.
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
Probably from his famous essay "what is anti-enlightenment?"
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u/clutchgod98 Aug 19 '20
“Anti-Aufklärung” does have a ring to it
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
Well, technically it should be "Gegenaufklärung" but I'll let it slide
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u/clutchgod98 Aug 19 '20
Ja aber das hat keine Alliteration
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
Da hast du natürlich Recht! Aber ich find eher sowas wäre gut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Rq5U1fv60
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u/Acuate I would prefer not to. Aug 19 '20
" Suspicion of the category of reason per se and the tendency to reduce it to an operation of power actually pre-empt the very questions one needs to ask about how power is affecting our functioning as rational subjects;"
Ma'am this is a wendys
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u/noactuallyitspoptart The Interesting Epistemic Difference Between Us Is I Cheated Aug 19 '20
they “speak [their] own language” and “represent a wholly different culture
Whether or not this is true (and in some degree it can’t be denied that it is), one is called to ask the question: what the fuck was so good about the old culture?
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
Do you need an itemized list or will "rule by cishet white men" suffice
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u/noactuallyitspoptart The Interesting Epistemic Difference Between Us Is I Cheated Aug 20 '20
Dude you know full well how many kings were getting it on with the pretty young boys of the court
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u/navamama Aug 19 '20
I too feel they misconstrue post-modernism and there is definitely a lot more to it then they say, but the origins of the deconstructivist craze they criticise is nonetheless post-modernism, which isn't "evil" intrinsically of course, but the current misuses of the philosophy are to be criticised heavily, which is what they attempt to do with said book.
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u/as-well Aug 19 '20
Where is this misuse, and can you explain it without making me invoke Rule 7
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u/navamama Aug 19 '20
ah I see after reading the rules, this sub doesn't just criticise bad philosophy, it is bad philosophy enacted too because no thy enemy, I hate and love this
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u/carfniex Aug 19 '20
i wonder if they've read that steven hicks book, and then nothing else ever