This nonsense emerged with a vengeance in the '80s in the humanities and spread quickly to the qualitative social sciences. (Philosophy, econ, and the sciences held out for decades; philosophy has fallen, the sciences are falling. Dunno about econ.)
It is a mishmash of some of the most incoherent, anti-rationalist, and intellectually weak…
This nonsense emerged with a vengeance in the '80s in the humanities and spread quickly to the qualitative social sciences. (Philosophy, econ, and the sciences held out for decades; philosophy has fallen, the sciences are falling. Dunno about econ.)
It is a mishmash of some of the most incoherent, anti-rationalist, and intellectually weakest "work" of the last 50 years. It's obsessed with Marx and Freud (both rejects from the social sciences), poststructuralism, postmodernism, Foucault, deconstruction, radical feminism, and the panoply of critical theories including critical race theory, queer theory and de-colonial theory. These disparate movements have many disagreements, but they come together around a few points of agreement. Radical left politics, for one. Leftist politics has been central to Continental philosophy since around the time of Sartre. Another point of overlap is weak, speculative, interpretive, quasi-literary method. This should be familiar to everyone now, as we see it all around us: aimless wandering among inscrutable, bombastic verbiage, dropping names and spewing neologisms. The conclusions are all predetermined by the politics, and the point is to wander about saying derogatory things about capitalism and the West until it's time to drop some outlandish, politically correct "conclusion"--women have penises, glaciers are sexist, dinosaurs are socially constructed by men...whatever. It is, for example, a foregone conclusion that all who disagree with them are racist (misogynist, x-phobic, etc.); the only question is how to string together some scholarly-sounding "arguments" to bamboozle people into thinking this conclusion is less preposterous than it seems on its face.
Some of us have been battling against this bullshit for decades, sounding the alarm about its spread in the academy. We were told that we were alarmist, and that it would remain isolated to campus. We explained that academia is the bottleneck through which the entire elite class passes, and that it was absurd to think that such pseudoscientific, anti-rationalist gobbledygook could pervade academia yet remained contained thereto.
Well, unfortunately, we were right.
How to defeat it is a separate question. But getting a clear view of the problem is, perhaps, a helpful first step.
This nonsense emerged with a vengeance in the '80s in the humanities and spread quickly to the qualitative social sciences. (Philosophy, econ, and the sciences held out for decades; philosophy has fallen, the sciences are falling. Dunno about econ.)
It is a mishmash of some of the most incoherent, anti-rationalist, and intellectually weakest "work" of the last 50 years. It's obsessed with Marx and Freud (both rejects from the social sciences), poststructuralism, postmodernism, Foucault, deconstruction, radical feminism, and the panoply of critical theories including critical race theory, queer theory and de-colonial theory. These disparate movements have many disagreements, but they come together around a few points of agreement. Radical left politics, for one. Leftist politics has been central to Continental philosophy since around the time of Sartre. Another point of overlap is weak, speculative, interpretive, quasi-literary method. This should be familiar to everyone now, as we see it all around us: aimless wandering among inscrutable, bombastic verbiage, dropping names and spewing neologisms. The conclusions are all predetermined by the politics, and the point is to wander about saying derogatory things about capitalism and the West until it's time to drop some outlandish, politically correct "conclusion"--women have penises, glaciers are sexist, dinosaurs are socially constructed by men...whatever. It is, for example, a foregone conclusion that all who disagree with them are racist (misogynist, x-phobic, etc.); the only question is how to string together some scholarly-sounding "arguments" to bamboozle people into thinking this conclusion is less preposterous than it seems on its face.
Some of us have been battling against this bullshit for decades, sounding the alarm about its spread in the academy. We were told that we were alarmist, and that it would remain isolated to campus. We explained that academia is the bottleneck through which the entire elite class passes, and that it was absurd to think that such pseudoscientific, anti-rationalist gobbledygook could pervade academia yet remained contained thereto.
Well, unfortunately, we were right.
How to defeat it is a separate question. But getting a clear view of the problem is, perhaps, a helpful first step.