Why is Academic Writing So *Needlessly *Ridiculous?

[French Canadian]

1) MacKinnon wrote an essay explicitly coming out against postmodernism in 2000. Hicks critiques a book that she wrote in 1993, alleging that her "logic" regarding her crusade to make porn illegal was symptomatic of postmodernist "logic." If you've read Hicks' book and the book of MacKinnon's that he's critiquing, then you wouldn't consider what he has to say to be in error. You don't have to be a proud, flag-waving postmodernist for your thinking to be infused with/infected by postmodernism.

2) Why is his table of medieval philosophy "complete horseshit"? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way. Thus far, slurs, invectives, and appeals to authority have been pinch-hitting for critical arguments in your posts. I'm at least articulating the grounds for my positions and posting the thousands of words that I've written in different essays backing my shit up. I'd be curious to see you actually make a case for something rather than just pointing out that Hicks' book wasn't published by Cambridge University Press

3) When a guy comes right out and says that he wants to "deny knowledge in order to make room for faith" and uses the Biblical story of Babel as the reason why we should all be good religious zealots and side with faith, how is categorizing him as anti-reason an error? Hell, even Nietzsche saw through Kant's bullshit and denounced his philosophical project as part of a "cunning theology" and considered the "success" of his philosophical work "merely a theologian's success."

You don't have to read every philosopher. But surely it's not too much to ask to hold off on deciding that someone's writing is a crock until you've actually...you know...read it, is it?

I thought her wanting porn to be illegal was based on the experiences of actresses such as the one from deep throat. That is explicitly why she doesn't like postmodernism. It seems not enough reality based for her.

I won't go through all the table, but for example his account of medieval epistemology being faith / mysticism is laughable. Truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus is from Aquinas. The best scholastic were not mere apologists : they questioned the Bible and interpreted it : lots of them were put to court, the Vatican declared lots of their thesis to be unholy. Some books were chained because they were heretical. For example, the Artians thought that in matters of philosophy, or natural philosophy theology did not matter. A physicist, as a physicist could not hold that the world was created. The principles of physics are in contradiction with theology. Lots of scholastic after 1200 were influenced by Averroes, who in his fasl al-maqal said that reason needs to interpret the Holy Scriptures, not vice versa.
Mostly, medieval philosophers thought philosophy could rationnaly explain theology, they did not try to hide the tensions : they pointed them out and used very advanced logic (Enlightenment's logic is less developed, Frege rediscovered (independently) some things from the medieval era) to resolve them.

You would have to explain the full context of the quote your using. If I am not mistaking, it has to do with the fact that there is no objective proof of the existence, nor of the non-existence of God. True Faith or belief, is subjective because there is no objective ground to stand on. This objective ground does not exist : reason has its limits.
I also find it weird to catapult Kant as anti-enlightment and anti-reason for the very fact that he wrote fondly of both. The critique of pure reason was the end of humanism. It erected science as the only way forward. Metaphysics had to be scientific.

Edit: if anything, kant is too rational which leads him to an unrealistic account of morality.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

^ I was actually pretty surprised by Hicks' positioning of Kant in that book as well.

But I haven't read the latter's Critique of Judgement.

 

[Bullitt68]

I thought her wanting porn to be illegal was based on the experiences of actresses such as the one from deep throat.

To be fair, Hicks' main target is another feminist scholar, Andrea Dworkin. But MacKinnon is arguing from a similar perspective. From Hicks' book:

"Dworkin and her colleague, Catharine MacKinnon, then call for the censorship of pornography on postmodern grounds. Our social reality is constructed by the language we use, and pornography is a form of language, one that constructs a violent and domineering reality for women to submit to. Pornography, therefore, is not free speech but political oppression."

Regardless of how MacKinnon feels about postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, etc., Hicks' claim is that the logic of her argument against pornography is made, as he says, "on postmodern grounds." That's all. It's a modest - and I think accurate - claim. The portion of her 1993 text, Only Words, to which Hicks refers is the following:

"Andrea Dworkin and I have proposed a law against pornography that defines it as graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words [...] This definition includes the harm of what pornography says - its function as defamation or hate speech - but defines it and it alone in terms of what it does - its role as subordination, as sex discrimination, including what it does through what it says."

It's a bizarre game of linguistic gymnastics "anchored" by a long and weird opening that's reminiscent of the kind of metaphorical/storytelling mode of Foucault's historicism.

I won't go through all the table, but for example his account of medieval epistemology being faith / mysticism is laughable. Truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus is from Aquinas. The best scholastic were not mere apologists : they questioned the Bible and interpreted it : lots of them were put to court, the Vatican declared lots of their thesis to be unholy. Some books were chained because they were heretical. For example, the Artians thought that in matters of philosophy, or natural philosophy theology did not matter. A physicist, as a physicist could not hold that the world was created. The principles of physics are in contradiction with theology. Lots of scholastic after 1200 were influenced by Averroes, who in his fasl al-maqal said that reason needs to interpret the Holy Scriptures, not vice versa.
Mostly, medieval philosophers thought philosophy could rationnaly explain theology, they did not try to hide the tensions : they pointed them out and used very advanced logic (Enlightenment's logic is less developed, Frege rediscovered (independently) some things from the medieval era) to resolve them.

How does this constitute a refutation of anything said by Hicks? It seems like you build to the same picture. You just don't like that he takes a "glass half empty" approach and emphasizes that Medieval philosophy was predominantly faith-based and mystical. Or would you even deny that?

To quote Hicks directly, he explains that he is operating from the following position:

"Augustinian Christianity was [Medieval philosophy's] intellectual center of gravity. In the later medieval era, Thomism was an attempt to marry Christianity with a naturalistic Aristotelian philosophy. Accordingly, Thomistic philosophy undermined [earlier faith-based philosophy] and helped open the door to the Renaissance and modernity."

I'm not clear on how the above picture is different from your picture.

You would have to explain the full context of the quote your using.

Ok. It's from the Preface to the Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. He kicks off his Preface lampooning the pretensions of everything that purports to be "scientific." He tries to take things back a step to "logic," which he conceives of as propaedeutic to the scientific. He then goes through the false theory/practice dichotomy and explains his reasoning regarding "a priori cognition." He then uses the following story about the man who invented the isosceles triangle as exemplary of the logical, the reasonable, the scientific, etc.:

"A new light broke upon the first person who demonstrated the isosceles triangle (whether he was called 'Thales' or had some other name). For he found that what he had to do was not to trace what he saw in this figure, or even trace its mere concept, and read off, as it were, from the properties of the figure; but rather that he had to produce the latter from what he himself thought into the object and presented (through construction) according to a priori concepts, and that in order to know something securely a priori he had to ascribe to the thing nothing except what followed necessarily from what he himself had put into it in accordance with its concept [...] [Such exemplars of the logical, the reasonable, and the scientific] comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements."

(Incidentally, this is what is known in Objectivism as the primacy of consciousness [as opposed to the primacy of existence]. Kant's "Copernican Revolution" - according to which, rather than our cognition having to conform to external objects [which is to say, rather than consciousness being the means by which we identify the objective reality independent of our minds], we're somehow able to make external objects conform to our cognition [which is to say that there's no such thing as an objective reality independent of our minds - there's only what we create in our own minds] - is exemplary.)

Having established his ideal of logical, reasonable, scientific activity - which resembles nothing if not fantasy - he then undertakes a lambasting of metaphysics that anticipates Derrida. He claims that, in the metaphysical realm (which he doesn't actually define, nor does he cite any exemplars so as to give a sense of who he has in mind with his lambasting), "we have to retrace our path countless times," the Sisyphean futility leading him to wonder if the inability to progress steadily on a metaphysical path is an indication of a fault in reason itself. As he writes:

"Is it perhaps impossible? Why then has nature afflicted our reason with the restless striving for such a path, as if it were one of reason's most important occupations? Still more, how little cause have we to place trust in our reason if in one of the most important parts of our desire for knowledge it does not merely forsake us but even entices us with delusions and in the end betrays us!"

(Note the religious rhetoric, the "My God, why have you forsaken me?" slant given to his Christ-like lamentation regarding the alleged impotence of reason).

He then explicitly sets out the terms of his nonsensical Copernican Revolution, explaining that "the concern of this critique [...] consists in that attempt to transform the accepted procedure of metaphysics, undertaking an entire revolution," after which he's led to an explanation of his also nonsensical distinction between things as they appear and things in themselves. This goofy discussion leads him to a weird discussion of freedom and morality - basically a tremendously confused working out of the free will versus determinism dilemma - over the course of which he constructs yet another bizarre dichotomy, that of practical reason versus speculative reason. Speculative reason, according to Kant, is, given its "pretension to extravagant insights," hubristic; it is an affront to God: "Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."

^ I was actually pretty surprised by Hicks' positioning of Kant in that book as well.

But I haven't read the latter's Critique of Judgement.

You're just asking for more spam, dude. I discuss the Critique of Judgment explicitly and extensively in the first bit of spam that I linked to. It's actually my favorite thing of Kant's because it's his most genuine attempt to work through the problems that he'd caused for himself with his nonsensical system and it's the place where the solutions to many of those problems are discernible in spite of Kant's own failure to discern them himself.

 

[EyeOfNewt]

Lol. TS asked why academic writing is so needlessly ridiculous and this page doesn't answer his question (why) but it sure demonstrates how.

 

[Rimbaud82]

Lol. TS asked why academic writing is so needlessly ridiculous and this page doesn't answer his question (why) but it sure demonstrates how.

Lol. Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean its needlessly complex. I would say that everything written here is very straightforward.

 

[EyeOfNewt]

Lol. Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean its needlessly complex. I would say that everything written here is very straightforward.

Not needlessly complex, needlessly verbose. If you want to prove something, you want to take the shortest route possible. At least this is true for hard science

 

[Rimbaud82]

Not needlessly complex, needlessly verbose. If you want to prove something, you want to take the shortest route possible. At least this is true for hard science

No one in this thread has written anything that is massively verbose.

 

[EyeOfNewt]

No one in this thread has written anything that is massively verbose.

I must have a short attention span then lol

 

[French Canadian]

To be fair, Hicks' main target is another feminist scholar, Andrea Dworkin. But MacKinnon is arguing from a similar perspective. From Hicks' book:

"Dworkin and her colleague, Catharine MacKinnon, then call for the censorship of pornography on postmodern grounds. Our social reality is constructed by the language we use, and pornography is a form of language, one that constructs a violent and domineering reality for women to submit to. Pornography, therefore, is not free speech but political oppression."

Regardless of how MacKinnon feels about postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, etc., Hicks' claim is that the logic of her argument against pornography is made, as he says, "on postmodern grounds." That's all. It's a modest - and I think accurate - claim. The portion of her 1993 text, Only Words, to which Hicks refers is the following:

"Andrea Dworkin and I have proposed a law against pornography that defines it as graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words [...] This definition includes the harm of what pornography says - its function as defamation or hate speech - but defines it and it alone in terms of what it does - its role as subordination, as sex discrimination, including what it does through what it says."

It's a bizarre game of linguistic gymnastics "anchored" by a long and weird opening that's reminiscent of the kind of metaphorical/storytelling mode of Foucault's historicism.



How does this constitute a refutation of anything said by Hicks? It seems like you build to the same picture. You just don't like that he takes a "glass half empty" approach and emphasizes that Medieval philosophy was predominantly faith-based and mystical. Or would you even deny that?

To quote Hicks directly, he explains that he is operating from the following position:

"Augustinian Christianity was [Medieval philosophy's] intellectual center of gravity. In the later medieval era, Thomism was an attempt to marry Christianity with a naturalistic Aristotelian philosophy. Accordingly, Thomistic philosophy undermined [earlier faith-based philosophy] and helped open the door to the Renaissance and modernity."

I'm not clear on how the above picture is different from your picture.



Ok. It's from the Preface to the Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. He kicks off his Preface lampooning the pretensions of everything that purports to be "scientific." He tries to take things back a step to "logic," which he conceives of as propaedeutic to the scientific. He then goes through the false theory/practice dichotomy and explains his reasoning regarding "a priori cognition." He then uses the following story about the man who invented the isosceles triangle as exemplary of the logical, the reasonable, the scientific, etc.:

"A new light broke upon the first person who demonstrated the isosceles triangle (whether he was called 'Thales' or had some other name). For he found that what he had to do was not to trace what he saw in this figure, or even trace its mere concept, and read off, as it were, from the properties of the figure; but rather that he had to produce the latter from what he himself thought into the object and presented (through construction) according to a priori concepts, and that in order to know something securely a priori he had to ascribe to the thing nothing except what followed necessarily from what he himself had put into it in accordance with its concept [...] [Such exemplars of the logical, the reasonable, and the scientific] comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements."

(Incidentally, this is what is known in Objectivism as the primacy of consciousness [as opposed to the primacy of existence]. Kant's "Copernican Revolution" - according to which, rather than our cognition having to conform to external objects [which is to say, rather than consciousness being the means by which we identify the objective reality independent of our minds], we're somehow able to make external objects conform to our cognition [which is to say that there's no such thing as an objective reality independent of our minds - there's only what we create in our own minds] - is exemplary.)

Having established his ideal of logical, reasonable, scientific activity - which resembles nothing if not fantasy - he then undertakes a lambasting of metaphysics that anticipates Derrida. He claims that, in the metaphysical realm (which he doesn't actually define, nor does he cite any exemplars so as to give a sense of who he has in mind with his lambasting), "we have to retrace our path countless times," the Sisyphean futility leading him to wonder if the inability to progress steadily on a metaphysical path is an indication of a fault in reason itself. As he writes:

"Is it perhaps impossible? Why then has nature afflicted our reason with the restless striving for such a path, as if it were one of reason's most important occupations? Still more, how little cause have we to place trust in our reason if in one of the most important parts of our desire for knowledge it does not merely forsake us but even entices us with delusions and in the end betrays us!"

(Note the religious rhetoric, the "My God, why have you forsaken me?" slant given to his Christ-like lamentation regarding the alleged impotence of reason).

He then explicitly sets out the terms of his nonsensical Copernican Revolution, explaining that "the concern of this critique [...] consists in that attempt to transform the accepted procedure of metaphysics, undertaking an entire revolution," after which he's led to an explanation of his also nonsensical distinction between things as they appear and things in themselves. This goofy discussion leads him to a weird discussion of freedom and morality - basically a tremendously confused working out of the free will versus determinism dilemma - over the course of which he constructs yet another bizarre dichotomy, that of practical reason versus speculative reason. Speculative reason, according to Kant, is, given its "pretension to extravagant insights," hubristic; it is an affront to God: "Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."



You're just asking for more spam, dude. I discuss the Critique of Judgment explicitly and extensively in the first bit of spam that I linked to. It's actually my favorite thing of Kant's because it's his most genuine attempt to work through the problems that he'd caused for himself with his nonsensical system and it's the place where the solutions to many of those problems are discernible in spite of Kant's own failure to discern them himself.

Your first claim that pornography is a language so its postmodern is not good. For them, it is reality and postmodernism doesn't emphasizes this enough.

Second, augustinism is way more complex then that. A good deal is about believing so you can understand. He would say that everyone does that, regardless of knowledge. For example, in historical knowledge we have to believe, because we cannot see. In religion, we have to believe to first cleanse ourselves morally through the ascetic lifestyle demanded by christianity, and then we me understand some of its mystery. Augustine's understanding is based on Plotinus. He is the one that first came up with the cogito argument and then a proof of God based on similar ground then Descarte's (one of the two Descartes proposes, the other he stole to saint anselme, the ontological proof which Kant refuted). Now your going to shower me with quotes od Augustine talking about faith. I know he liked it, but it was a way towards understanding and in some cases we can never hope for anything more than faith (historical knowledge). Plus, for him it is reasonable to put faith in God because humans long for eternal happiness. I won't go into the details and I don't believe anyone can boasts that he understands Augustine completely, the amount he wrote is ridiculous.

And Renaissance was less logic based then scholasticism. They entered theological debate that were already solved earlier and killed themselves over them. If that is being less faith based....

Lastly I don't see how your last point undermines anything about Kant. It is accurate in some cases, but overall shows that you haven't taken courses on him and don't understand the concepts behind the words.

I do not wish to usurp this thread any further. I would however recommend reading s peer-reviewed book on postmodernism and Kant, instead of taking your account from an independent publisher.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

You're just asking for more spam, dude. I discuss the Critique of Judgment explicitly and extensively in the first bit of spam that I linked to. It's actually my favorite thing of Kant's because it's his most genuine attempt to work through the problems that he'd caused for himself with his nonsensical system and it's the place where the solutions to many of those problems are discernible in spite of Kant's own failure to discern them himself.

Sounds to me like it's time for an SPD (Serious Philosophy Discussion) stickied thread

 

[faustian]

Lol. Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean its needlessly complex. I would say that everything written here is very straightforward.

This +1. I'm just a kinda lowbrow casual philosophy fan but imo the posts itt are still very reasonably concise and reader-friendly. Even the perspectives which don't align with my own are nonetheless interesting and have been worth reading. Very good thread