Author Topic: Philosophy Culture  (Read 1904 times)

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Offline kimmy

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Re: Philosophy Culture
« Reply #15 on: November 13, 2018, 03:29:08 am »

Nevertheless, the poisons of post-structuralism have now spread throughout academe and have done enormous damage to basic scholarly standards and disastrously undermined belief even in the possibility of knowledge. I suspect history will not be kind to the leading professors who appear to have put loyalty to friends and colleagues above defending scholarly values during a chaotic era of overt vandalism that has deprived several generations of students of a profound education in the humanities. The steady decline in humanities majors is an unmistakable signal that this once noble field has become a wasteland..


https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camille-paglia-its-time-for-a-new-map-of-the-gender-world/


I have only made it part-way through the interview, and am not really qualified to comment because my own knowledge of philosophy is about as deep as my knowledge of brain surgery.  I haven't done much in the way of fancy book larnin' myself.

But I do have to say that post-modernism seems to be a concept that I arrived at on my own and never had a name for previously.  A while back in another thread I was talking about the idea that objective news coverage doesn't (and can't) exist because a complete factual description of reality is too much to fit into a broadcast, or a newspaper, or a website.  Those things can show you a portion of reality, but the portion they show is somebody's idea of what is most important and disregards everything else. You get a brief look at some politics items, some local traffic news, some local weather, a few world events, some stock market news, some sports items, and a human interest story.  That's not everything that happened, that's some editor's idea of what they think their viewers will find most useful.  Trying to describe reality is unavoidably a situation like the story about the three blind men trying to describe an elephant by touch.

And that problem isn't limited to a news show trying to explain the world in 30 minutes.  That problem is our selves trying to understand a universe that we can barely perceive at all. Our attempt to understand our world or anything in it is like the three blind men trying to describe an elephant.  We see only a tiny portion of our world. We see what's happening on the street we're walking down, but we don't see what's happening the next street over. We read one news source but disregard another.  We can only see a tiny piece of the world, and which tiny piece we choose to look at is a result of the choices we make.

And even our perception of the piece we choose to look at is edited by our own biases.  Two people can look at the exact same news story and come to different conclusions about its significance because our biases inform us as to which facts are most important.  Our brain itself isn't a perfect rational instrument.  Our perception and our choices at any given time can be influenced by anything from our the amount of sleep we've had and our blood sugar level and how much we've had to drink, to some terrible experience you had back in high school that your current situation reminds you of.

There is an objective reality, but all of us are looking at it through a distorted lens that we have constructed ourselves.  You experience reality through your own set of filters and biases and even biological differences that make your experience different from the person next to you.  The viewer's own lens is an unavoidable part of what they're seeing. In a sense, we ourselves create the way we experience things.  I think that's an unavoidable conclusion.  And if my understanding of the term is correct, that's the basic idea behind post-modernism.


 -k
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