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Philosophy

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Philosophy is the critical study of the most fundamental questions that humankind has been able to ask. In doing so, Philosophy asks what is the nature of reality, and what is the reality of nature. Do our perceptions of reality match the actual reality that is "out there"? What does it mean to think, to have a mind? How can we know that other minds (i.e. other thinking beings) actually exist? Is there a difference between right and wrong, and if so, how can we prove this? How do we define rules that allow us to apply theoretical ideas of right and wrong in practical situations? What do we mean by the word "God"? Does God exist? Philosophy studies such concepts as existence, goodness, knowledge, and beauty. It asks "Is knowledge possible," and if so, "What is knowledge?" Philosophy is the critical, speculative or analytical study of any of these topics.

Philosophers generally frame problems in a logical manner then work towards a solution based on logical processes and reasoning, based on a critical reading and response to previous work in this area.

It proceeds by formulating problems carefully based on all known facts, and proceeding to logically offer solutions to them, giving arguments for the solutions, and engaging in a dialectical process to discern the truth; this is the method of science without so much dependence on physical experimentation. Just as science proceeds by observation, formulation of a hypothesis, and further experimentation, so philosophy proceeds by logical formulation of a problem, argument for a solution, and counter-argument. These processes proceed until a solution is reached. Philosophy has developed more slowly than other sciences because it is solely dependent on cognitive integrity, without a coherent paradigm determining what kinds of experimental evidence to accept. In fact, some have argued that the existence of such a paradigm is what caused the various natural sciences to diverge from philosophy, which was their original home (as reflected in the term Ph.D., for Doctor of Philosophy).

 

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Western and Eastern Philosophy

Members of many societies around the world have considered the same questions, and built philosophic traditions based upon each other's works. Philosophy may be broadly divided into various realms based loosely on geography. The term "philosophy" alone in a Euro-American academic context usually refers to the philosophic traditions of Western civilization, sometimes also called Western philosophy. In the West, the term "eastern philosophy" broadly subsumes the philosophic traditions of Asia and the East.

 

Western Philosophy

The Western philosophic tradition began with the Greeks and continues to the present day. Famous Western philosophers include Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

 

Eastern Philosophy

Famous Eastern philosophers include Gautama Buddha, Bodhidharma, Lao Zi, Confucius, and Zhuang Zi. This article deals primarily with the Western philosophic tradition; for more information on Eastern philosophies, see Eastern philosophy.

 

In general

Popularly, the word "philosophy" is often used to mean any form of wisdom, or any person's perspective on life (as in "philosophy of life") or basic principles behind or method of achieving something (as in "my philosophy about driving on highways"). That is different from the academic meaning, and it is the academic meaning which is used here.

 

Origins

To start with, "philosophy" meant simply "the love of wisdom." "Philo-" comes from the Greek word philein, meaning to love, and "-sophy" comes from the Greek sophia, or wisdom. "Philosopher" replaced the word "sophist" (from sophoi), which was used to describe "wise men," teachers of rhetoric, who were important in Athenian democracy. Some of the first sophists were what we would now call philosophers. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates often contrasts Philosophers (those who love wisdom) with Sophists, those Socrates characterised as dishonest for hiding their ignorance behind word play and flattery, and convincing others of what was baseless or untrue. "Sophist" to this day is a derogatory term for one who persuades rather than reasons.

The introduction of the term "philosophy" was ascribed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras (see Diogenes Laertius: "De vita et moribus philosophorum", I, 12; Cicero: "Tusculanae disputationes", V, 8-9). This ascription is certainly based on a passage in a lost work of Herakleides Pontikos, a disciple of Aristotle. It is considered to be part of the widespread Pythagoras legends of this time. In fact the term "philosophy" was not in use long before Plato.

The scope of philosophy was "all intellectual endeavors". It has long since come to mean the study of an especially abstract, nonexperimental intellectual endeavor. In fact, and as was mentioned at the opening of this article, philosophy is a notoriously difficult word to define and the question "What is philosophy?" is a vexed philosophical question. It is often observed that philosophers are unique in the extent to which they disagree about what their field even is.

 

Philosophical subdisciplines

Philosophy has many subdisciplines.

  • Axiology: the branch of philosophical enquiry that explores:
    • Aesthetics: the study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty. Sometimes philosophy of art is used to describe only questions about art, with "aesthetics" the more general term. Likewise "aesthetics" sometimes applied even more broadly than to "philosophy of beauty" :to the "sublime," to humour, to the frightening--to any of the responses we might expect works of art or entertainment to elicit.
    • Ethics: the study of what makes actions right or wrong, and of how theories of right action can be applied to special moral problems. Subdisciplines include meta-ethics, value theory, theory of conduct, and applied ethics.
  • Economic philosophy: The branch of philosophy that addresses issues of economic distribution, equality, justice, poverty and progress, from the standpoint of first principles.

 

  • History of philosophy: the study of what philosophers up until recent times have written, its interpretation, who influenced whom, and so forth. The bulk of questions in history of philosophy are interpretive questions.
  • Philosophy of biology: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of biology, including the notion of a species and whether biological concepts are reducible to nonbiological concepts. Also see biosophy.
  • Philosophy of perception: the philosophical study of topics related to perception; the question what the "immediate objects" of perception are has been especially important.
  • Philosophy of psychology: the study of some fundamental questions about the methods and concepts of psychology and psychiatry, such as the meaningfulness of Freudian concepts; this is sometimes treated as including philosophy of mind.
  • Philosophy of religion: the study of the meaning of the concept of God and of the rationality or otherwise of belief in the existence of God.
  • Philosophy of science: includes not only, as subdisciplines, the "philosophies of" the special sciences (i.e., physics, biology, etc.), but also questions about induction, scientific method, scientific progress, etc.
  • Philosophy of social sciences: the philosophical study of some basic concepts, methods, and presuppositions of social sciences such as sociology and economics.
  • Value theory: the study of the concept value. Also called theory of value. Sometimes this is taken to be equivalent to axiology (a term not in as much currency in the English-speaking world as it once was), and sometimes is taken to be, instead of a foundational field, an overarching field including ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy, i.e., the philosophical subdisciplines that crucially depend on questions of value.

Axiology, metaphysics and epistemology are what many consider the three main branches from which all philosophical discourse stems. Logic is sometimes included as another main branch, sometimes as a separate science usually worked on by philosophers, sometimes just as a characteristically philosophical method applying to all the others.

 

How to get started in philosophy

It is a platitude (at least among people who write introductions to philosophy) that everybody has a philosophy, though they might not all realize it or be able to defend it. But at the same time the word "philosophy" as it is used by philosophers is nothing like what is meant by people who say "Here's my philosophy (of life, etc.): . . ." Such is the tension between pedagogy and scholarship.

If you're already interested in studying philosophy, your reason might be to improve the way you live or think somehow, or you simply wish to get acquainted with one of the most ancient areas of human thought. On the other hand, if you don't see what all the fuss is about, it might help to read the motivation to philosophize, which explains what motivates many people to "do philosophy," and get an introduction to philosophical method, which is important to understanding how philosophers think. It might also help to acquaint yourself with some considerations about just what philosophy is.

Those who are new to the subject of philosophy are advised to study logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy as these are - arguably - the central disciplines.

 

Applied philosophy

Philosophy has applications. The most obvious applications are those in ethics--applied ethics in particular--and in political philosophy. The political philosophies of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls have shaped and been used to justify governments and their actions. Philosophy of education deserves special mention, as well; progressive education as championed by John Dewey has had a profound impact on educational practices in the United States in the twentieth century.

Other important, but less immediate applications can be found in epistemology, which might help one to regulate one's notions of what knowledge, evidence, and justified belief are. Philosophy of science discusses the underpinnings of the scientific method, among other topics sometimes useful to scientists. Aesthetics can help to interpret discussions of art. Even ontology, surely the most abstract and least practical-seeming branch of philosophy, has had important consequences for logic and computer science. In general, the various "philosophies of," such as philosophy of law, can provide workers in their respective fields with a deeper understanding of the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of their fields.

Moreover, recently, there has been developing a burgeoning profession devoted to applying philosophy to the problems of ordinary life: philosophical counseling.

 

Philosophy contrasted with other disciplines

Natural Science

Originally the term "philosophy" was applied to all intellectual endeavour. Aristotle studied what would now be called biology, meterology, physics, and cosmology, alongside his metaphysics and ethics. Even in the eighteenth century physics and chemistry were still classified as "natural philosophy", that is, the philosophical study of nature. Today these latter subjects are referred to as science.

Psychology, economics, sociology, and linguistics were once the domain of philosophers insofar as they were studied at all, but now have only a weaker connection with the field. In the late twentieth century cognitive science and artificial intelligence could be seen as being forged in part out of "philosophy of mind."

Philosophy is done a priori. It does not and cannot rely on experiment, However, in some ways philosophy is close to science in its character and method; Analytic philosophy urges that philosophers should emulate the methods of natural science; Quine holds that philosophy just is a branch of natural science, simply the most abstract one. This approach, common nowadays, is called "philosophical naturalism"

Philosophers have always devoted some study to science and the scientific method, and to logic, and this involves, indirectly, studying the subject matters of those sciences. Whether philosophy also has its own, distinct subject matter is a contentious point. Traditionally ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics have all been philosophical subjects, but many philosophers have, especially in the twentieth century, rejected these as futile questions (the Vienna Circle). Philosophy has also concerned itself with explaining the foundations and character knowledge in general (of science, or history), and in this case it would be a sort of "science of science" but some now hold that this cannot consist in any more than clarifying the arguments and claims of other sciences. This suggests that philosophy might be the study of meaning and reasoning generally; but some still would claim either that this is not a science, or that if it is it ought not to be pursued by philosophers.

All these views have something in common: whatever philosophy essentially is or is concerned with, it tends on the whole to proceed more "abstractly" than most (or most other) natural sciences. It does not depend as much on experience and experiment, and does not contribute as directly to technology. It clearly would be a mistake to identify philosophy with any one natural science; whether it can be identified with science very broadly construed is still an open question.

 

Philosophy of Science

This is an active discipline pursued by both trained philosophers and scientists. Philosophers often refer to, and interpret, experimental work of various kinds (as in philosophy of physics and philosophy of psychology). But this is not surprising: such branches of philosophy aim at philosophical understanding of experimental work. It is not the philosophers in their capacity as philosophers, who perform the experiments and formulate the scientific theories under study. Philosophy of science should not be confused with science it studies any more than biology should be confused with plants and animals.

 

Theology and Religious studies

Like philosophy, most religious studies, are not experimental. Parts of theology, including questions about the existence and nature of gods, clearly overlap with philosophy of religion. Aristotle considered theology a branch of metaphysics, the central field of philosophy, and most philosophers prior to the twentieth century have devoted significant effort to theological questions. So the two are not unrelated. But other part of religious studies, such as the comparison of different world religions, can be easily distinguished from philosophy in just the way that any other social science can be distinguished from philosophy. These are closer to history and sociology, and involve specific observations of particular phenomena, here particular religious practices.

Nowadays religion plays a very marginal role in philosophy. The Empiricist tradition in modern philosophy often held that religious questions are beyond the scope of human knowledge, and many have claimed that religious language is literally meaningless: there are not even questions to be answered. Some philosophers have felt that these difficulties in evidence were irrelevant, and have argued for, against, or just about religious beliefs on moral or other grounds. Nonetheless, in the main stream of twentieth century philosophy there are very few philosophers who give serious consideration to religious questions.

 

Mathematics

Math uses very specific, rigorous methods of proof that philosophers sometimes (only rarely) try to emulate. Most philosophy is written in ordinary prose, and while it strives to be precise it does not usually attain anything like mathematical clarity. As a result, mathematicians hardly ever disagree about results, while philosophers of course do disagree about their results, as well as their methods.

The Philosophy of mathematics is a branch of philosophy of science; but in many ways mathematics has a special relationship to philosophy. This is because the study of logic is a central branch of philosophy, and mathematics is a paradigm example of logic. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries logic made great advances, and mathematics has been proven to be reducible to logic (at least, to first-order logic with some set theory). The use of formal, mathematical logic in philosophy now resembles the use of math in science, although it is not as frequent.

 

Some tentative generalizations about what philosophy is

So philosophy, it seems, is a discipline that draws on knowledge that the average educated person has, and it does not make use of experimentation and careful observation, though it may interpret philosophical aspects of experiment and observation.

More positively, one might say that philosophy is a discipline that examines the meaning and justification of certain of our most basic, fundamental beliefs, according to a loose set of general methods. But what we might mean by the words "basic, fundamental beliefs"?

A belief is fundamental if it concerns those aspects of the universe which are most commonly found, which are found everywhere: the universal aspects of things. Philosophy studies, for example, what existence itself is. It also studies value--the goodness of things--in general. Surely in human life we find the relevance of value or goodness everywhere, not just moral goodness, though that might be very important, but even more generally, goodness in the sense of anything that is actually desirable, the sense, for example, in which an apple, a painting, and a person can all be good. (If indeed there is a single sense in which they are all called "good.")

Of course, physics and the other sciences study some very universal aspects of things; but it does so experimentally. Philosophy studies those aspects that can be studied without experimentation. Those are aspects of things that are very general indeed; to take yet another example, philosophers ask what physical objects as such are, as distinguished from properties of objects and relations between objects, and perhaps also as distinguished from minds or souls. Physicists proceed as though the notion of a physical body is quite clear and straightforward--which perhaps in the end it will found to be--but at any rate, physics assumes that, and then asks questions about how all physical bodies behave, and then does experiments to find out the answers.

 

Quotes

"Science is what we know and philosophy is what we don't know." - Bertrand Russell

"What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." - Ambrose Bierce

"No one would hire a plumber who claimed there was no such thing as plumbing pipes, but apparently such standards of caution and care are not required of philosophers." - Dr. Hugh Akston in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

 

Philosophical issues, theories, and movements

agnosticism -- altruism -- anti-realism -- applied ethics -- Aristotelianism -- Buddhist philosophy -- conceptualism -- coherentism -- Confucianism -- Conscience -- consequentialism -- constructivism -- cosmology -- Critical Theory -- deconstruction-- determinism -- egoism -- empiricism -- epicureanism -- ethics -- existentialism -- feminism -- foundationalism -- foundation ontology -- formalism -- French materialism -- German idealism -- hedonism -- historicism -- idealism -- intuitionism -- Irrationalism and Aestheticism -- irrealism -- knowledge -- logical positivism -- materialism -- mechanism -- mentalism -- memetics -- naive realism -- nativism -- nominalism -- ontology -- operationalism -- paternalism -- philosophical naturalism -- philosophical pessimism -- philosophy of action -- physicalism -- Platonism -- pragmatism -- probabilism -- psychological egoism -- Queer studies -- rationalism -- realism -- reality enforcement -- relativism -- reliabilism -- stoicism -- subjectivism -- scholasticism -- solipsism -- supertasks -- Taoism -- teleology -- traditionalism -- Transcendentalism -- utilitarianism -- vitalism

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Economics

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Economics is a social science that studies society's allocation of scarce resources to meet desires and wants. Economics therefore starts from the premise that resources are in limited supply and that it is necessary to choose between competing alternatives. With scarcity, choosing one alternative implies foregoing another alternative; economists refer to this as opportunity cost. Understanding choice by individuals and groups is therefore central in economics. Economists tend to think that incentives and preferences (tastes) together play an important role in shaping decision making.

Aspects receiving particular attention in economics are trade, resource allocation and competition. Economics may be applied to such diverse topics as the governance of production, distribution and consumption of wealth as well as the various related problems of finance, taxation, labor, law, poverty, pollution etc.

Economics is said to be positive when it attempts to explain the consequences of different choices given a set of assumptions and normative when it prescribes a certain route of action. The nature of positive and normative economics is discussed further below.

Most contemporary theory assumes that economic agents act rationally to optimize well-being given available information. This may sometimes be an acceptable approximation (for instance, if individual irrationality cancel each other out in the aggregate) and tends to produce tractable results. However, this framework ("homo economicus") is not accepted by all. More recently, irrational behavior and imperfect information have increasingly been the subject of formal modelling (often referred to as behavioral economics), resulting in some Nobel Prizes in economics.

Mathematical economics is based on the belief that mathematical methods encourage researchers to focus on essentials and makes exposition less prone to ambiguity. However, the basic ideas of economics can be taught with no more than simple arithmetic and graphs, without knowledge of the underlying formal mathematical theory. Indeed, the Austrian School of economics believes that anything beyond simple logic is not only unnecessary but inappropriate for economic analysis.

In any case, economics relies on formal, mathematical styles of argument more than other social sciences. However, formal modelling is also increasingly used in other social sciences, such as political science, as well as philosophy. Formal modelling can involve advanced mathematical methods, but often only relatively straightforward algebra or elementary calculus is needed.

 

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Areas of study in economics

Economics is usually divided into two main categories:

  • Microeconomics, which deals with the behaviour and interaction of individual agents and firms.
  • Macroeconomics, which examines an economy as a whole with a view to understanding the interaction between economic aggregates such as income, employment and inflation.

Attempts to join these two branches or to refute the distinction between them have been important motivators in much of recent economic thought, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, the consensus view is arguably that good macroeconomics has solid microeconomic foundations i.e. its premises have support in microeconomics.

Within these major divisions there are specialized areas of study that try to answer questions on a broad spectrum of human economic activity (see below). There are also methodologies used by economists whose underlying theories are important. The most significant example may be econometrics, which applies statistical techniques to the study of economic data.

There has been an increasing trend for ideas from economics to be applied in wider contexts. There is an economic aspect to any field where people are faced with alternatives - education, marriage, health, public policy, etc. Public Choice Theory studies how economic analysis can apply to those fields traditionally considered outside of economics. The areas of investigation in Economics therefore overlap with other social sciences, including political science and sociology.

 

Branches of economics and related subjects

Economics may be broken down as follows:

Microeconomics
General equilibrium -- Industrial organization -- Financial economics -- Public finance -- International trade -- Labor economics -- Development economics -- Environmental economics -- Evolutionary economics -- Public choice theory -- Public goods -- Economic geography -- Network effect -- Transport economics -- Supply and Demand -- Consumer Theory -- Health economics
Macroeconomics
Stabilisation policy -- Economic growth -- Purchasing power parity -- supply side economics -- gold standard
Methodology
Econometrics -- Game Theory -- Mathematical economics

Related fields and topics:

Related fields
History of economic thought -- Political economy -- Political science -- Accounting -- Finance -- Operations research
Selected topics
Economists -- The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel -- Communism -- Capitalism -- Coordinatorism -- Market economy -- Informal economy -- Freiwirtschaft -- Synthetic economies -- Participatory economics -- Natural capitalism -- Stock exchange -- economic indicator -- Regulation -- Deregulation -- Privatization

 

Development of economic thought

Modern economic thought is usually said to have begun with Adam Smith in the late 18th century. For an overview of precursors to Smith as well as an overview of schools that have developed later, see history of economic thought. Modern mainstream economics is primarily a further refinement of neoclassical economics.

Macroeconomics began with Keynes in the 1930s. For an overview of a number of competing schools, see macroeconomics.

Many economists use a combination of Neoclassical microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics. This combination, sometimes known as the Neoclassical synthesis, was dominant in Western teaching and public policy in the years following World War II and up to the late 1970s.

In principle, economics can be applied to any type of economic organization. However, it developed historically in market societies, and its most detailed and precise work has dealt with the institutions belonging to them. To what extent economics must be adjusted to be applied to earlier forms of social organization has been the source of discussion. Generally, mainstream economists mostly feel that the basic framework of economics is relevant and flexible enough to be applied to virtually any form of society. Marxist economists, who were more influential a few decades ago, often feel that each era of history obeys its very own set of laws, and that contemporary economics can only be applied to industrialized societies.

 

Economics and political economy

The term economics was coined in around 1870, and popularised by influential neoclassical economists such as Alfred Marshall. Prior to this the subject had been known as political economy. This term is still often used instead of economics, especially by radical economists such as Marxists.

 

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Austrian School

 

The Austrian School is a school of economic thought founded in 1871 with the publication of Carl Menger's Principles of Economics, which helped start the Neoclassical Revolution in economics in the late nineteenth century. Austrian economics is currently closely associated with advocacy of radical laissez faire views. This was not always the case as the earlier Austrian economists were more cautious compared to later economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The early Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk said that he feared that unbridled free competition would lead to "anarchism in production and consumption." However the Austrian School, especially through the works of Friedrich Hayek would be influential in the free market revival of the 1980s.

Austrians view entrepreneurship as the driving force in economic development, see private property as essential to the efficient use of resources, and often see government interference in market processes as counterproductive. The school originated in Vienna and owes its name to members of the Historical School of economics who during the Methodenstreit, where the Austrians defended the reliance that classical economists derisively called it the "Austrian School" to emphasize its departure from mainstream German thought and to suggest a provincial approach.

Menger was closely followed by contributions from Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser. Austrian economists developed a sense of themselves as a school distinct from neoclassical economics during the economic calculation debate, with Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek representing the Austrian position. The school was no longer centered in Austria after Hitler came to power. Austrian economics was ill-thought of by most economists after World War II. Its reputation has lately risen with work by students of Israel Kirzner and Ludwig Lachmann, as well as an interest in Hayek after he won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Carl Menger was one of a group of economists founding neoclassical economics in the 1870s. Neoclassical economists reject classical cost of production theories, most famously the labor theory of value. Instead they explain value by subjective preferences of individuals. This psychological aspect to Menger's economics may be partly explained by the schools birth in turn of the century Vienna. Supply and demand are explained by aggregating over the decisions of individuals, following the precepts of methodological individualism and marginalist arguments, which compare the costs and benefits for incremental changes.

Contemporary neo-Austrian economists claim to adopt Economic subjectivism more consistently than any other school of economics and reject many neoclassical formalisms. For example, while neoclassical economics formalizes the economy as an equilibrium system, Austrian economists emphasize its dynamic, perpetually dis-equilibrated nature.

The Austrian economists were the first liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the Historical School. Though many Marxist authors have attempted to portray the Austrian school as a bourgeois reaction to Marx, such an interpretation is untenable: Menger wrote his Principles of Economics at almost the same time as Marx was completing Das Kapital. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes. Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists--including Rudolf Hilferding--attended his seminar in 1905-06. In contrast, the classical economists had shown little interest in such topics, and many of them did not even gain familiarity with Marx's ideas until well into the twentieth century.

Probably the most consistent and influential Austrian School body is the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

 

Some contributions of Austrian economists:

  • A theory of distribution in which factor prices result from the imputation of prices of consumer goods to goods of "higher order", that is goods used in the production of consumer goods, goods used in the production of those producers goods, etc.
  • An emphasis on opportunity cost and reservation demand in defining value, and a refusal to consider supply as an otherwise independent cause of value. (The British economist Philip Wicksteed adopted this perspective.)
  • An emphasis on the forward-looking nature of choice, seeing time as the root of uncertainty within economics (see also time preference).
  • A fundamental rejection of mathematical methods in economics seeing the function of economics as investigating the essences rather than the specific quantities of economic phenomena. This was seen as an evolutionary, or "genetic-causal", approach against the stresses of equilibrium and perfect competition found in mainstream Neoclassical economics.
  • Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's critique of Marx centered around the untenability of the labor theory of value in the light of the transformation problem. There was also the connected argument that capitalists do not exploit workers; they accommodate workers by providing them with income well in advance of the revenue from the output they helped to produce.

 

  • The Mises-Hayek business cycle theory which explains depression as a reaction to an intertemporal production structure fostered by monetary policy setting interest rates inconsistent with individual time preferences.
  • Hayek's concept of intertemporal equilibrium. (J. R. Hicks took over this theory in his discussion of temporary equilibrium in Value and Capital, a book very influential on the development of neoclassical economics after World War II.)
  • Stressing uncertainty in the making of economic decisions, rather than relying on "homo oeconomicus" or the rational man who was fully informed of all circumstances impinging on his decisions. The fact that perfect knowledge never exists, means that all economic activity implies risk.
  • Seeing the entrepreneurs' role as collecting and evaluating information and acting on risks.
  • The economic calculation debate between Austrian and Marxist economists, with the Austrians claiming that Marxism was doomed to fail because prices could not be set to recognise opportunity costs of factors of production, and so socialism could not calculate best uses in the same way capitalism does.

 

Major Austrian Economists

 

Other related economists

 

Contemporary Austrian Economists

 

Seminal Works

 

See also

 

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Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises (September 29, 1881 - October 10, 1973) was a notable economist and a major influence on the modern Libertarian movement. He was born in Austria-Hungary and subsequently taught at the University of Vienna in the years 1913 to 1934, while also serving as a principal economic adviser to the Austrian government.
Von Mises left Austria in 1934 due to the turmoil provoked by the Nazis rising to power; he first went to Geneva, and in 1940 to the United States, where he taught at New York University from 1945 to 1969. He is seen as one of the leaders of the Austrian school of economics - he wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of (classical) liberalism.
see also Economics

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 - April 29, 1951) was an Austrian and English philosopher who was mainly concerned with the meaning and limitations of language. In his life he only published one work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was very influential amongst the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, although Wittgenstein did not consider himself part of that school. The Tractatus was later heavily criticised by Wittgenstein himself, in the Blue and Brown Books and in the Philosophical Investigations, both published after his death. He studied under Bertrand Russell at Trinity College, Cambridge and later taught there.

 

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Life

He was born as Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein in Vienna. His paternal grandparents, after they had converted from Judaism to Protestantism, moved from Saxony in Germany to Vienna, where Ludwig's father, Karl Wittgenstein, gained wealth and esteem as one of the leading businessmen in the iron and steel industry of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ludwig's mother, Leopoldine (née Kalmus) was a Catholic, but her father was also of Jewish descent. Ludwig was baptized in a Catholic church (and when he died he would be given a Catholic burial although he never was a practicing nor a believing Catholic).

Ludwig grew up as the youngest of eight children in a family that provided an intellectually and artistically stimulating environment. Ludwig's parents were both very musical and all their children were both artistically and intellectually gifted. Moreover the Wittgenstein's house attracted many people of culture, especially musicians. The family was often visited by artists such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. All his life music would remain important to Ludwig and he used many musical examples in his philosophical writings. Another less fortunate inheritance would be his suicidal tendencies; three of his four brothers committed suicide. The other, Paul Wittgenstein, became a famous pianist.

Until 1903 Ludwig was educated at home; after that he began three years of schooling at the Realschule in Linz, a school emphasizing technical topics. Adolf Hitler was a student there at the same time, but there is no evidence that the two met. In 1906 Ludwig took up studying mechanical engineering in Berlin. In 1908 he went to the University of Manchester to study for his doctorate in engineering. For this purpose he registered as a research student in an engineering laboratory. There he did research on the behavior of kites in the upper atmosphere of the earth. From that he moved to aeronautical research on the design of a propeller with small jet engines on the end of its blades. He successfully designed and tested it.

For his research Wittgenstein needed to study more mathematics than he knew, and he became interested in the foundations of mathematics, especially after he had read Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics (the predecessor of Principia Mathematica).

He studied in Germany briefly under Gottlob Frege, arguably the greatest logician since Aristotle and who had in previous couple of decades laid the foundations of modern logic and logical mathematics. Frege urged him to read the work of Bertrand Russell, who had discovered certain crucial contradictions in Frege's own theories. In 1912 Wittgenstein went to the University of Cambridge and studied with Russell. He made a great impression on Russell and G. E. Moore and started to work on the foundations of logic and mathematical logic. In this period he had three big interests: philosophy, music and travelling.

In 1913, Wittgenstein inherited a great fortune when his father died. He donated some of it (initially anonymously) to Austrian artists and writers including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. In 1914 he would go to see Trakl when the latter wanted to meet his benefactor, but Trakl killed himself days before Wittgenstein arrived.

Because he felt that the discussions he had with other academics lacked depth, he retreated in 1913 to a life of solitude in a mountain cabin in Skjolden in Norway, so remote it could be reached only by horseback. This turned out to be a very productive period where he developed his ideas on logic and language that would provide the basis for the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and then only in German and in Wilhelm Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie. A year later it would be published as a book in a bilingual (English and German) edition under the Latin title, suggested by G. E. Moore, with perhaps a deliberate resemblance to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. It was translated by Frank Ramsey, himself only just out of his teens, and given an introduction by Russell. Of the original notebooks only the three remain that were published in 1961.

In prison Wittgenstein read Tolstoy's commentary on the gospels, and as a result when released in 1919 he gave away the family fortune that he had inherited when his father had died. Much of it he gave to his siblings, insisting they promise never to give it back. Giving money to the poor, he felt, could only corrupt them further; the rich would not be harmed by it.

The outbreak of World War I in the next year took him completely by surprise as he was living a secluded life at the time. He volunteered for the Austria-Hungarian Empire army, hoping that nearness of death would improve him. He first served on a ship and then in an artillery workshop. In 1916 he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front where he won several medals for bravery. The diary entries of this time reflect his contempt for the baseness of his fellow soldiers.

During the war Wittgenstein wrote his philosophical contemplations in his notebooks that he kept with him. At the end of the war in 1918 he was sent to north Italy in an artillery regiment, and there he became a prisoner of the Italians. When he was taken prisoner they found a ready manuscript of the Tractatus in his rucksack. He was allowed to send it (with help from John Maynard Keynes) from his prison camp in Italy to Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. Despite Russell's efforts it was not published until 1921.

Because in his own opinion Wittgenstein had now solved all the problems of philosophy, he returned to Austria and trained as a primary school teacher. He was educated in the methods of the Austrian School Reform Movement which advocated the stimulation of the natural curiosity of children and their development as independent thinkers, instead of just letting them memorize facts. Wittgenstein was enthusiastic about these ideas but ran into problems when he was appointed as a elementary teacher in a small village in rural Austria. Although the children seemed to appreciate him, he had a long series of disagreements with the children's parents and his colleagues. During this period Wittgenstein was very unhappy and came on a few occasions close to committing suicide. In 1925 he gave up his job as a teacher with the feeling that he had failed miserably as a primary school teacher.

After that he worked as a gardener's assistant in a monastery near Vienna. In the period 1926-28 he would work on the design and construction of a mansion house near Vienna for his sister Margaret ("Gretl") Stoneborough. At the end of this period Moritz Schlick brought him in contact with the Vienna Circle. He accepted the invitation but only on the precondition that they would not criticize any of his philosophical positions.

During this whole period that Wittgenstein was away from university he was not completely isolated from the study of the foundations of mathematics and philosophy. On several occasions he met Frank P. Ramsey who was making a special study of the Tractatus and had travelled several times from Cambridge to Austria to meet with Wittgenstein and also with philosophers of the Vienna circle. As Wittgenstein later admitted, these discussions showed him that there might be some "grave mistakes" in his work presented in the Tractatus.

In 1929 he decided, at the urging of Ramsey and others, to return to Cambridge. He was met at the train station by a crowd of England's greatest intellectuals, discovering rather to his horror that he was one of the most famed philosophers in the world.

Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge, as he did not have a degree, so he applied as an undergraduate (!). Russell noted that his previous residency was in fact sufficient for a doctoral degree, and urged him to offer the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis, which he did in 1929. It was examined by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defense, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." Moore commented in the examiner's report to the effect that: "In my opinion this is a work of genius; it is, in any case, up to the standards of a degree from Cambridge." Wittgenstein was appointed as a lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College.

Wittgenstein's political sympathies lay on the left, and while he was opposed to Marxist theory, he described himself as a "communist at heart" and romanticized the life of labourers. In 1934, attracted by Keynes' description Short View of Russia, he conceived the idea of emigrating to the Soviet Union with his close friend (or lover) Francis Skinner. They took lessons in Russian and in 1935 Wittgenstein traveled to Leningrad and Moscow in an attempt to secure employment. He was offered teaching positions but preferred manual work and returned three weeks later.

From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, leaving Skinner behind. He worked on the Philosophical Investigations. In the winter of 1936/37, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most of them about minor infractions, in an effort to cleanse himself.

After G. E. Moore's resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein, who was by then considered a philosophical genius, was appointed to the chair in Philosophy at Cambridge. He acquired the British citizenship soon afterwards.

After exhausting philosophical work, Wittgenstein would often relax by watching an American western or reading detective stories. These tastes are in stark contrast to his preferences in music, where he rejected anything after Brahms as a symptom of the decay of society.

By then, Wittgenstein's view on the foundations of mathematics had changed considerably. Earlier, he had thought that logic could provide a solid foundation, and he had even considered updating Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Now he denied that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and that mathematical statements were "true" in any real sense: they simply expressed the conventional established meanings of certain symbols; he also denied that a contradiction should count as a fatal flaw of a mathematical system. He gave a series of lectures which were attended by Alan Turing and in which the two argued vigorously about these matters.

During a period in World War II he left Cambridge and volunteered as a hospital porter in Guy's Hospital in London and as a laboratory assistant in the Royal Victoria Infirmary. He taught at Cambridge until 1947 when he resigned to concentrate on his writing. He never liked the intellectual's life at Cambridge, and in fact he encouraged several of his students to pursue non-academic careers.

Wittgenstein communicated with the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, who succeeded Wittgenstein as professor at the University of Cambridge.

Wittgenstein never married. Indeed he was an active homosexual who at times engaged in casual relationships as well as having longer relationships e.g., with David Pinsent with whom he spent time in Norway.

Much of Wittgenstein's later work was done in the rural isolation that was so much preferred by him, on the west coast of Ireland. By 1949, when he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer, he had written most of the material that would be published after his death as Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations) which arguably contains his most important work. The last two years of his life were spent by him working in Vienna, Oxford and Cambridge. His work from this period has been published as On Certainty. He died in Cambridge in 1951. His last words were "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

 

The Tractatus

The Tractatus could be fit with little difficulty into fifty pages. It consists of a series of numbered propositions, 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, etc., so that 1.1 is a comment on or elaboration of 1, 1.11 and 1.12 comment on 1.1, and so forth. There are seven "main" propositions; The first is "1. The world is everything that is the case" (also translated "...all that is the case." This is probably a significant ambiguity, since the former appears to define "world" and the latter appears to delimit what is (or could be) the case); the last, with no supplementary remarks is "7. What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence."

In rough order, the first half of the book sets forth the following theses: the world consists of independent atomic facts--existing states of affairs--out of which larger facts are built. Language consists in atomic, and then larger-scale, propositions that correspond to these facts by sharing the same "logical form." Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts. We can analyse our thoughts and sentences to express (*show*, not say) their true logical form; those we cannot so analyse are in a literal sense meaningless. Philosophy consists in no more than this form of analysis.

"Picture Theory of Language" "Logical Atomism" "Logical Analysis" "Ideal Language philosophy"

Under 4. and 5. and their subsidaries, Wittgenstein develops "truth tables," which are now the standard method of explaining semantics for sentential logic, and gives a rigorous if rather opaque account of formal logic generally, covering notation, Russell's paradox, and the notions of tautology and contradiction, and truth-functions. He moves increasingly into questions of language, connections with science, belief, and induction, giving a rather austere view of all these things ("Superstition is just belief in the causal nexus.")

In 6. he moves on to more philosophical reflections on logic, which connect to ideas of knowledge, thought, and the "a priori" and "transcendental." The final pages suggest logic and language can supply no meaning, and that since they perfectly reflect the world, neither can it. Ethics and aesthetics can say nothing. He begins talking of the will, life and death, and veers rather deliberately into strangely mystical remarks ("If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present," "The riddle does not exist") all the while increasingly hinting that his own project of trying to explain language is impossible for exactly these reasons. He compares the book to a ladder that must be thrown away after one has climbed it, then the book ends with 7.

See also: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

 

Intermediary Works

Between the Tractatus and his death Wittgenstein published only a single paper, "Remarks on Logical Form," and two very brief letters to a philosophical journal. The paper was to be read to the Aristotelian Society, where members would comment on it, but by that time he had repudiated it as worthless and insisted on talking about the concept of infinity instead. He also gave a lecture on ethics that was reprinted.

He wrote copiously, however, and arranged much of his writing into an array of incomplete manuscripts. Some thirty thousand pages existed at the time of his death. Much, but not nearly all of this has been sorted and released in several volumes.

The bulk of his work in the twenties and thirties involved attacking from various angles the sort of philosophical perfectionism embodied in the Tractatus.

 

The Philosophical Investigations

Published posthumously in 1953, Philosophical Investigations comprises two parts. Part I, consisting of 693 numbered paragraphs, which was ready for printing in 1946, but was rescinded from the publisher by Wittgenstein and Part II which was added on by the editors, trustees of his Nachlass.

In PI Wittgenstein presents an analysis of our use of language which he sees as crucial to the carrying out of philosophical research. In brief, Wittgenstein describes language as a set of language-games within which the words of our language function and receive their meaning. This view of meaning as use represents a break from the classical view (also presented by Wittgenstein in his earlier Tractatus) of meaning as representation.

 

Late Work

  • "On Certainty" - A collection of aphorisms discussing the relation between knowledge and certainty, extremely influential in the philosophy of action.
  • "Remarks on Colour"

 

Important Publications

  • Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14 (1921)
    • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C.K. Ogden (1922)
  • Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953)
    • Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe (1953)
  • Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, ed. by G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe (1956) (a selection from his writings on the philosophy of logic and mathematics between 1937 and 1944)
    • Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, rev. ed. (1978)
  • The Blue and Brown Books (1958) (Notes dictated in English to Cambridge students in 1933-35)
  • Philosophische Bemerkungen, ed. by Rush Rhees (1964)
    • Philosophical Remarks (1975)

 

Quotations

  • Proposition 6.54 from the Tractatus: "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as non-sensical.."..."-as steps-to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)"
  • "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" (proposition 7 and final sentence of the Tractatus). An alternative version sometimes quoted is "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent"; and the related paragraph from the introduction to the Tractatus:
  • "...the aim of this book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather- not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable..."

 

Other references

  • Ray Monk: Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, 1990. A biography that also attempts to explain his philosophy.
  • Norman Malcolm: 'Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir', 1958. A moving portrait by someone who knew Wittgenstein well.

 

External links



Homo economicus

Homo economicus, or Economic man, is a term used for an approximation of Homo sapiens that acts to obtain the highest possible well-being given available information about opportunities. This approach has been formalized in certain social science models, particularly in certain economic models.

As in social science in general, these assumptions are at best approximations. The term is often used derogatorily in academic literature, perhaps most commonly by sociologists, who tend to prefer structural explanations to ones based on rational action by individuals.

Homo economicus bases his choices only the consideration of his own personal "utility function". To the extent that this utility function does not consider the well-being of others, Homo economicus is selfish. Some believe such assumptions about humans are unethical. Economists tend to disagree, arguing that it may be relevant to analyze the consequences of enlightened egoism just as it may be worthwile to consider altruistic or social behavior.

How is Homo economicus rational? Usually in the sense that well-being as defined by the utility function is optimzed given perceived opportunities. See Rational Choice Theory and Rational expectations for further discussion; the article on Rationality widens the discussion.

The Austrian School criticise homo economicus as an actor for economic forecasting. They stress uncertainty in the making of economic decisions, rather than relying on the rational man who is fully informed of all circumstances impinging on his decisions. They argue that perfect knowledge never exists, means that all economic activity implies risk.

Although not typically used this way, Homo economicus could probably also be used, with some degree of felicity, to critique the characters of Ayn Rand.

Comparisons between economics and sociology have resulted in a corresponding term Homo sociologicus, to parody the image of human nature given in sociological models. Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman (1990, p. 44) say that homo sociologicus is largely a tabula rasa upon which societies and cultures write values and goals; unlike economicus, sociologicus acts not to pursue selfish interests but to fulfill social roles. Sociologicus may appear all society and no individual.
See also the discussion at Indifference curve.

 

References

    • Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman (1990). "Clean Models Versus Dirty Hands: Why Economics is Different From Sociology". pp. 39-56 in Zukin and DiMaggio (Eds.), Structures of Capital: The Social Organization of the Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External link


 

List of academic disciplines

An academic discipline is a branch of knowledge that is formally taught, either at the university, or via some other such method. Each division usually has several sub-divisions and distinguishing lines are often both arbitrary and ambiguous. Functionally, disciplines are usually defined and recognised by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies to which their practitioners belong.

List of academic disciplines

See also: list of science topics

 



Epistemology

 

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge and truth, encompassing the study of the origin, nature, and limits of human knowledge.

People approach epistemology in various ways; the following categories originally reflected divisions among schools of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but may prove useful in categorizing certain approximate trends throughout the history of epistemology:

(1) Rationalists believe there are innate ideas that are not found in experience. These ideas exist independently of any experience people may have. These ideas may in some way derive from the structure of the human mind, or they may exist independently of the mind. If they exist independently, they may be understood by a human mind once it reaches a necessary degree of sophistication.
(2) Empiricists (see: scientific method, philosophy of science naive empiricism) deny that there are concepts that exist prior to experience. For them, all knowledge is a product of human learning, based on human perception. Perception, however, may cause concern, since illusions, misunderstandings, and hallucinations prove that perception does not always depict the world as it really is.
Some say the existence of mathematical theorems poses a problem for empiricists. Mathematical truths certainly do not depend on experience, and they can be known prior to experience. Some empiricists reply that all mathematical theorems are empty of cognitive content, as they only express the relationship of concepts to one another. Rationalists would hold that such relationships are indeed a form of cognitive content.
(3) The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is widely understood as having worked out a synthesis between these views. In Kant's view people certainly do have knowledge that is prior to experience, which is not devoid of cognitive significance. For example, the principle of causality. He held that there are a priori synthetic concepts.

People in all schools of thought agree that people have the capacity to think of questions that no possible appeal to experience could answer. For instance: Is there an end to time? Is there a God? Is the God of the philosophers the same as the Biblical God? Is there a reality beyond that which we can sense? Such questions are termed transcendental, as they seem to go beyond the limits of rational inquiry. In the 20th century logical positivists have declared such questions to be totally devoid of cognitive significance. Others disagree, and hold that only some metaphysical claims are devoid of cognitive significance, and that others may not be.

No consensus exists as to which epistemology will prove the most productive in allowing human beings to have the most accurate understanding of the world. All people use an epistemology, even if unconsciously. Thinking beings cannot understand and analyze ideas without first having a system to accept and analyze information in the first place, which we all do. All people - even children - possess rudimentary and undeveloped epistemologies. However, those who study some philosophy and logic can begin to recognize how their own epistemologies work, and such people can choose to change their epistemology.

An analysis of this topic would be dependent on the system one used to begin with. One might wonder: What do I have to do, to be sure that I do have the truth? How can I be sure that my beliefs are true? Is there some sort of guarantee available to me -- some sort of criterion I might use, in order to decide, as rationally and as carefully as I possibly could, that indeed what I believe is actually true?

Suppose someone thought that his or her belief had been arrived at rationally. Using logic, one might base his or her belief on observation and experiment, conscientiously answer objections, and so forth. Accordingly, one would conclude that his or belief is rational. If so, then one's belief has at least some claim to be true. Rationality provides an indicator of truth: if your belief is rational, then it is at least probably true. At the very least, the rationality of a belief gives reason to think the belief is true.

There are a number of features of beliefs, such as rationality, justification, and probability, that are indicators of truth. Accordingly, a feature of belief is an epistemic feature if it is at least some indication that the belief is true.

Many beliefs have lots of positive epistemic features; many beliefs are quite rational, quite justified, very probably true, highly warranted, and so on. However, most people, at least in some moments, do not want to rest content with just being rational because even a rational belief can be false. To wit, one can be very conscious, careful, and logical in forming a belief, and so be rational in holding the belief; but it still might be false. Arguably, one's ultimate ambition for his or her beliefs is knowledge. If one does know something, then not only is one justified, or rational, in a belief, one has the truth. Accordingly, when one is thinking about the epistemic features of one's beliefs, the overarching question is: When does someone have knowledge? When can someone say that he or she has knowledge? Skeptics claim that we cannot have knowledge.

Epistemology includes the study of:

  1. the epistemic features of belief, such as justification and rationality;
  2. the origin or sources of such features (and thus the sources of knowledge);
  3. what knowledge is, i.e., what epistemic features would make a true belief knowledge;
  4. whether it is possible to have knowledge.

Epistemologists spend a great deal of time concerning themselves with various epistemic features of belief, such as justification and rationality. And they write long articles and books trying to say just when beliefs are justified, or rational. A related concern is where such epistemic features ultimately come from. If one says, for example, that his or her belief that Paris is the capital of France is justified, one can ask: Where did the justification for that belief come from? This information could have come from a reliable source of testimony. Another source of justification would be sense-perception. So epistemology asks: What are the ultimate sources of justification, rationality, or other epistemic features of belief? And that allows one to answer a further question: What are the ultimate sources of knowledge? Which brings one to the question of what knowledge is. The question here is not what one can know, or even what one does know. The question is: What would knowledge be, if one had it? A belief has to pass some sort of muster to count as knowledge. So what features would a belief have to have, in order to be an actual piece of knowledge -- not just something that pretends to be knowledge, but which is actually knowledge?

One of the more difficult topics of philosophy is trying to answer, or otherwise deal with, the challenge that one cannot have knowledge. A number of philosophers -- not too many, but some -- have said that we cannot have knowledge. Many philosophers have said that it is very difficult to obtain knowledge, but they usually do not deny that we have it or that we can have it. Not so many philosophers, however, have gone so far as to say that we have no knowledge at all, or (to say something even stronger) that it is impossible to have knowledge.

Another contemporary approach to epistemology divides the approaches into two categories: foundationalism and coherentism.

Foundationalism holds that there are basic beliefs in which you can be certain and that you can be similarly confident in other beliefs derived rigorously from these. The most famous example of this is Descartes' statement cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am"), by which he meant that it is impossible to doubt one's own existence. Others have responded that a person's observation of his or her own mental activity is not fundamentally different or more reliable than other observations and does not necessarily imply a thinker. The difficulty of foundationalism is that no set of basic beliefs proposed for it are uncontroversial.

Coherentism holds that you are more justified in beliefs if they form a coherent whole with your other beliefs. A common, cheeky, riposte to this is called the "drunken sailors" argument, which points out that two drunken sailors holding each other up may still not be on solid ground. Stated more formally: a set of beliefs can be internally consistent but still not reflect the actual world.

Recently, Susan Haack has attempted to fuse these two approaches into her doctrine of Foundherentalism, which accrues degrees of relative confidence to beliefs by mediating between the two approaches. She covers this in her book Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology.

See also: Self-evidence, theory of justification, the regress argument in epistemology, a priori and a posterior knowledge, knowledge, scepticism, Common sense and the Diallelus, social epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy, ontology, reason, philosophy of science, science education.

 

External links



Naive empiricism

(Redirected from Naive Empiricism)

Naive Empiricism is a philosophy about how one should best approach science. It is an attempt to explain what types of actions are acceptable in science and the best way to use science to our advantage. Naive Empiricism refers to the belief that scientist should try to be as objective and neutral as possible when studying something. Scientists should approach a problem with no preconceived expectations or assumptions which have not been previously studied and justified using the scientific method. Naive empiricism stresses the importance of relying on empirical observations about the world and not our interpretations of those observations.

There are many arguments for and against naive empiricism. Someone who subscribes to the philosophy may tell you that the goal of science is to uncover truth but that this cannot be accomplished when scientist's methods and interpretations are biased. Assumption causes scientists to arrive at some particular conclusion, which is justified by the experiment but still predetermined. Such conclusions cannot be said to be true becase assumption limits which possibilities are examined.

Naive Empiricism has been around for a very long time, and many arguments against the philosophy have developed. The rationale behind many of these arguments is that one must make some assumptions before any progress in study can be made. Assumptions don't have to be misleading or unfounded, but in order to study anything we must either make assumptions of some kind. If no such assumptions are made then science is limited to empirical observations which tell us little about how the world works. An entertaining work of fiction by a respected essayist, Jorge Luis Borges, Funes, the Memorious illustrates this position.

Also see: Epistemology

External links

  • Funes, the Memorious was first published in Ficciones by Luis Borges and is available online.

 


 

Logical positivism

Logical positivism (sometimes referred to as logical empiricism), was one of the early manifestations of analytic philosophy. It was the philosophical position of the Vienna Circle in its early years, and gained recognition in the English speaking world through the work of A. J. Ayer. The term subsequently came to be almost interchangeable with "analytic philosophy" in the first half of the twentieth century. Logical Positivism was immensely influential in philosophy of science, logic, and philosophy of language. Even though few of its tenets are still agreed with, its role as in forming contemporary philosophy should not be underestimated; many subsequent commentators on "logical positivism" tend to attribute to it more of a singular purpose and creed than it in fact adhered to, overlooking the complex disagreements among the logical positivists themselves.

Logical positivism took up the projects of Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein (who, along with Albert Einstein, were held up by the circle as the paragons of modern science and philosophy). The movement held that philosophy should aspire to the same sort of rigor as science. This meant it should be able to provide strict criteria for judging sentences true, false and meaningless. The claim most characteristic of logical positivism asserts that statements are meaningful only insofar as they are verifiable, and that statements can be verified only in two (exclusive) ways: empirical statements, including scientific theories, were verified by experiment and evidence. Analytic truth statements are true or false by definition, and so are also meaningful. Everything else, including ethics and aesthetics, was not literally meaningful, and so belonged to "metaphysics." Serious philosophy, the Vienna Circle argued (in agreement with David Hume), should no longer concern itself with metaphysics.

Under this view, statements about God, good and evil, and beauty are neither true nor false, and thus should not be taken seriously. Positivism was the dominant theory of the philosophy of science between World War I and the Cold War.

 

Table of contents [hide]
1 Further reading

Criticisms

Critics of Logical Positivism says that its fundamental tenets could not themselves be formulated in a way that was clearly consistent. The verifiability criterion did not seem verifiable; but neither was it simply a logical tautology, since it had implications for the practice of science and the empirical truth of other statements. This presented severe problems for the logical consistency of the theory. Another problem was that, while positive existential claims (There is at least one human being) and negative universals (Not all ravens are black) allow for clear methods of verification (find a human or a non-black raven), negative existential claims and positive universal claims do not.

Universal claims could apparently never be verified: How can you tell that all ravens are black, unless you've hunted down every raven ever, including those in the past and future? This led to a great deal of work on induction, probability, and "confirmation," (which combined verification and falsification; see below).

Karl Popper, a wellknown critic of Logical Positivism, published a book Logik der Forschung in 1934, presented an influential alternative to the verification theory of meaning, explaining scientific statements in terms of falsifiability. First, though, Popper's concern was not with distinguishing meaningful from metaphysical (meaningless) statements, but distinguishing science from pseudo-science. He did not hold that metaphysical statements must be meaningless; in some cases, such as Marxism, he held that they were meaningful and had been falsified. In others, such as psychoanalysis, he held that they offered no method for falsification, and so were not science. He was, in general, more concerned with scientific practice than with the logical issues that troubled the positivists. Second, although Popper's philosophy of science enjoyed great popularity for some years, if his criterion is construed as an answer to the question the positivists were asking it turns out to fail in exactly parallel ways. Negative existential claims (There are no unicorns) and positive universals (All ravens are black) can be falsified, but positive existential and negative universal claims cannot.

Logical positivists' response to the first criticism is that Logicial Positivism, like all other philosophies of science, is a philosophy of science, not an axiomatic system that can prove its own consistency. (see Gödel's incompleteness theorem) Secondly, a theory of language and mathematical logic was created to answer what it really means to say things like "all ravens are black".

Subsequent philosophy of science tends to make use of the better aspects of both of these approaches. Work by W. V. Quine and T. S. Kuhn has convinced many that it is not possible to provide a strict criterion for good or bad scientific method outside of the science we already have. But even this sentiment was not unknown to the logical positivists: Otto Neurath famously compared science to a boat which we must rebuild on the open sea.

 

Logik der Forschung in 1934. http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/logical-positivism.html

Further reading

 

Books

 

External link



 

Moral relativism

.

Moral relativism is the viewpoint that moral standards are not absolute, but instead emerge from social customs and other sources. The philosophical stance can be traced back at least as far as the Greek scholar Protagoras, who stated that "Man is the measure of all things;" a modern interpretation of this statement might be that things exist only in the context of the people who observe them.

Moral relativism stands in contrast to moral absolutism, which sees morals as fixed by an absolute human nature (John Rawls), or external sources such as deities (many religions) or the universe itself (as in Objectivism). Those who believe in moral absolutes often are highly critical of moral relativism; some have been known to equate it with outright immorality or amorality.

Moral relativism has sometimes been placed in contrast to ethnocentrism. Essentially, the claim is that judging members of one society by the moral standards of another is a form of ethnocentrism; some moral relativists claim that people can only be judged by the mores of their own society. (This is analogous to the stance often taken by historians, in that historical figures cannot be judged by modern standards, but only in the context of their time.) Other moral relativists argue that, as moral codes differ among societies, one can only utilize the "common ground" to judge moral matters between societies.

One consequence of this viewpoint, also known as cultural relativism, is the principle that any judgment of society as a whole is invalid: individuals are judged against the standards of their society; societies themselves have no larger context in which judgement is even meaningful. This is a source of conflict between moral relativists and moral absolutists, since a moral absolutist would argue that society as a whole can be judged for its acceptance of "immoral" practices, such as slavery. Such judgments are inconsistent with relativism, although in practice relativists often make such judgments anyway (for example, a relativist is unlikely to defend slave-owners on relativistic principles).

Another view point is the individual viewpoint, also known as emotivism, where people judge morality based on ones emotions and feelings. Universism further argues that only those individuals causing or directly affected by an action can make any judgment about the action's ultimate rightness or wrongness. Those judgments can be made on the basis of reason, experience and emotion.

The philosopher David Hume suggests principles similar to those of moral relativism in an appendix to his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).

See also: morality, ethics, Situational ethics.

 

References and external links

 


 

Structuralism

The term structuralism is used in many contexts in different disciplines in the 20th century. Structuralism proposes the idea that many phenomena do not occur in isolation, but instead occur in relation to each other, and that all related phenomena are part of a whole with a definite, but not necessarily defined, structure. Structuralists, in any area of knowledge, attempt to perceive that structure and the changes that it may undergo with the goal of furthering the development of that system of phenomena or ideas.

In film and literary theory and criticism, the term refers to a line of thought stemming from the structural linguistics usually identified with Ferdinand de Saussure. The generalization of linguistic models by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss inspired others to apply their versions of structuralist ideas to a wide range of subjects. Thus, Levi-Strauss' views affected the social sciences from the 1960s and onward.

As with any cultural movement, the influences and developments are complex; other linguists besides Saussure were important. Roman Jakobson, in particular, worked on specifically literary problems long before structuralism became a general trend. For a description of structuralist principles, Levi-Strauss is an adequate representative of the approach; trained in both philosophy and social science, he states his views methodically.

Also, other major figures in structuralism have written a good deal of work in which other influences dominate. Both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have been called both structuralists and post-structuralists. Louis Althusser's chief concern was to enlarge Marxist theory. In America, the work of Leonard Bloomfield, who was inspired by Saussure, represents a more specific sense of structuralism, which is now thought to be too restrictive. In the fifties, Noam Chomsky rigorously criticized many aspects of structuralism, while at the same time he contributed to it as it is perceived today.

(But Levi-Strauss was an anthropologist, a point to remember in searches for further information. He uses certain terms, including "structuralism," in the way his field uses them, even though they have other meanings elsewhere. He repeatedly contrasts structural anthropology with the work of "functionalists" while relying on two linguistic authorities, Roman Jakobson and Nicolas Troubetzkoy, who are functionalists as far as many linguists are concerned. Indeed, the purpose of calling them functionalists, along with other members of the Prague School, is to distinguish their work from the structural linguistics of Saussure. Even more confusingly, the Prague School is occasionally referred to as "functional-structuralist", while there is a well-known position in the social sciences, deriving from Talcott Parsons, which is sometimes called "structural functionalism." A Google search on any of these terms can be exasperating.)

 

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Structuralism in Linguistics

Structural linguists make the influential argument that the elements of a language have no intrinsic character. They take on a character only in relation to each other.

For example, human beings can make a certain range of noises, but the sound of "m" is not really the sound of "m" outside of a language that uses an "m." Within that language, a certain range of noises gets classified together as equivalent versions of the "m" sound, and there is no useful way to describe this classification except by referring to the language. The boundaries are imprecise--people who hear an "m" are not measuring waveforms and rejecting the ones beyond a certain cutoff point. Furthermore, there is change through time, local variation, and a good deal of overlap between the range of noises that can be classified as "m" and those that can be classified as something else. If there is an "m" sound that exists in the language, it must be thought of as something persisting through the welter of possible variations.

The phoneme has some essential character, apart from all its manifestations. Furthermore, the language defines this essential character partly by differentiating it from other phonemes. What makes an "m" is partly its distinction from "n." But what makes an "n" is partly its distinction from "m."

Continuing this line of analysis, it must be the case that the ?m? sound in one language is not the same as the ?m? sound in another, even if the same range of vocal noise is classified as ?m? in each. The classification is being made by contrasts within two different systems.

Saussure believed that the meanings expressed in a language were determined by an analogous system of differences.

This way of thinking has several obvious characteristics.

It defines the boundaries of a language by reference to its internal structure.

It portrays the workings of a language solely in terms of the internal structure, rather than seeking a set of causes, functions, or patterns that could underlie several different structures. If generalized from phonetics to meaning, the approach obviously raises the possibility that what's expressed in one language cannot be expressed in any other.

Most pervasively, it depends on a notion of purely abstract structure underlying all the particular manifestations of a language. Language is not the sound, it is the classification of sounds; it is not the question, it is the comparison with other sentence types that define what a question is; it is not the idea, it is the set of underlying distinctions that make the idea possible.

This idealism, if that is the term, has a somewhat surprising result. Sign and meaning tend to merge. A word means just what it means in the language that uses it, and only that word expresses it.

So, implicitly, languages are not translatable into each other. This is a possibility taken up by deconstructionism.

 

Structuralism in Psychology

In psychology, structuralism refers mainly to the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B. Titchener, who investigated the mind by directing subjects to introspect and recording the subjects' reports.

 

Structuralism in General Human Culture

Levi-Strauss extends this form of linguistic analysis to all human culture. But he assumes that there is a knowable structure underlying all actions. All the operations of human consciousness and action are built on simple contrasts-the raw and the cooked, the wet and the dry, and so forth. In his view, these contrasts are changeless and universal.

In this respect, he is extending another aspect of linguistic research, the search for a universal grammar. Cultures cannot be explained without some reference to universals, located in a fundamental structure of the human mind, which must necessarily be expressed in every human act.

One implication of this view is that the same structures will operate in both the actions being studied and the scholar's interpretation of them. Freud may completely misread a folktale's meaning, in the sense of giving a bad description of the psychological tensions that its tellers had in them to express. But his response to the tale nevertheless arises from the same basis as theirs. It is at least relevant to a good description of what the tale means. Levi-Strauss explored this sort of ambiguity in his later MYTHOLOGIES.

Now, a brief illustration of structuralist analysis. In 1977, Levi-Strauss recorded an informal series of talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, presenting his views in layman's terms. The talks were published in 1979 as MYTH AND MEANING. At one point, Levi-Strauss commented on the puzzling recurrence of a musical theme in Wagner's Ring Cycle. The analysis is a good example because it is quick and entirely verbal (where thorough structural presentation often requires charts and tables and ad hoc borrowings of algebraic notation).

In the Rheingold, the character Alberich renounces all human love in order to receive a treasure of gold, and the theme is played. Later his wealth allows him to seduce a woman who later bears his son.

The theme is played again in the Valkyrie at a puzzling moment. Siegmund embarks on an incestuous relationship with his sister, after extracting a sword that is embedded in a tree. The scene is unlike the first one--instead of renouncing love, a man is embarking on it. His sister will later give birth to Siegfried.

The music plays again later in the Valkyrie as the king of the gods consigns his daughter Brunhilde to an enchanted sleep in a ring of fire.

What Levi-Strauss notices is that in each scene there is a protected or obstructed treasure-- the gold at the bottom of the Rhine, the sword held in a tree, the woman held in a ring of fire. The repetition of the music responds to this similarity.

In fact, says Levi-Strauss, the three objects merge. The gold is a way to a position of power which eventuates in a son, the extraction of the sword opens the way to a sexual conquest that also produces a son, and each of the sons will eventually possess Brunhilde, the woman in the fire. And she, of all the characters in this multi-generational story, will in the end return the gold to the river.

Thus, by considering a structural element common to three situations, Levi-Strauss finds a sense in which the situations are related, outside the cause-and-effect of plot. This analysis has two properties characteristic of structuralism. The structuralist comparison runs somewhat at odds with the plot sense of the scenes--the same music occurs at a moment of renunciation and a moment of love. And the analysis allows a certain shifting of use or meaning among the analogous elements. The gold and the sword are buried treasures that become instruments of conquest, while the woman is more like the object of conquest, and the music is linked to her in a scene where she the treasure is being confined rather than extracted. She returns the gold to the Rhine partly because she is identified with it, but in this action the nature of the identification becomes ambiguous--does she return the gold, or is the gold acting through her?

Now, these meanings are simple, used only to illustrate method. An opera lover might perceive them (or correct them) without any set critical approach.

Where structuralism becomes useful is in organizing large bodies of material, such as the kinship systems that Levi-Strauss initially studied or the mythologies that occupied him later. Applied to criticism, it takes the form of considering many texts, many films.

 

Outlook

To be blunt, this approach strains the abilities of many writers. It requires a meticulous examination of the material, and its ambition is to find the patterns that underlie just about everything. So its use as a general outlook on art and society is somewhat questionable, compared to the influential work it has produced in specialized fields. In Hellenistic studies, for example, the understanding of the myths and rites of sacrifice requires a grasp of the basic oppositions that generate all Hellenistic ideas of sacrifice: god vs. man, animal vs. man, heaven vs. earth. But one must also understand how the myrrh tree, which produces a perfume used in some rites, is defined in an entire body of knowledge about plants. Myrrh was also used as a sexual perfume, so the relation of the plant world to marriage customs is part of the same story.

For the essayist at large, structuralist methods can blend easily into the practice of attending only to the facts that support a preconception. The persistent criticism of structuralist work has been just that. Historical influences, local meanings, plot structure and other conscious work--in a word, context--provide one way of interpreting the details of a text. When structural analysis is not carried through methodically, specific interpretations can be dismissed with nothing to replace them but arbitrary claims.

Several aspects of structuralism open the way for the revision known as deconstruction. As mentioned, the Saussurean linguistic theory strongly implies that meanings cannot be translated. If the original author and the commentator are playing variations on the same structure whether the interpretation can be judged right or not, then variations may be seen as having value in themselves. And if the Western tradition of historical and critical thinking only exists within a framework of continuing mythical thought, then attention may turn to exposing how this framework is concealed.

 



Deconstruction

(Redirected from Deconstructionism)

In Continental philosophy and literary criticism, deconstruction is a post-structuralist philosophical and literary method (or, some would say, event) first characterized by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. More broadly, it is the critical reading of texts in a manner similar to Derrida's. Many whose writings may be considered deconstructive resist the use of the word deconstructionism, along with related "-ist" and "-istic" forms, because they do not consider deconstruction properly to be a movement or constituency, but rather a textual occurrence. (A few have advocated the word deconstructor.) Popularly, however, deconstruction is widely considered to be a liberal Western academic movement, and the main philosophical pillar of postmodernism.

 

The meaning of "deconstruction"

The word deconstruction has been used by Jacques Derrida and others, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, and J. Hillis Miller, to describe an event in which they participated. However, these writers have actively resisted a precise and succinct definition of the word. While Derrida was the first to use the word in this philosophical and linguistic sense, he states, "I little thought it would be credited with such a central role in the discourse that interested me at the time." See Derrida, Jacques, "Letter to A Japanese Friend," Derrida and Differance, ed. David Wood & Robert Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia Press 1985, p. 1. According to Derrida, deconstruction is neither an analysis, a critique, a method, an act, or an operation. See id. , p. 3. As to the question of what deconstruction is, Derrida stated, "I have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question. See id. , p. 4.

Similarly, there are hundreds of pages devoted to the issue of what deconstruction is, and thousands of pages in which deconstruction occurs. Most of these texts are difficult reading, and resistant to summary. The writing's difficulty and idiosyncratic style is claimed by sympathetic readers to be essential to a proper treatment of its subject (but many unsympathetic readers have called it everything from obscurantism to outright nonsense).

Deconstruction is not, properly speaking, a synonym for "destruction." Rather, according to Barbara Johnson,

[Deconstruction] is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo"--a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself." See Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (1981).

Deconstruction's central concern is a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a "metaphysics of presence" (also known as logocentrism or sometimes phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction.

An early translator of Derrida (the philosopher David B. Allison) explained the term "deconstruction" as follows:

It signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and "take apart" those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. "Deconstruction" is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms "destruction" or "reversal"; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple "overcoming" of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics. (Introduction to Speech and Phenomena, p. xxxii, n. 1)

Another explanation of deconstruction is by Paul de Man, who explained, "It's possible, within text, to frame a question or to undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements." See de Man's reply to a request for a definition of "deconstruction" in Robert Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 156. Thus, viewed in this way, "the term 'deconstruction', refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message." See Richard Rorty, "From Formalism to Poststructuralism", in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol.8, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

 

Différance

Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings an idea called différance. This French neologism is, on the deconstructive argument, properly neither a word nor a concept; it names the non-coincidence of meaning both synchronically (one French homonym means "differing") and diachronically (another French homonym means "deferring"). Because the resonance and conflict between these two French meanings is difficult to convey tersely in English, the word différance is usually left untranslated.

In simple terms, this means that rather than privileging commonality and simplicity and seeking unifying principles (or grand teleological narratives, or overarching concepts, etc.) deconstruction empasizes difference, complexity, and non-self-identity. A deconstructive reading of a text, or a deconstructive interpretation of philosophy (for deconstruction tends to elide any difference between the two), often seeks to demonstrate how a seemingly unitary idea or concept contains different or opposing meanings within itself. The elision of difference in philosophical concepts is even referred to in deconstruction as a kind of violence, the idea being that theory's willful misdescription or simplification of reality always does violence to the true richness and complexity of the world. This criticism can be taken as a rejection of the philosophical law of the excluded middle, arguing that the simple oppositions of Aristotelian logic force a false appearance of simplicity onto a recalcitrant world.

 

Binary oppositions

One typical procedure of deconstruction is its critique of binary oppositions. A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged over the other. Examples include:

  • speech over writing
  • presence over absence
  • identity over difference
  • fullness over emptiness
  • meaning over meaninglessness
  • mastery over submission
  • life over death

Derrida argues in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) that, in each such case, the first term is classically conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." These binary oppositions, and others of their form, he argues, must be deconstructed.

This deconstruction is effected in stages. First, Derrida suggests, the opposition must be inverted, and the second, traditionally subordinate term must be privileged. He argues that these oppositions cannot be simply transcended; given the thousands of years of philosophical history behind them, it would be disingenuous to attempt to move directly to a domain of thought beyond these distinctions. So deconstruction attempts to compensate for these historical power imbalances, undertaking the difficult project of thinking through the philosophical implications of reversing them.

Only after this task is undertaken (if not completed, which may be impossible), Derrida argues, can philosophy begin to conceive a conceptual terrain outside these oppositions: the next project of deconstruction would be to develop concepts which fall under neither one term of these oppositions nor the other. Much of the philosophical work of deconstruction has been devoted to developing such ideas and their implications, of which différance may be the prototype (as it denotes neither simple identity nor simple difference). Derrida spoke in an interview (first published in French in 1967) about such "concepts," which he called merely "marks" in order to distinguish them from proper philosophical concepts:

...[I]t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics. (Positions, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 42-43)

As can be seen in this discussion of its terms' undecidable, unresolvable complexity, deconstruction requires a high level of comfort with suspended, deferred decision; a deconstructive thinker must be willing to work with terms whose precise meaning has not been, and perhaps cannot be, established. (This is often given as a major reason for the difficult writing style of deconstructive texts.) Critics of deconstruction find this unacceptable as philosophy; many feel that, by working in this manner with unspecified terms, deconstruction ignores the primary task of philosophy, which they say is the creation and elucidation of concepts. This deep criticism is a result of a fundamental difference of opinion about the nature of philosophy, and is unlikely to be resolved simply.

 

An illustration: Derrida's reading of Lévi-Strauss

A more concrete example, drawn from one of Derrida's most famous works, may help to clarify the typical manner in which deconstruction works.

Structuralist analysis generally relies on the search for underlying binary oppositions as an explanatory device. The structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that such oppositions are found in all cultures, not only in Western culture, and thus that the device of binary opposition was fundamental to meaning.

Deconstruction challenges the explanatory value of these oppositions. This method has three steps. The first step is to reveal an asymmetry in the binary opposition, suggesting an implied hierarchy. The second step is to reverse the hierarchy. The third step is to displace one of the terms of the opposition, often in the form of a new and expanded definition.

In his book Of Grammatology, Derrida offers one example of deconstruction applied to a theory of Lévi-Strauss. Following many other Western thinkers, Lévi-Strauss distinguished between "savage" societies lacking writing and "civilized" societies that have writing. This distinction implies that human beings developed verbal communication (speech) before some human cultures developed writing, and that speech is thus conceptually as well as chronologically prior to writing (thus speech would be more authentic, closer to truth and meaning, and more immediate than writing).

Although the development of writing is generally considered to be an advance, after an encounter with the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss suggested that societies without writing were also lacking violence and domination (in other words, savages are truly noble savages). He further argued that the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery (or social inequality, exploitation, and domination in general). (This claim has been rejected by most later historians and anthropologists as incorrect. There is abundant historical evidence that both hunter-gatherer societies and later non-literate tribes had significant amounts of violence and warfare in their cultures.)

Derrida's interpretation begins with taking Lévi-Strauss's discussion of writing at its word: what is important in writing for Lévi-Strauss is not the use of markings on a piece of paper to communicate information, but rather their use in domination and violence. Derrida further observes that, based on Lévi-Strauss's own ethnography, the Nambikwara really do use language for domination and violence. Derrida thus concludes that writing, in fact, is prior to speech. That is, he reverses the opposition between speech and writing.

Derrida was not making fun of Lévi-Strauss, nor did he mean to supersede, replace, or proclaim himself superior to Lévi-Strauss. (A common theme of deconstruction is the desire to be critical without assuming a posture of superiority.) He was using his deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss to question a common belief in Western culture, dating back at least to Plato: that speech is prior to, more authentic than, and closer to "true meaning" than writing.

 

Criticisms of deconstruction

As a rule, deconstructive writing tends to be rather inaccessible and eccentric, containing word-play, playful interpretations of texts, and other features that invite criticism. Judged on the basis of more orthodox Western thought, these writings may appear irrelevant and incoherent. For example, Derrida used punning on the name of a poet as a way to explore the meaning of a poem.

The practices of deconstructive writers have been disputed and criticized by many historians, linguists, and literary scholars. For example:

  • Deconstructionists have deconstructed the idea that each text has a "truth" corresponding to what the author intended to say. In response, critics argue that as a matter of practice most authors do have specific objective intentions, and the authors themselves may agree that readers are able to accurately understand their intentions. There is no reason, they argue, to suspect that an author is lying when she states that her text is understood properly. In response, deconstructionists defend this position by saying that an author's claims "participate in the same condition of textuality" in which the "works" in question are enmeshed. In other words, text can be thought of as "dead," and what an author says about her text doesn't revive it, and is just another text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of others. In this view, when an author says, "You have understood my work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the textual system, along with what the reader said she understood about the original text, and not a resuscitation of the original dead text. Most philosophers, literary critics, scientists and historians would not agree with this view.
  • No one can know anything about the true nature of reality. Some deconstructionists have deconstructed the idea that there is a privileged, objective reality "out there", arguing instead that reality is a social construct as defined by text. This view is often rejected as a disguised version of solipsism. Deconstructionists hold that this view is justified; they claim that deconstruction questions the very notion that meaning can be fixed by reference to a source or principle within the mind. Most philosophers, literary critics, scientists and historians would not agree with this view.
  • No claim of knowledge is privileged; no method of learning provides authoritative information. This deconstructionist belief is rejected on its face; the articles on Knowledge, science and history give explanations of why most people believe that there are reliable ways of learning information. Many deconstructionists defend this position; they hold as a belief that all information or knowledge, no matter how thoroughly tested and confirmed, is only available within a discursive system, that is, within textuality. Most philosophers, literary critics, scientists and historians would not agree with this view.
  • Deconstruction is seen by many as means of academic empire-building; it is seen as a vain attempt to make literary analysis of texts become as important as the texts themselves. For example, many deconstructionist writers treat their own essays on science, like Quantum Mechanics, and on philosophy, like Aristotle, as just as important as the disciplines of science and philosophy themselves. Thus, many critics consider this to be arrogant.
  • A central concept of deconstructionism is that language has no inherent meaning. Critics counter that if this were true, then how could anyone ever agree with deconstructive writers? How could deconstructionist writers themselves disagree with others? In response, deconstructionists argue that the meaning of sentences does not derive from an absolute realm of ideas to which words can refer unproblematically. They believe that language, and all books, have no fixed and stable meaning. However, deconstructive writers are willing to deconstruct unstable language using other unstable language.
  • Many deconstructionists claim that their writings should be classified as philosophy. However, most philosophers find deconstructionist writings to be more similar to wordplay, or book reviews, and devoid of actual philosophical content. Critics hold that most deconstructionist writings relies on terms whose conceptual status and definition are unclear, and often contradictory. Deconstructive writers consider philosophy to be much the same as wordplay, and are happy to point out, and even use, philosophical unclarity and contradiction, in the course of their deconstruction of philosophy.
  • Critics argue that deconstruction's rejection of teleology renders accounts of historical progress (and indeed the entire philosophy of history) considerably more difficult to sustain, leading some to reject it on political grounds. (The relation between deconstruction and Marxism, Marxist theory, and Marxist philosophy is particularly complex and fraught with numerous disagreements and attempted reconciliations.)

A common rebuttal to all deconstructionist dogma is that deconstructionists effectively claim a privileged position for their own writings. They write letters and books which expect that readers understand their own intent, yet deny that this is possible for anyone else. MIT Linguist Noam Chomsky has written a strong refutation of deconstructionism and related philosophies.

 

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Noam Chomsky on Rationality/Science - From Z Papers Special Issue

 

History of deconstruction

During the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers influenced by deconstruction, including Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, worked at Yale University. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism, as de Man, Miller, and Hartman were all primarily literary critics. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the University of California Irvine.

(More detailed institutional history could be added here.)

 

Precursors

Deconstruction has significant ties with much of Western philosophy; even considering only Derrida's work, there are existing deconstructive texts about the works of at least many dozens of important philosophers. However, deconstruction emerged from a clearly delineated philosophical context:

  • Derrida's earliest work, including the texts that introduced the term "deconstruction," dealt with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Derrida's first publication was a book-length Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomena, an early work, dealt largely with phenomenology.
  • A student and prior interpreter of Husserl's, Martin Heidegger, was one of the most significant influences on Derrida's thought: Derrida's Of Spirit deals directly with Heidegger, but Heidegger's influence on deconstruction is much broader than that one volume.
  • The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud is an important reference for much of deconstruction: The Post Card, important essays in Writing and Difference, Archive Fever, and many other deconstructive works deal primarily with Freud.
  • The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is a forerunner of deconstruction in form and substance, as Derrida writes in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles.
  • The structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, and other forms of post-structuralism that evolved contemporaneously with deconstruction (such as the work of Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, etc.), were the immediate intellectual climate for the formation of deconstruction. In many cases, these authors were close friends, colleagues, or correspondents of Derrida's.

References

See also: Jacques Derrida -- Paul de Man -- Jean Baudrillard -- Jean-François Lyotard -- Judith Butler -- Yale school (deconstruction) -- structuralism -- Post-structuralism -- Cultural movement -- Post-modernism -- Continental philosophy -- feminism -- feminist theory -- Queer theory -- literary theory -- literary criticism -- psychoanalysis -- phenomenology

See also: Deconstructivism or Deconstruction, an architectural movement inspired by Deconstruction.

 

External links

 

Books and articles

  • Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1973.
    • Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1981.
    • Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
  • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction.
  • Ellis, John M. (1989). Against Deconstruction Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06754-6




Critical theory

.

Critical theory, in sociology and philosophy, is shorthand for critical theory of society or critical social theory, a label used by the Frankfurt School, i.e. members of the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, their intellectual and social network, and those influenced by them intellectually, to describe their own work, oriented toward radical social change, in contradistinction to "traditional theory," i.e. theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode. In literature and literary criticism, by contrast, "critical theory" means something quite different, namely theory used in criticism.

Although the original critical social theorists were Marxists and there is some evidence that in their choice of the phrase "critical theory of society" they were in part influenced by its sounding less politically controversial than "Marxism", nevertheless there were substantial substantive reasons for this choice. First, they were explicitly linking up with the "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant, where the term "critique" meant philosophical reflection on the limits of claims made for certain kinds of knowledge and a direct connection between such critique and the emphasis on moral autonomy. In an intellectual context defined by dogmatic positivism and scientism on the one hand and dogmatic "scientific socialism" on the other, critical theory meant to rehabilitate through such a philosophically critical approach an orientation toward revolutionary agency, or at least its possibility, at a time when it seemed in decline. Second, in the context of both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodoxy, which emphasized Marxism as a new kind of positive science, they were linking up with the implicit epistemology of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's "Capital: a critique of political economy", wanting to emphasize that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. In the 1960's, Juergen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his "Knowledge and Human Interests", by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.

The term "critical theory", in the non-literary-criticism sense, now loosely groups all sorts of work, e.g. that of the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Bourdieu, and feminist theory, that has in common the critique of domination, an emancipatory interest, and the fusion of social/cultural analysis, explanation, and interpretation with social/cultural critique.

Notable figures in critical theory:

See also: Marxism, Frankfurt School, cultural studies, Race Theory, queer theory


What are our priorities for writing in this area? To help develop a list of the most basic topics in Critical Theory, please see Critical Theory basic topics.



Wikipedia:

Critical Theory basic topics

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These should be the most basic topics in the field--topics about which we'd like to have articles soon. Please see the most basic encyclopedia article topics for general instructions on constructing this list, and consult complete list of encyclopedia topics.

 

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Major concepts, key terms, theories, schools of thoughs

Reason, Enlightenment,

Negative dialectic, Communicative action, Public sphere, Civic society, Constellation, Cultural industry, Late capitalism,

 

Major theorists

  <long list here... lots of French and German intellectuals, and later some Americans>

Frederick Jameson, Hebert Marcuse, Althusser, Taccheri Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Stuart Hall, Slavoj Zizek, Raymond Williams, Moshe Postone, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, LOÏC WACQUANT

 

Frankfurt School members and their close colleagues

Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jurgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal,

Gyorgy Lukacs, Ernest Bloch, Bertolt Brecht,

 

Major works

One Dimensional Man -Escape from Freedom -Theory of Communicative Action -Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere -Negative Dialectic -Dialectic of Enlightenment

 

Major historical events

Habermas-Luhmann debate, Habermas-Lyotard debate, Adorno-Popper debate

 

Related school of thoughts

Neo-Marxism, Post-Marxisim, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism




Postmodernism

The term postmodernism refers to a philosophical and cultural movement that is notoriously difficult to define, but distinguished largely by its rejection of modernism. The term is hard to define precisely due to one of its central premises: the rejection of "meta-narratives", ways of thinking that unite knowledge and experience to seek to provide a definitive, universal truth. Also adding confusion to the debate surrounding its definition and significance is the fact that modernity and modernism are not easy to define.

Postmodernists claim that modernity was characterised by a monolithic mindset impossible to maintain in the culturally diverse and fragmented world (which is sometimes referred to as postmodernity) that we live in today. Postmodernism, instead, embraces fluid and multiple perspectives, typically refusing to privilege any one 'truth claim' over another. Ideals of universally applicable truths give way to provisional, decentered, local petit recits which, rather than referencing some underlying universal reality, point only to other ideas and cultural artefacts, themselves subject to interpretation and re-interpretation.

The role of individuals (and especially the individual body) and action is emphasised over standardized or canonical forms of knowledge. Knowledge is interpreted according to our own "local" experiences, not measured against all encompassing universal structures. In this sense, postmodernity owes much to its allied school of thought, post-structuralism (or deconstruction) which sought to destabilise the relationship between language and the objects to which it referred.

Postmodernists often express a profound skepticism regarding the Enlightenment quest to uncover the nature of truth and reality. Perhaps the most striking examples of this skepticism are to be found in the works of French cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard. In his book Simulations, he contends that social 'reality' no longer exists in the conventional sense, but has been supplanted by an endless procession of simulacra. The mass media, and other forms of mass cultural production, generate constant re-appropriation and re-contextualisation of familiar cultural symbols and images, fundamentally shifting our experience away from 'reality', to 'hyperreality'.

Postmodernism has applications in many modern academic and non-academic disciplines; philosophy, art, architecture, film, television, music, sociology, fashion, technology, literature, and communications are all heavily influenced by postmodern trends and ideas, and are rigorously scrutinised from postmodern perspectives.

Postmodernism is not limited to the West, it exists in many national varieties such as Russian postmodernism [1], Japanese, and Latin American postmodernisms (the plural advocated by postmodernism in relation to "cultures," "mentalities," and "sexualities" should be applied to PM itself).

Postmodern culture is ubiquitous and permeates every aspect of our daily lives. From film and television programs to political personas and our daily clothes, postmodernity, it has been stated, "is the very air we breathe". (Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols).

Note: It may be helpful to distinguish between postmodernism in its philosophical, theoretic sense, and as a cultural phenomenon that can be observed in daily life — often referred to as 'Postmodernity'. Examples of postmodernity in action abound in Western society; in fact, Wikipedia is a good example of a postmodern project.

Also note: "post-modern" tends to be used by critics, "postmodern" by supporters.

 

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History of postmodernism

Postmodernism was first identified as a theoretical discipline in the 1980s, but as a cultural movement it predates them by many years. Exactly when modernism began to give way to post-modernism is difficult to pinpoint, if not simply impossible. Some theorists reject that such a distinction even exists, viewing post-modernism, for all its claims of fragmentation and plurality, as still existing within a larger a 'modernist' framework. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas is a strong proponent of this view.

The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1979 Jean François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work "The Postmodern Condition : a report on knowledge". Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes (in his more post-structural work) are also strongly influential in postmodern theory. Postmodernism is closely allied with several contemporary academic disciplines, most notably those connected with sociology. Many of its assumptions are integral to feminist and post-colonial theory.

Some identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the earliest trend out of cultural modernity toward postmodernism. Tracing it further back, some identify its roots in the breakdown of Hegelian idealism, with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy of action, Soren Kierkegaard's and Karl Barth's important fideist approach to theology, and even the nihilism of Nietzsche's philosophy. Michel Foucault's application of Hegel to thinking about the body is also identified as an important landmark.

While it is rare to pin down the specific origins of any large cultural shift, it is fair to assume that postmodernism represents an accumulated disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment project and its progress of science, so central to modernist thinking.

The movement has had diverse political ramifications: its anti-ideological insights appear conducive to, and strongly associated with, the feminist movement, racial equality movements, homosexual rights movements, most forms of late 20th century anarchism, even the peace movement and various hybrids of these in the current anti-globalization movement. Unsurprisingly, none of these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the postmodern movement, but reflect or, in true postmodern style, borrow from some of its core ideas.

 

The use of the term

In an essay From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context, [2] Ihab Hassan point out a number of instances in which the term postmodernism is used before the term became popular:
  • John Watkins Chapman, an English salon painter, in the 1870s, to mean Post-Impressionism.
  • Federico de Onís, 1934, to mean a reaction against the difficulty and experimentalism of modernist poetry. (The term was postmodernismo)
  • Arnold Toynbee, in 1939, to mean the end of the "modern," Western bourgeois order dating back to the seventeenth century.
  • Bernard Smith, in 1945, to mean the movement of Socialist Realism in painting
  • Charles Olson, during the 1950s,
  • Irving Howe and Harry Levin, in 1959 and 1960, respectively, to mean a decline in high modernist culture.
Also, many cite Charles Jencks (1977) "The Language of Postmodern Architecture" among the earliest piece which shaped the use of the term today.

 

 

Postmodernism in art

Postmodernist art may be seen as a reaction to the reductionism and abstraction of Modernism.
Where modernists desired to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, postmodernism aims to unseat them, to embrace diversity and contradiction. A postmodern approach to art thus rejects the distinction between 'low' and 'high' forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favours eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms. Similarly, it promotes parody, irony, and playfulness, commonly referred to as "joissance" by certain postmodern theorists. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it. As the gravity of the search for underlying truth is relieved, it is replaced with 'play'. As postmodern icon David Byrne, and his band Talking Heads said: 'Stop making sense'.

 

Andy Warhol is an early example of postmodern art in action, with his appropriation of common popular symbols and "ready-made" cultural artefacts, bringing the previously mundane or trivial onto the previously hallowed ground of 'high art'.

 

Postmodernism in economics

In economics, Postmodernism refers to multinationalist, consumer-based capitalism, as opposed to the monopoly capitalism associated with modernism through the first half of the 20th century, or market capitalism before that. Some think semi-marxistically that the shift in mode and technology of production may have precipitated or at least emphasized the change to modernism and then to postmodernism.

 

Postmodernism in architecture

As with many cultural movements, one of postmodernism's most pronounced and earliest ideas can be seen in architecture. The functional, mostly bland forms and spaces of the modernist movement are replaced by unapologetically bold aesthetics; styles collide, form is adopted for its own sake, and new ways of viewing familiar styles and space abound.

Classic examples of modern architecture are the Empire State building or the Chrysler building. A classic example of post-modernist architecture is the ATT building in New York, which, like modernist architecture, is a skyscraper relying on steel beams and with lots of windows — but, unlike modern architecture, it borrows elements from classical (Greek) style. Post-modern buildings are usually not so grand and imposing as modern skyscrapers; they are more playful, and, often through the use of mirrored glass that reflects the sky and surrounding buildings, call attention to their environment rather than to themselves.

 

Postmodern architects include: Philip Johnson (later works), John Burgee, Robert Venturi, Ricardo Boffil

 

Postmodernism in literature

Modernist literature has commonly relied on an objective and omniscient point of view (think of the role of a narrator in a third-person narrated novel). Perhaps Joyce's Ulysses may be the best example, but anything by Dickens or Tolstoy may serve.

For a good study of modernism, see Marshall Berman's book All That is Solid Melts into Air.

Among popular and influential examples of post-modern literature are Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot and works by Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Some suggest Douglas Adams' series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency as a humorous introduction to postmodern ideas. Some postmodern philosophy may also appear is his better known work, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

But some people think that modernity has reached its end; there will be no more progress, just more combinations and re-combinations of what we now have. They feel that the Enlightenment project is bankrupt, and they celebrate this, feeling that the new global economy, the "information age" has liberated us from everything that the enlightenment sought, unsuccessfully, to liberate us from. These are people who looked to post-modern art and architecture for inspiration in a new philosophy. The leading proponent of this attempt to bring post-modernism into philosophy is Jean-François Lyotard who wrote a short book called The Postmodern Condition. Guy Debord is another important post-modernist philosopher.

 

Deconstructionism

Deconstruction was a tool of postmodernism that was itself constructed by the philosopher and textual artist Jacques Derrida. He played with words, putting them together with unique combinations of punctuation to make points about, in essence, how meaningless words are and the ways in which we give them meaning. The term deconstruction itself is Destruct + Construct. By analyzing an idea and breaking it into pieces, you are simultaneously asserting its existence. If it did not exist and was not of importance, you would not be analyzing it. Also, you are in the process of defining it and reifying its existence as you name its pieces. Most people use deconstruction simply to mean the analysis of the binaries within an idea. Understanding that this analysis recreates the binaries is more difficult to grasp.

 

Postmodernism in philosophy

Many figures in the 20th century philosophy of mathematics are identified as "postmodern" due to their rejection of mathematics as a strictly neutral point of view. Some figures in the philosophy of science, especially Thomas Samuel Kuhn and David Bohm, are also so viewed. Some see the ultimate expression of postmodernism in science and mathematics in the cognitive science of mathematics, which seeks to characterize the habit of mathematics itself as strictly human, and based in human cognitive bias.
For further information, see Postmodern philosophy.

 

Post-Modernism vs. Post-Structuralism

In terms of frequently cited works, postmodernism and post-structuralism overlaps quite significantly. Some philosophers, such as Francois Lyotard, can legitimately be classified into both groups. This is partly due to the fact that both modernism and structuralism owe much to the Enlightenment project.

Structuralism has a strong tendency to be scientific and seeking out stable patterns in observed phenomena - an epistemological attitude which is quite compatible with Enlightenment thinking, and incompatible with postmodernists. At the same time, findings from the structural analysis carried a somewhat anti-Enlightenment message, revealing that rationality can be found in the minds of "savage" people, just in different forms than people from "civilized" societies are used to seeing. Implicit here is a critique of the practice of colonialism, which was partly justified as a 'civilizing' process by which wealthier societies bring knowledge, manners, and reason to less 'civilized' ones.

Post-structuralism, emerging as a response to the structuralists' scientific orientation, has kept the cultural relativism in structuralism, while discarding the scientific orientations.

One clear difference between postmodernism and poststructuralism is found in their respective attitudes towards the demise of the projects of the enlightenment and modernity: post-structuralism is fundamentally ambivalent, while post-modernism is decidedly celebratory.

Another difference is the nature of the two positions. While post-structuralism is a position in philosophy, encompassing on views on human being, language, body, society, and many other issues, it is not a name of an era. Post-modernism, on the other hand, is closely associated with "post-modern" era, a period in the history coming after modern age.

 

Postmodernism and its critics

Charles Murray, a strong critic of postmodernism, defines the term:
"By contemporary intellectual fashion, I am referring to the constellation of views that come to mind when one hears the words multicultural, gender, deconstruct, politically correct, and Dead White Males. In a broader sense, contemporary intellectual fashion encompasses as well the widespread disdain in certain circles for technology and the scientific method. Embedded in this mind-set is hostility to the idea that discriminating judgments are appropriate in assessing art and literature, to the idea that hierarchies of value exist, hostility to the idea that an objective truth exists. Postmodernism is the overarching label that is attached to this perspective." [1]
It is this underlying hostility toward objectivity, evident in most contemporary critical theorists, that is the common point of attack for postmodernist critics. Many critics characterise postmodernism as a temporary phenomenon that can't be adequately defined simply because, as a philosophy at least, it doesn't represent anything more substantial than a series of disparate conjectures allied only in their distrust of modernism.

Indeed, there seems to be a glaring contradiction in maintaining the death of objectivity and privileged position on one hand, while the scientific community continues a project of unprecedented scope to unify various scientific disciplines into a theory of everything, on the other. Hostility toward hierarchies of value and objectivity becomes similarly problematic when postmodernity itself attempts to analyse such hierarchies with, apparently, some measure of objectivity and make categorical statements concerning them.

Despite its ability to challenge the status quo and shake the foundations of ingrained ideologies, many theorists think postmodernism is on decidedly shaky epistemological grounds. How can we effect any change in people's poor living conditions, in inequality and injustice, if we don't accept the validity of underlying universals such as the 'real world' and 'justice' in the first place? How is any progress to be made through a philosophy so profoundly skeptical of the very notion of progress, and of unified perspectives? Such critics may argue that, in actual fact, such postmodern premises are rarely, if ever, actually embraced — that if they were, we would be left with nothing more than a crippling radical subjectivism. That the projects of the Enlightenment and modernity are alive and well can be seen in the justice system, in science, in political rights movements, in the very idea of universities; and so on. This is the common approach of left academics with Marxist leanings, such as Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late capitalism), and David Harvey (The Condition of Postmodernity), whose attacks on the philosophy of postmodernism have been frequent and scathing.

Such critics see postmodernism as, essentially, a kind of semantic gamesmanship, more sophistry than substance. Postmoderism's proponents are often criticised for a tendency to indulge in exhausting, verbose stretches of rhetorical gymnastics, that sound important but don't appear to have any discernible meaning. The more brave of the postmodernists may argue that this is precisely the point. This tendency is parodied by the "Postmodern essay generator", a computer program whose output is meaningless essays which appear unnervingly similar to the actual writings of many followers of postmodernism, and, more notoriously, by the Sokal Affair in which Alan Sokal, a physicist wrote a deliberately and obviously nonsensical article purportedly about interpreting physics and mathematics in terms of postmodern theory which was nevertheless published by a journal of postmodern thought. The same also co-authored Fashionable Nonsense, which criticizes the abusive use of scientific terminology in intellectual writing and finishes with a critic of some forms of postmodernism.

Whatever its philosophical value, postmodern phenomena can be observed in nearly all areas of Western capitalist cultures, and a postmodern theoretical approach can help explain much of this cultural condition, irrespective of whether it offers a coherent, functional epistemology.

 

Postmodern Principles of Interpretation

    • There is no “reason” insomuch as reason is by definition a “3rd-person perspective” and there is no 3rd-person perspective without a hermeneutic, thus making it either a disguised 1st-person perspective or a 2nd-person perspective.

See also

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Post-structuralism

(Redirected from Poststructuralism)

Post-Structuralism is a body of work that is a response to structuralism; it rejects structuralism yet for various reasons still defines itself in relation to it. So the best way to understand post-structuralism is to understand structuralism.

There are many definitions. Most broadly, structuralism is any theory that follows Immanuel Kant's notion that the mind actively structures perceptions (Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky are structuralists in this sense), or any theory that follows Durkheim's attention to social structure (e.g. classifying societies as mechanical or organic). More narrowly, structuralism is inspired by the work of the linguists Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure. Their main point is that language is not just a set of words (abstract) that refer to things (concrete). In other words, the word "rock" does not have sense, or meaning, simply because we identify it with real rocks. Rather, language consists of a system of meaning; that is, the meaning of any one word is determined by its relationship with other words (thus, a dictionary doesn't juxtapose words with pictures of things; rather, it defines words in terms of other words). When looking solely at language or systems of meaning that function linguistically, this approach is called semiotics. When looking at other phenomena, it is structuralism. In short, any approach that sees the meaning of something as subordinate to its place within a system is structuralism. The most important structuralists were French scholars who tried to adapt these principles to other fields of study: the psychoanalyst Lacan, the philosopher Louis Althusser, and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

Note: structuralism is in many ways opposed to humanism, because it privileges structures and systems rather than the specific parts of these systems (e.g. actual humans).

Note: structuralism requires some space between the system and the person studying the system -- in other words, structuralism is a way of studying structures objectively.

Post-structuralists are quite simply all people who take structuralism very seriously and recognize its importance, yet on some level profoundly disagree with or even actively reject it. This ambivalence echoes a deeper ambivalence towards the whole Enlightenment project. Like Kant and his contemporaries and successors, they believe in the importance of critical thinking (the philosopher Jurgen Habermas is probably the most important heir to Kant today -- not that he is strictly speaking a "Kantian", but in a more general sense that he believes that through reason we can understand the world and achieve enlightenment). Unlike Kant and his successors, they are highly skeptical of progress. You might say they take Kant's critical approach one step further by turning it against itself, and thus criticizing the Enlightenment assumptions that objectivity is possible and good, and that the positive accumulation of objective knowledge is possible and good. They are so true to this critical spirit that, unlike post-modernists, they do not whole-heartedly celebrate the demise of the Enlightenment project. (In this ambivalent turn they are something like contemporary heirs to Nietzsche, and many explicitly refer to Nietzsche for inspiration, even if they do not agree with everything he wrote.)

Other than a disagreement with the tenets of structualism, many post-structuralists are sharply critical of one another. This is one reason why a group with such divergent views are called post-structuralists and not something else - once you get beyond their debt to structuralism and the fact that they nevertheless are not structuralists, there is nothing else to define them as a group. The most famous post-structuralists - although they express often fundamentally divergent views - are the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the historian Michel Foucault, and the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour.

See also postmodernism, structuralism