This is my grandfather’s axe. My father replaced the head. I replaced the handle. My daughter added some tape to the handle. Is it still my grandfather’s axe? Ship of Theseus problems: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even […]
My grandfather’s axe Read More »
“Deconstruction,” Stanley Fish confesses happily, “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting.” For the implications of Fish’s quotation for postmodernism, see p. 11 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau to Foucault. Information about other editions and translations is available at this dedicated page.
Stanley Fish in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
The advance tickets are sold out for Friday’s talk at the University of British Columbia, but here’s a link to the event site. I’ll be speaking on themes out of my Explaining Postmodernism with special application to today’s campus wars.
UBC talk this week in Vancouver Read More »
In his “Letter to the Americans,” bin Laden issued a call for morality: “We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gamblings, and trading with interest.” Americans’ failure to cleanse themselves of these sins is one of the justifications bin Laden
The Wages of Sin, according to Osama bin Laden Read More »
Some time ago I was lambasted for being a Marxist professor who indoctrinates his students: Now the exact same video prompts the opposite reaction: Hence my new slogan: “Marxists and anti-Marxists of the world, pay attention!”
Is my Marxism genuine or fraudulent? Read More »
Theologian Richard Niebuhr called Friedrich Schleiermacher “the Kant of modern Protestantism.” Here is Schleiermacher himself: “The essence of religion is *the feeling of absolute dependence*. I repudiated rational thought in favour of a theology of feeling.” For more on Schleiermacher and his contributions to postmodernism, see p. 57 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau
Friedrich Schleiermacher in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
My “Will the Alt-Right Make the Left embrace the Enlightenment?” is now republished at Britain’s Church and State site: “Criticizing Enlightenment thought has become fashionable across the political spectrum. For the past several decades, more and more academics have called reason into question, especially the sort of rationalist worldview that emerged in the seventeenth and
“Will the Alt-Right Make the Left embrace the Enlightenment?” [Church and State] Read More »
“The normal fuck,” writes Andrea Dworkin, “by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation.” For more on the implications of Dworkin’s claim for postmodernism, see my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau to Foucault. Information about other editions and translations is available at this dedicated
Andrea Dworkin in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »