In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a hoax by submitting a nonsense article to an academic journal of postmodern studies, and subsequently deriding the journal for publishing it. The hoax was, and remains, a significant salvo in the “Science Wars.”
Not School Report: Philip Auslander on Postmodern Theater
Citizens can now listen to the Philosophy and Theater Group’s discussion of Philip Auslander’s From Acting to Performance.
Not School Report: Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’
The Philosophy and Theatre Group’s discussion of Grotowski’s Akropolis is now available to PEL Citizens.
Rick Roderick on Derrida
http://youtu.be/LvAwoUvXNzU
Watch on YouTube.
For anyone still trying to sort Derrida out, here’s a hopefully helpful attempt at explication from Rick Roderick. I liked Roderick’s approach in directly opposing Derrida’s theory to the “Theory of Reference.” This is an allusion to Gottlob Frege, who was discussed in an earlier PEL episode.
Amateur Philosophy at it Worst: How to Write a David Brooks Column
Ironically, the Enlightenment is also a favorite bogeyman of leftist university postmodernists. And oddly, they seem to associate the Enlightenment with the sciences, and do not see the latter as somehow having emancipated us from the former. For them, overcoming this bogeyman requires a much more radical project that includes an epistemological (and sometimes ethical) relativism that swallows up even the hard sciences. Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan and Derrida are their great post-Enlightenment and post-modern thinkers … not Malcolm Gladwell. For them, the irrational and communal do not lead us back to … family values.