philosophy

We’re coming upon that time of the year: final exams. Everyone wants to know the shortcut for how to memorize faster and easier for exams. As they say, there are no shortcuts in life. But there is a lot of scientific research on what’s most effective. I’ll leave links at the end, but I’m not … Read more

I’ve decided to end my silence by responding to a recent Tor article by Liz Bourke entitled Sleeps With Monsters: On the Question of Quality. I have one main beef with it, and it comes as a fundamental misunderstanding of the importance of literature. But before I get to that, I want to address a … Read more

Today we will do a critical postmodern reading on Jacques Derrida’s theory of Differance. This series hasn’t been as rough as I’ve expected this far. The first few parts showed some of the classic postmodernists to be clearer and more prescient than many give them credit for. This changes all that. Derrida is rough going. … Read more

Jean Baudrillard is one of those postmodernist philosophers that people can name but probably don’t know much about. He’s most famous for his work Simulacra and Simulation, in which he argues we’ve replaced everything real in our society by symbols (more on this later). If you’re thinking of the movie The Matrix, then you’ve understood. That movie gets … Read more

This series of articles will critically examine many of the fundamental readings on postmodernism. Today, we’ll look at The Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard. A Brief Aside on my Views I’m over nine years into this blog, so I think most readers know my opinions and worldview on many issues in philosophy. I roughly subscribe … Read more

I’ll tread carefully here because we live in a strange time of questioning the motives and knowledge of expert opinion to bolster every bizarre conspiracy theory under the sun. No one trusts any information anymore. It’s not even clear if trusting/doubting expert opinion is anti/hyper-intellectual. But that isn’t the subject of today’s topic. Expertise Without … Read more

Two weeks ago I wrote about Knapp and Michael’s “Against Theory.” I’ve started going through the book Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, which is a compilation of all the major papers arguing for/against the points brought up in “Against Theory.” Here’s the main point of Knapp-Michaels, which I never articulated in a … Read more

In this article, we’ll summarize and critique the main arguments in Knapp and Michaels’ 1982 paper Against Theory.

I feel I may have been a little unfair in choosing “From Work to Text” last post. In the same collection of essays, Image – Music – Text, is a much better introduction to what Barthes is known for: (post-)structuralism. Recall that structuralism began back in the very early 1900’s (maybe even very late 1800’s) … Read more

Roland Barthes was a prolific and important academic literary critic in the mid 20th century. He published many books, but his most famous are probably S/Z, Mythologies, and Image – Music – Text. The essay “From Work to Text” comes from this last book. I thought I’d continue from Sontag into Barthes since he was … Read more