Closing of the American Mind

[Anonymous No.10364753]

What am I in for?

[Anonymous No.10364758]

>>10364753
One of the best non-fiction books ever written by an American

[Anonymous No.10364774]

Purple prose, lame arguments

[Anonymous No.10365120]

>>10364753
Guy complains that leftists are destroying the humanities, while conservatives are cutting funds and closing his department.

[Anonymous No.10365126]

>>10365120
>muh liberals are fuckin with muh morals
>muh conservatives aren't giving me enough money
I hate centrists so much.

[Anonymous No.10365131]

>>10365120
>conservatives cutting funding to private colleges
what

[Anonymous No.10365166]

>>10365131
Yeah:

Among elite private universities, like Harvard and Yale, the average taxpayer subsidy is $13,000 per student per year, while the annual subsidy at the most selective public universities, like the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of California, Los Angeles is more than $23,000 per student annually.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/81056/how-much-public-funding-do-private-universities-in-the-united-states-receive-di

Naturally this doesn't stops universities to skyrocket tuitions. Which means less people enroll in humanities, because humanities don't offer a way to repay that debt. Less people enrolling in humanities, mean more departments closing, less hirings, which leads to less scholars and less people enrolling. Which leaves us all with a population of uneducated people who think that books are stupid. Which is what Bloom refers to as the closing of the American mind.

[Anonymous No.10365175]

>>10365120
Stop thinking tribally. How does an attack on leftist politics automatically suggest being in concurrence with every conservative policy?

[Anonymous No.10365192]

>>10365166
More millennial have enrolled in college than any other generation in our history, so your thesis that rising tuitions lead to fewer enrollments isn't true.

[Anonymous No.10365193]

>>10365175
No but it's a valid criticism towards the book since syllabi are pretty much unchanged since the 90s despite his criticism, while conservative politics (together with administrations' greed) are responsible for impoverishing the american public.

He completely misread the situation. He thought that we would pay professor for not teaching Plato, and instead what happened is that professor fiercely try to keep teaching Plato while being starved.

[Anonymous No.10365201]

>>10365192
Enrollment in the humanities...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/14/study-shows-87-decline-humanities-bachelors-degrees-2-years

English stays strong at community colleges because of low tuitions.

[Anonymous No.10365204]

>>10365166
The conservative view on this is more justifiable than the leftist one. A system where people who belong to particular groups deemed to be disadvantaged receive government subsidies for education makes less sense than either an entirely private system, or an entirely public one. But Bloom's contention was with the content of the classes, not their accessibility. So your point be tangentially related to his argument, but it doesn't invalidate anything he says in the book.

[Anonymous No.10365213]

>>10365193
Stop working off the false premise that fewer people have access to education now than they did in Bloom's time. That's literally the opposite of the truth.

>since syllabi are pretty much unchanged since the 90s despite his criticism
How the students are made to engage with their syllabus has changed tremendously since the 80s, hence the the state of student activism today.

[Anonymous No.10365219]

>>10365201
That's not due to a lack of access, it's due to its decreasing relevance in our culture, which is something that Bloom explains in the book. If access were the issue, then you'd see a decreased enrollment in every subject, and not an increase in STEM and business.

[Anonymous No.10365230]

>>10365204
Bloom was concerned about the loss in our culture of the love for education and the cannon that created good and responsible leaders.

He is mistaken in diagnosing how this was pushed by the left, rather than by a philistine and anti-intellectual right who for years has been repeating "english major? enjoy your job at mcdonalds".

If you want to understand why people don't read Plato today look at market forces.

>>10365213
That's not my premise. My argument is that there is a drop in liberal art majors because tutions are too high. And that if people don't read great books they will not understand their value and they will be less likely to defend them when they will be under attack by politicians.

[Anonymous No.10365235]

>>10365193
Their lack of job security due to an over-saturation of professors and a lack of interest from students. Government subsidies would only go towards the professors teaching subjects students are interested in anyways. It's not like limited government funds are going to the teaching of dead subjects

[Anonymous No.10365238]

>>10365219
The decrease relevance in our culture is due to the fact that the market has been pushed as the only source of value.

Here too it's full of people saying that studying literature is useless because you don't get a job with it.

[Anonymous No.10365245]

>>10365235
And there you go, it's people reasoning like you that killed the humanities, not the left.

You are openly contradicting Allan Bloom by exactly calling what he was defending (the old univeristy that taught the greeks) dead subjects.

[Anonymous No.10365266]

>>10365235
One last thing: sure there is an over-saturation. I guess that is why colleges have to employ dozens of TA and overburden phds with teaching assignments.

If there is funding but not over saturation you can put the people to do research. Or how about dedicating some professors to follow phd candidates, since so many candidates just complain about being left to their own devices.

[Anonymous No.10365268]

>>10365245
I'm presenting the reality of our economic situation. A government-subsidized school isn't going to use its limited resources funding economically irrelevant subjects. This is true both for public and private schools.

>You are openly contradicting Allan Bloom by exactly calling what he was defending (the old univeristy that taught the greeks) dead subjects.
No i'm not. Interest in the subject precedes funding for it. The problem is primarily cultural. If people going to college have no interest in the classics before they get to college, they're not going to choose majors that involve studying them.

[Anonymous No.10365276]

>>10365238
That's a cultural problem that isn't going to be solved by funneling more money into universities. People not caring about our cultural heritage is much more due to leftist cultural criticism than right wing materialism.

[Anonymous No.10365284]

>>10365276
Yeah they don't have interest in the classics because no one reads them. No one reads them because there is no money to be made by reading them. There is no money to be made because the market has no utility for the western canon.

So yes sure, the market is always right and the perfect allocator of value is def. a position of the left.

[Anonymous No.10365299]

>>10365230
>He is mistaken in diagnosing how this was pushed by the left, rather than by a philistine and anti-intellectual right who for years has been repeating "english major? enjoy your job at mcdonalds"
What's being taught is a much more pertinent factor when it comes to the decline of the humanities than apparent economic use. People are alienated by the increased focus on activist disciplines, and the necessary decreased focus on "dead white men." I switched major not because I wasn't interested in the canon, but because its teaching become politicized to the point of being intellectually stifling

[Anonymous No.10365319]

>>10365284
There's absolutely money to be made off the canon. Just look at Penguin's classics imprint. The problem was that leftist critiques of Western intellectual hegemony forced many schools to change their curricula to accommodate less culturally relevant subjects for the sake of inclusion. Less de Beauvoir and more Plato, and you'll see how kids will perk up and take interest.

[Anonymous No.10365353]

>>10364758
now that's a sick burn

[Anonymous No.10365372]

>>10365299
Yeah absolutely, the fact that culture keeps repeating go into stem or you'll end up cleaning up fast foods has nothing to do with it.

I bet it's also because of the culture that people go into law school and accounting. It's all those matlock re-runs and ben affleck's movie.

Please. Don't be naive.

>>10365319
Please, have you been in the book publishing industry? Sales are going really bad, there is no career advancement, and you start at 30k and if you are lucky and a lot of people above you die you might get at 95k after a 30 years career.

If you don't believe me:

Financial

Bertelsmann’s group revenues from continuing operations declined by 1.1% in 2016, from 17.1 billion EUR to 17 billion EUR. The loss is primarily due to negative exchange rate effects, disposals, as well as declining organic revenues at Penguin Random House and Bertelsmann Printing Group. Despite start-up losses for digital and new businesses the operating EBITDA increased by 3.3% to 2.6 billion EUR during 2016.

Revenues at Penguin Random House declined by 9.6% from 3.7 billion EUR to 3.4 billion EUR, due to portfolio and exchange rate effects. The organic growth was -3.9 %, impacted by a decline in e-book revenues that was partly due to new sales conditions in the retail market.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/74544-global-publishing-leaders-2017-penguin-random-house.html

[Anonymous No.10365405]

>>10365372
>the fact that culture keeps repeating go into stem or you'll end up cleaning up fast foods has nothing to do with it.
Kids going to college aren't making responsible career choices, they're getting into what interests them. STEM hold a place in our public consciousness not just due to its economic use, but because the technical objective knowledge of the sciences interests kids over the subjective and politicized knowledge of the humanities. Would you rather get into a subject that lets you understand precisely how your smartphone works, or get into the arcanum of long-standing political debates? Would you rather get into subjects that will lead to the knowledge required to colonization Mars, or spend half a semester studying white privilege? I'm not downplaying the importance of the humanities, i'm just explaining why the methods used to teach it contribute to its decline. Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, and Austen are inherently interesting, but having to power through the political stench left behind by the 1960s is too big a price to pay for most students.

[Anonymous No.10365450]

>>10365405
>Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, and Austen are inherently interesting, but having to power through the political stench left behind by the 1960s is too big a price to pay for most students.

So which is it:

Students don't want to read the classics because they are leftists, or students don't want to go into the humanities because they are marxists.

You are getting into slippery territory here and contradicting yourself.

But the truth is this:

>Would you rather get into a subject that lets you understand precisely how your smartphone works, or get into the arcanum of long-standing political debates? Would you rather get into subjects that will lead to the knowledge required to colonization Mars, or spend half a semester studying white privilege?

The toxic culture for western values is just capital. The imperative of productivity and capital and making money.

I mean who are the philistines? They are the self-satisfied middle class middle brow citizen who think that the humanities are big waste of time and thinks that books are stupid and that watching a documentary and tv is much more efficient.

Ps. to answer your rhetorical question just to show you how you are imbibed in a culture of consumerism that you can't even realize how ideologically brainwashed you are: I don't care about smartphones, or mars, or anything like that.

I always found the pleasures of studying so much more rewarding. In fact I studied logic and history of philosophy.

[Anonymous No.10365505]

>>10365450
>Students don't want to read the classics because they are leftists, or students don't want to go into the humanities because they are marxists.
How is this difficult to get? The teachers are leftists, and the students aren't interested in feminism and post-colonial studies. A classical study of Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod would interest students, but that's not really what they get when they enter the humanities. Unless they deliberately choose to study the classics, they usually just receive fractured, contextless pieces of the canon interpreted through modern critical lenses. Kids aren't interested in that.

>you are imbibed in a culture of consumerism that you can't even realize how ideologically brainwashed you are
If you can't see something inherently interesting about technology and space exploration, especially given that we're having this conversation precisely because of advances in technology, then you have a severely limited imagination. My philistinism is nothing compared to your parochialism.

>The toxic culture for western values is just capital.
So after destroying the public perception of every classical virtue for being "reactionary," leftists complain about a lack of higher values?

[Anonymous No.10365526]

>>10365505
>How is this difficult to get? The teachers are leftists, and the students aren't interested in feminism and post-colonial studies. A classical study of Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod would interest students, but that's not really what they get when they enter the humanities. Unless they deliberately choose to study the classics, they usually just receive fractured, contextless pieces of the canon interpreted through modern critical lenses. Kids aren't interested in that.

So you disagree with Allan Bloom, because what he says is that the students are the leftists and that are pushing the professors to teach those subjects.

>If you can't see something inherently interesting about technology and space exploration, especially given that we're having this conversation precisely because of advances in technology, then you have a severely limited imagination. My philistinism is nothing compared to your parochialism.

Or maybe I'm not enthralled by cheap sci-fi. Be ware I never said I don't appreciate science or research. I just don't find particularly the obsession with gadgetry and the romanticization of market activity.

>So after destroying the public perception of every classical virtue for being "reactionary," leftists complain about a lack of higher values?

You are cherrypicking. Most leftists are lovers of the cannon. See all of the Frankfurt School and see the New York Review of Books. Where is the conservative money in promoting great books?

[Anonymous No.10365563]

>>10365526
>So you disagree with Allan Bloom, because what he says is that the students are the leftists and that are pushing the professors to teach those subjects.
Bloom was writing in the 1980s about the 1960s. The activist students he's talking about are the teachers of today. And i'd submit that while those student activists were influential, they were likely a minority at the time. Their outsized influence came from the fact that everyone else agreed with them on the one issue that mattered most at the time: the Vietnam war.

>Or maybe I'm not enthralled by cheap sci-fi.
Technology shapes nearly every aspect of human relations in the 21st century. It affects how we communicate, how we date, how we live. Even if it doesn't interest you personally, its effects are important enough to elicit even a cultural interest in the subject.

>You are cherrypicking. Most leftists are lovers of the cannon.
Bullshit. At least not in my experience. The leftist decrying "dead white males" cliché is very real where I live, and enough of a turn off to make me want to study the canon by myself. I took up programming in school to avoid those people. And the people whom I took classes with hated them as much as I do.

[Anonymous No.10365852]

>>10365120
Which is pretty much what happened, no?

[Anonymous No.10366266]

>>10364753
Kind made be hate americans less. But only pre 1950s americans.

Book has an extremely amateur understanding of Hediegger. Strauss should have tutored Bloom more.

[Anonymous No.10366271]

>>10365166
>Which is what Bloom refers to as the closing of the American mind.

You are leaving out, the fact that Great Books were a stable of many families, not in state education, but the family unit itself. You don't need more humanities students when you are already trained in that within your family.

[Anonymous No.10366292]

Americans are stupid and love to be ignorant for a reason I cannot fathom.

[Anonymous No.10367058]

>>10366271
Yeah except now nobody understands the great books because English and History are taught like shit because schools are “let’s teach kids how to code because this is what corporations want” and for some reason philosophy is not even in the high school curriculum.

Really don’t kid yourself that the closing of the American mind happened for any reason that isn’t the absolute penetration of the market and anti-intellectualism of conservatism.

Or atleast when your reaction to structural problems that are destroying our ability to understand and pass on the western canon is “who cares, coding is better anyway” don’t fucking pose as lovers of the art. Because you are unwittingly showing yourself for the philistines who until an year ago were disgusted by the humanities

[Anonymous No.10367088]

>>10365526
>>10365563
I have enjoyed reading your conversation, anons. I think to an extent you are both correct. Conservatives cry foul over the teaching of humanities, make references to flipping burgers, and then seek to cut funding while talking about the greatness of STEM fields. Leftists in many non-Classics humanities departments at top-tier universities teach through modern leftist lenses (and, in the United States, largely Marxist lenses, which is something I've seen less of in the UK and Europe more generally). Both of these things hurt enrollment in the humanities.

The older tradition of a liberal education as the education properly befitting a free man is largely lost unless young students come into the university with the specific intention of seeking it out.


An aside:
>Where is the conservative money in promoting great books?
I suppose I think of The Teaching Company's various lecture series as essentially conservative and still promoting/being coned with the great books of the Western canon.

[Anonymous No.10367113]

>>10367088
concerned* with

[Anonymous No.10367168]

>>10367088
I would say the teaching company is fairly non-political, in that it tends to treat all topics fairly and in a not biased way. I used to have an office job and would listen to them all day long and often lectures about medieval history would have feminist analysis of women conditions at the time, or chapters dedicated to women characters in certain ancient literary traditions, I mean the kinda of unacceptable thing that conservatives say is driving students away.

Also I disagree that Marxist interpretations are common in the US. Marxist interpretation is a mode that privileges the economic factors as a lense through which to analyze the subject, and literary outside Harvard there is very little resurgence of this. So please name names of professors doing materialist analysis.

[Anonymous No.10367183]

>>10365131
>I don't pay attention to politics, but I sure do hate liberals! amirite, /pol/ bros?

[Anonymous No.10367250]

>>10364753

All critique of American culture is just "I hate daddy, I like sex".

[Anonymous No.10367260]

>>10366292
Says the American.

[Anonymous No.10367417]

>Equality begets in man the desire of judging of everything for himself: it gives him, in all things, a taste for the tangible and the real, a contempt for tradition and for forms. These general tendencies are principally discernible in the peculiar subject of this chapter. Those who cultivate the sciences amongst a democratic people are always afraid of losing their way in visionary speculation. They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and the study of facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow-man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man’s authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to point out the weaker points of their neighbors’ opinions. Scientific precedents have very little weight with them; they are never long detained by the subtility of the schools, nor ready to accept big words for sterling coin; they penetrate, as far as they can, into the principal parts of the subject which engages them, and they expound them in the vernacular tongue. Scientific pursuits then follow a freer and a safer course, but a less lofty one.

From Tocqueville, Democracy in America Bk I Ch. 10

Asking Americans to care about theory and literature is like asking a cat to bark.

[Anonymous No.10367584]

What pol/tards think is feminist analysis: “hurr durr the odyssey is about dead white men and an instrument of the patriarchy”

What feminist analysis really is: “Telemachus becomes a ma by executing slave girls who really didn’t have any agency over their actions, and nobody cared in 2500 years of commentaries”

[Anonymous No.10367741]

>>10364753
You're in for 1) a very readable polemic that 2) conceals the extent to which it's in support of radical philosophic positions.

I read this before I read his Republic commentary and his more academic essays, and reading the latter gave me the impression that there's a good deal more careful rhetoric hanging over this thing then most people care to notice.

[Anonymous No.10367775]

>>10367741
What are the radical philosophical positions?

[Anonymous No.10367795]

>>10367775
Harder to discern in specifics, because he's also hiding behind the philosophers himself, and the book seems to be ultimately an argument to look to them directly. I can at least note that it's striking how often it's the case that he describes a phenomenon of the soul in such a way that you're inclined to think that he thinks it's bad, but he never comes out and says it, suggesting sometimes very highly qualified agreement. I think he's not necessarily that far from a stance of nihilism, but concealed by a great deal of concern for edification. It's at bottom and at least a defense of Socratic philosophizing that attempts to appeal to how edifying it looks to non-philosophers, while the Socratic philosophic position that Bloom's aiming to preserve consists of radical skepticism (in the ancient sense of unceasing inquiry into all things, and not the modern sense of the lack of or rejection of belief in certain ideas or dogmas).

[Anonymous No.10367844]

>>10367795
Gotcha, but doesn’t that seem a bit of an unserious take on Strauss. Strauss was the tragedy bloom the farce.

Farce because he really didn’t have any reason other than greed or cleverness to not take the position of Rorty. But yeah switching the blame on the leftists while the conservatives were dismantling higher education made him rich and famous as we can see in Ravelstein.

[Anonymous No.10368652]

>>10367844
Hm, maybe not necessarily an unserious take; I think The Closing is ultimately a limited failure, but the intent seems pedagogical. Perhaps move some of those in the Straussian "cave beneath the cave" into the cave so that they might come out of it.

I think part of the difference between Bloom and Rorty is that the latter is a misologist who at bottom loves edification because it's edifying, while the former is (at least comparatively?) open to the possibility of coming to know, even if the Truth is ugly. Though I see why you'd think that, since his relationship to the edifying gets uncomfortably close to that of Rorty's position.

[Anonymous No.10368825]

>>10367584
There is literally zero difference between your two examples

[Anonymous No.10368857]

>>10367058
You're downplaying the effects the rise of visual media has had on the decline of literature. People don't read anymore because they've lost the ability to concentrate on long works of fiction, not because they perceive it to be a waste of time. Our culture still views reading as a valid intellectual activity, and people who read great works are still called smart. The real issue is that the internet makes people too lazy to read, not that they don't want to read.

[Anonymous No.10368864]

>>10367584
The latter example is as ridiculous and contextless.

[Anonymous No.10368875]

>>10368825
You don't think that it's a valid point to make, that actually the only people large son telemachus kills are teenage slave girls. And he doesn't even have the guts to kill them with a sword, like Odysseus proposes, but decides to hang them?

I think it's a very good point to make, and if you don't see it it's because you are blindsided by your ideology.

[Anonymous No.10368877]

To the idiot who thinks “conservatives” are responsible for the death of the humanities:

It is not conservatism that is to blame. It is economics itself. As more people are attending college and seeking management positions, it is no longer good enough to just have a degree and be a smart college student, because there are thousands of others just like you graduating in the same year. Hence the rise of business degrees. Students have to prove their competency for the job in advance, even if they probably could learn the job function in a couple months without taking a bunch of business courses at school. It is not a cultural issue as you claim, simply the need to secure an income.

[Anonymous No.10368899]

>>10368857
I actually don't disagree, but again that is not the point that Allan Bloom does in his polemic. He actually attacks those who in many ways have been hostile to entertainment and media, singing the praise of high art.

Meanwhile the conservatives talked about elitism and praised populist entertainment.

[Anonymous No.10368901]

>>10368877
The humanities were always a minority interest. I bet as large a percentage of Americans read Plato in school today than did in the 19th century. The only difference is that a much larger percentage of our overall population goes to college, and of that larger percentage many aren't economically-secure enough to go for a major that doesn't automatically lead to a high paying job. So the students going for MBAs rather than degrees in English literature today probably wouldn't have gone to college in the 19th century.

[Anonymous No.10368909]

>>10368899
You're still thinking in a conservative/leftist dichotomy. Bloom wrote this as a critique of the leftist activism he felt was invading academia, not as a de facto praise of American conservatism. It's also worth noting that the biggest conservative at the the time was William F. Buckley, who very much cared about the Western canon, probably more so than any leftist public intellectual at the time.

[Anonymous No.10368916]

>>10368877

And who is the vector of Economics is always right, we don't need for society to balance it out its excesses?

Conservatives.

Who has declared that the school's goal is only that of forming workers and cater to the needs of businesses instead of forming moral and aware citizens?

Conservatives

Who has defunded art and humanities programs in middle schools and highschools?

Conservatives.

So don't even start saying there isn't a political design, because I kept receipts and I know where the philistines who hate culture are.

[Anonymous No.10368923]

>>10368909
No, I'm just saying he missed the mark, because Leftist activism has been the only force in american academia that has defended the humanities and the classics, and he willfully was not seeing the people that were destroying what he loved under his nose.

He was schmuck, he got flattered by conservatives, and was running in their speech circuits, and getting a lot of money, not seeing how he was actually condemning what he loved.

And conservatives immediately embraced him because once the humanities went to shit they were looking for an easy scapegoat to pin that too.

[Anonymous No.10368933]

>>10368916
>conservatives are all free market Ayn Rand types
>conservatives aren't interested in Plato and Aristotle, more so than feminists and race activists are
>conservatives don't praise the classics as a means of deriding the state of contemporary art by comparison

[Anonymous No.10368952]

>>10368933
all the relevant conservatives, those in power, are free market ayn rand types.

[Anonymous No.10368953]

>>10368933
Name one policy advocated by conservatives that would be in favor of the humanities.

[Anonymous No.10368957]

>>10368952
Yeah, their being in favor of the humanities is bitching and moaning about how ugly the stuff at art basel is, while doing absolutely nothing about it.

Maybe the stuff at art basel is so fucking ugly because they have created a situation where literally the only people who can afford to make art are trustfund kids.

[Anonymous No.10368964]

>>10368923
>because Leftist activism has been the only force in american academia that has defended the humanities and the classics,
He was living at time when leftists were literally shouting "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" in the streets surrounding Stanford. When respected leftist writers took every chance they got to attack Western culture and its hegemonic status. When popular feminists perceived Western culture as being synonymous with patriarchy. Even his friend Susan Sontag talked about how the evils of the white race couldn't be justified by the works of great Western art it produced.

[Anonymous No.10368965]

>oy vey, goyim, you know how American higher education became a politicized cesspool?
>it's all the fault of those germans like Heidegger and Nietzche!
>we the chosen people have nothing to do with that, i swear upon the 6 gorillion!

[Anonymous No.10368971]

>>10368952
That wasn't true at the time Bloom was writing. William F. Buckley hated Rand's books.

[Anonymous No.10369109]

>>10368916
Politics has nothing to do with it. Economics is a force outside of anyone's control just like the weather or gravity. You can't change the economic facts of life, and one of those is that very few people have the free time and wealth necessary to pursue a humanities education.

[Anonymous No.10369112]

>>10368964
So you agree with him that it is a date analysis and he has largely missed the mark on where the threat was coming from?

Ps. Susan Sontag's comment is irrelevant for this discussion because it doesn't mean that we have to throw away the canon, but argues whether it was worth it the history of atrocities. Which is a legitimate position. As an anti-natalist I don't believe that any result of the humanity is worth what it cost in pain.

[Anonymous No.10369132]

>>10369109
So you agree that Bloom misses the mark and the closing of the american mind has not happened because of leftists students but because the Western Cannon is not economically viable.

The enemy of western civilization, according to you, is the economic system with its immutable laws, a force outside the control of any political actor.

[Anonymous No.10369157]

>>10369112
He identified a problem and laid out its causes in a subtle and detailed manner. Even if one were to concede your point that economic forces are what lead to the downfall of the humanities, and that conservatives tend to be more in favor of letting those apolitical economic forced take over increasingly larger sections of our culture, that still wouldn't make his critiques of leftist activism any less salient. All it would suggest is that he's looking at half of the picture, rather than the entire thing. And a particular half of the picture that no one else was looking at at the time.

I'd also submit that nearly all of cultural forces that kept vain materialism at bay were dismantled by the left for being "reactionary". You're more susceptible to economic exploitation after all of the previous sources of meaning have been systematically destroyed by your culture.

[Anonymous No.10369176]

>>10368923
>because Leftist activism has been the only force in american academia that has defended the humanities and the classics
Defended the humanities, sure, obviously. Defended the classics? That's been one of their main targets in academia, and Bloom wasn't wrong to note that they were targeting the classics, whether for being "racist", "sexist", "elitist", etc.. The fact that the classics still get read at all in the academy is a miracle, but a precarious one, and those readings are often "critical readings", i.e., the application of some other system of thought or hermeneutic to the text, whether it be a "Marxist reading", a "psychoanalytic reading", a "Heideggerian reading", a deconstructive one, a feminist one, a post-colonialist one, and on and on, anything but to take the text itself seriously, or acknowledge oneself as possibly ignorant and able to be informed by taking seriously the old books through careful study. Selective readings and treating them as a ready-to-hand punchingbag isn't a defense of the classics.

[Anonymous No.10369332]

>>10369157
Not at all! He missed it 100%.

It's as if he predicted that 2008 economic crisis would have been cause by the no-global movement of seattle and the after the crisis you come here and tell me: "yeah ok the crisis was causes by the housing bubble, but Bloom has correctly identified the problem by pointing at the seeattle protests"

[Anonymous No.10369342]

>>10369332
You keep saying he "missed it". Okay, money where your mouth is. Analyze an argument in the book where you think he's wrong, and show us how.

[Anonymous No.10369356]

>>10369176
Elitist is a word used by the right.

And if the leftist is so much against the cannon, and if the left control colleges, then why the position of the canon is still completely there?

Also expanding the canon doesn't me being against that. The fact that now you study Baldwin in composition doesn't mean that shakespeare and plato are any less important.

>the application of some other system of thought or hermeneutic to the text, whether it be a "Marxist reading", a "psychoanalytic reading", a "Heideggerian reading", a deconstructive one, a feminist one, a post-colonialist one, and on and on,

Reading is not a neutral mode, you can't seriously argue that certain interpretations are better than others, or that kind of interpretations are wrong.

Also psychoanalytic and heideggerian readings are conservative readings. And you will have a very hard time using heidegger against the cannon. In fact the only reason american conservative attacked him is because he was a nazi, without even reading him.

I think your ignorance about interpretation and those philosophers you criticize is starting to show.

[Anonymous No.10369381]

>>10369332
That's a ridiculous analogy. I'm drawing a direct connection between the decreased emphasis on the classics in the humanities and a decreased enrollment in the humanities. And i'm blaming the decreased emphasis on the classics on the activist left who valued diversity over conserving our culture's legacy.

[Anonymous No.10369397]

>>10369381
I think you have yet to prove that there is a decreased emphasis of the classics in humanities.

Everywhere the programs are pretty much the same. You are given more choice, so if you want to focus on the classics nothing is stopping you.
There is no shortage of classes on ancient classics nor on shakespeare or modernism.

And if Foucault and Freud and Marx are thought is because they ARE part of the cannon.

[Anonymous No.10369402]

>>10369356
When you use a particular critical lens to interpret a work you limit its scope by forcing everything through the pinhole of a single ideology. Literature is much more complex than marxist or feminist readings can elucidate. There are aspects of human nature and biology at play; religion and psychology play important roles; the life of the author is worth exploring. What the left has done is picked three or four major interpretive lenses, and then forced a 3,000 year old canon through that leftist grinder. Many of them don't even believe in human nature. If you don't believe that human beings are basically the same throughout most of our history, then what's the point of even maintaining a canon?

[Anonymous No.10369424]

>>10369397
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/yale-english-students-call-for-end-of-focus-on-white-male-writers

>Undergraduates at Yale University have launched a petition calling on the English department to abolish a core course requirement to study canonical writers including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, saying that “it is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might read only white male authors”.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/13/teacher-why-i-dont-want-to-assign-shakespeare-anymore-even-though-hes-in-the-common-core/?utm_term=.91d7f39b2136

>I am sad that so many of my colleagues teach a canon that some white people decided upon so long ago and do it without question.

>What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important. In the 25 years that I have been a secondary teacher, I have heard countless times, from respected teachers (mostly white), that they will ALWAYS teach Shakespeare, because our students need Shakespeare and his teachings on the human condition.

These examples are representative of the rhetoric in most schools across the US.

[Anonymous No.10369471]

1/2
>>10369356
>Elitist is a word used by the right.

Yeah, sure, sometimes, when it's contrasted with populist sentiments or expressions. The Left lobs the term around too, for example, against anything that might stink of a hierarchy of human types, and in some cases of arguments concerning whether something or other is better or worse.

>And if the leftist is so much against the cannon, and if the left control colleges, then why the position of the canon is still completely there?
First off, I don't know whether you're conflating me with another anon or not, but maybe try arguing with the contents of what I said than the lame strawmanning you're shoving in my mouth. I don't claim the Left controls colleges. Now, I would claim that the Left is predominantly represented in Humanities departments, and the reason the canon might still remain in some form or other could be explained for quite a few reasons, but one would have to start by noting that "the Left" means many things, and not one monolithic entity. There might be features similar or related between Left movements or figures, but one has to address the situation in truth. In the case of that part of the Left that seeks the dismantling of the canon, the supposed preservation is an illusion; the canon is meant to be made an example of to students, it being assumed that the students are already in some way or another familiar with such and such work of the canon, with the aim being to remove the wool from the eyes of the students and show them the implicit oppressions, prejudices, and negative causal effects of works of the canon. The aim is to enlighten the students so that the canon can be eventually altered in light of the critique, with the bringing-to-presence of those voices and narratives ignored or suppressed prior to our historical period. This is a part of a certain Leftist aim. And sometimes the preservation is as trivial as someone above the department head saying "fuck you I'm not giving funding to the study of some obscure Ethiopian semi-philosopher 'just because'; tell me something about Augustine or whatever and we'll talk money."

>Also expanding the canon doesn't me being against that. The fact that now you study Baldwin in composition doesn't mean that shakespeare and plato are any less important.
You must be new to all this. That, say, Nussbaum might offer some figures to read in addition to everyone else is a different claim in kind then the increasingly more popular vulgar Leftist position that wants to see Plato removed in favor of Hypatia, or Descartes and Nietzsche removed in favor of Zera Yacob, or to see Austen replaced with any other woman author of her period who discusses race. That the position you're describing exists I don't think any of your interlocutors in this thread would deny, but no one who's detailing a concern of Leftist attacks of the canon is bothered by that position, but by the one you're ignoring.

[Anonymous No.10369474]

2/2
>>10369356
>Reading is not a neutral mode, you can't seriously argue that certain interpretations are better than others, or that kind of interpretations are wrong.
Didn't claim it was neutral; the fuller argument is that if all you're doing is applying ready-made hermeneutics to "work x", then "work x" is irrelevant and arbitrary in itself; what's to learn after all in the Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare? Better to skip the pretense and stick to learning Marx and applying his analyses to news items if you need examples.

And Nietzsche of all people would claim that it's silly to pretend that some interpretations aren't better than others; the Will to Power is supposed to be a better interpretation (because more comprehensive) of the phenomena of life than many (if not all) others.

>Also psychoanalytic and heideggerian readings are conservative readings. And you will have a very hard time using heidegger against the cannon. In fact the only reason american conservative attacked him is because he was a nazi, without even reading him.
That's trivially untrue in both cases, and I can point to Irigaray in the former case and Derrida in the latter case of figures who use Left oriented psychoanalytic and Heideggerian readings. You sound so impressed with yourself for noting Heidegger's conservatism, as if it weren't already noticed by some scholars (Thomas Sheehan, Stanley Rosen) how peculiar it is that the blatantly conservative Heidegger has figures of the Left appropriating his work.

>I think your ignorance about interpretation and those philosophers you criticize is starting to show.
Hahahaha, yeah, okay

[Anonymous No.10369492]

>>10369424
I went last year at yake still plenty of white writers

[Anonymous No.10369522]

>>10369492
Who's saying these people have succeeded? The issue is that they're trying and gaining very strong sentiment.

[Anonymous No.10369602]

>You must be new to all this. That, say, Nussbaum might offer some figures to read in addition to everyone else is a different claim in kind then the increasingly more popular vulgar Leftist position that wants to see Plato removed in favor of Hypatia, or Descartes and Nietzsche removed in favor of Zera Yacob, or to see Austen replaced with any other woman author of her period who discusses race. That the position you're describing exists I don't think any of your interlocutors in this thread would deny, but no one who's detailing a concern of Leftist attacks of the canon is bothered by that position, but by the one you're ignoring.

Increasingly popular where? Proposed by who (certainly not by foucault, derrida, or even butler)?

It's a position that it exists only in tumblr leftism and in the polemical strawman of the Blooms (both harold and allan).

It is largely ignored and in fact nothing has really changed in the syllabbi. Really there is no difficulty of access for courses on the great books.

>what's to learn after all in the Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare?

A marxist interpretation of Shakespeare explores how the economics of theater shaped his art. Which again is nothing banal since the importance that selling his art to the public had for Shakespeare.

The point of those analysis is not to apply a ready made made apparatus, but to engage with the text on a different plane with different questions.

Of course there is bad essays. There is people who mine the text for snippets of info that tells them they are right and they just report their fudging with the data.

But bad scholarship is everywhere, look at the sciences and replication crisis, but that is more an effect of careerism and the publish or perish culture (which incidentally is why I dropped out of academia, I couldn't keep up with the pace and write articles I was satisfied with, so I preferred not to produce more trash).

>That's trivially untrue in both cases, and I can point to Irigaray in the former case and Derrida in the latter case of figures who use Left oriented psychoanalytic and Heideggerian readings.

And that shows that the theory is not in itself politically tainted but offers different questions to different people. And ofc it is that way.

Let's take psychoanalysis: to a sexually repressed society it is progressive, to marxists it is conservatives.

And also there is nothing blatant in appropriating Heidegger from the left. Heidegger's philosophy especially the part of dasein analysis is apolitical since it is just a derivation of the conclusions of phenomenology. And Husserl was a liberal progressive himself.

His conservativism comes later with his ethical analysis and the whole doctrine of care.

Similarly deconstruction in itself is not conservative or progressive. It is a fact of texts that can be interpreted in both ways.

[Anonymous No.10369613]

>>10369602
Only when Derrida started to talk about Justice, hospitality, forgiveness that we have seen the root of his leftism.

>>10369522
Certainly not me, nor most leftists. Nor deconstructionists (they depend on canon), nor nietzscheans, nor marxists.

Or anyone who reads Adorno, who again was a big defender of the canon.

[Anonymous No.10369635]

>>10367795
Read Richard Velkley’s book on Strauss And Heidegger, all Straussians are essentially following in the footsteps of Heidegger and his unceasing questioning regarding the return of philosophy to an endless questioning that challenges the modern conceptions of ideas of things that really on forgetting the original problems the Socratic tradition illuminated.

[Anonymous No.10369654]

>>10369522
And also why are you not concerned about the politics that are actually succeeding in dismantling the teaching of the canon in our universities?

As a person who is concern with keeping people teaching Homer and Shakespeare in universities Bloom doesn't tell me anything. I see brilliant students of the classics literally starving to keep their TA jobs hoping one day to go to college and teach kids what they love, and Allan Bloom instead of addressing the real culprits of this occupational crisis, he just says "oh, uh, the kids are not polite and that is going to ruin us"

Even as an example of western values Allan Bloom fails. He is utterly cowardly and decides to attack people with no power (students) rather than the powerful and the politicians that have pushed the humanities out of the discourse. And his cowardice is exactly why he died a celebrated and rewarded man by the powerful.

[Anonymous No.10370232]

>>10368916
Liberals suck.

[Anonymous No.10370261]

>>10369602
>>10369654
>>10369397
>>10369356
>>10369132
>>10368916
>>10368923
Cool it with the Reddit spacing, read a book, and grow the fuck up. You're disgusting.

[Anonymous No.10370269]

>>10369654
Your conception of Bloom as someone who attacks students in order to protect the interests of the economic elites is ridiculous. Throughout his book he portrays leftists students as being the victims of a cultural and educational force that's been brewing since the 1940s; he thinks that the students are being manipulated. He's less concerned with assigning blame than with dispassionately explaining what he views to be the causes of leftist parochialism.

>And also why are you not concerned about the politics that are actually succeeding in dismantling the teaching of the canon in our universities?
I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I am concerned with intersectional politics and poststructualism, yes.

[Anonymous No.10370273]

>>10369397
>And if Foucault and Freud and Marx are thought is because they ARE part of the cannon.
Doesn't change the fact that there are a great deal of powerful people who want destroy the canon a build a new one with Lorde and Baldwin as its cornerstone.

[Anonymous No.10370277]

>>10365120
>socialists ruin humanities programs
>conservatives close ruined humanities programs
what is the problem?

[Anonymous No.10370289]

>>10365193
Both accounts are wrong. Professors are pressured by students to stop teaching Plato because that would be neo-colonialism.

[Anonymous No.10370332]

>>10365238
I say that all the time because it's not like these humanities departments are churning out knowledgeable students capable of thinking themselves out of a wet paper bag. The degrees are worthless in every sense of the word and do not qualify anybody for a job more demanding than fast food.

[Anonymous No.10370341]

>>10365372
>revenues of companies down primarily because of exchange rates
wow you really sent my noggin for a joggin

[Anonymous No.10370416]

>>10370277
this guy gets it

[Anonymous No.10370544]

A Zio-Con psy-op.

[Anonymous No.10370708]

>>10370269
And who are these powerful people manipulating the students in the 80s? Let me guess he doesn't say, so anyone can project their little personal enemy there.

>I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I am concerned with intersectional politics and poststructualism, yes.

Which Allan Bloom's criticism doesn't touch, because instead of posing a serious critique of those philosophies, he aestheticizes about a time when students were more polite. And then he switches his gear to say that students don't agree with him because "they don't have enough moral character"

Utter trash philosophy.

[Anonymous No.10370716]

>>10370273
Name names.

>>10370289
Name a top college where you can't study plato

>>10370277
The problem that that isn't Bloom's argument.

>>10370332
Plenty of successful philosophy students in the world. So you are just projecting.

>>10370341
Probably "as well as declining organic revenues" went over your head. It's ok there is a reason why they use that expression to say "declining sales"

[Anonymous No.10370720]

>>10370708
You haven't read the book.

[Anonymous No.10370760]

>>10370720
Typical straussian hand waving when someone points out that their whole castle is nostalgia masquerading as philosophy.

[Anonymous No.10371111]

>mfw two thirds of this thread is one triggered ressentiment faggot who hasn’t read the book and doesn’t understand why progressivism is hated

[Anonymous No.10371131]

>>10370716
Stanford University & Yale University both just had recent movements to push Ancient Greek philosophy out of the main curriculum.

[Anonymous No.10371140]

>>10370716
How am I projecting when I'm not a humanities major? Do you even know what projection is?

The successful philosophy majors are overwhelmingly from Ivy League universities where it doesn't matter what you study. Most philosophy programs are watered down garbage anyway.

[Anonymous No.10371160]

>>10367584
The second one is literally just an instance of the first

[Anonymous No.10371163]

>>10365166
pretty sure this guy didn't read the book

[Anonymous No.10371176]

>>10371111
lol this

[Anonymous No.10371205]

>>10368877
>Students have to prove their competency for the job in advance, even if they probably could learn the job function in a couple months without taking a bunch of business courses at school

This is so true. The Swiss got this figured out and most students seek out apprenticeships for high level jobs you'd think you need 6 years of schooling for. Someone mentioned earlier, a big problem is that education has been co-opted by utilitarians who think school's only purpose is to get them a job. STEM is the only worthwhile thing to study.

[Anonymous No.10371617]

>>10371131
I asked for a department where you can't study it.
Btw Ancient philosophy is so hated by the department they even putting the course online: https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205/lecture-1

>>10371140
Please tell me what you would change of a specific philosophy degree pedagogy. What is watered down, what do you think that the students aren't studying? Specifics.

[Anonymous No.10371626]

>>10371160
I asked this no one answered:

>>10368875

[Anonymous No.10371638]

>>10371163
Is this your only defense left?

[Anonymous No.10371660]

>>10365166
we obviously need to force science students to be grounded in the humanities/liberal arts. these kids need to read some fiction so they don't leave school as cultureless autistics

[Anonymous No.10371747]

>>10371617
>Btw Ancient philosophy is so hated by the department they even putting the course online: https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205/lecture-1
That's a Greek History course, not an Ancient Philosophy course. But nice try, Reddit.

[Anonymous No.10371762]

>>10371747
Is this the only rebuttal you have?

[Anonymous No.10371901]

>>10371638
just my observation man i don't want to argue with somebody that thinks they understand the book but don't

[Anonymous No.10371923]

>>10371901
Again this is the Straussian defense at every turn.
The "you can't really refute my point because you don't know what my point is."

Even at its best (Rosen) there is always this rhetorical move "well you see there is all this clues that this author is not arguing for what he seems to be arguing... what's his point you ask? Ah that is for you to find out!"

[Anonymous No.10371954]

>>10371923
>Less people enrolling in humanities, mean more departments closing, less hirings, which leads to less scholars and less people enrolling. Which leaves us all with a population of uneducated people who think that books are stupid. Which is what Bloom refers to as the closing of the American mind
well if you're the same anon from above i think you don't get what he means by "the closing of the american mind". I think what he means is that there's a lack of interest in learning, not that there's a lack of funds to get people there. It's important now because of the Bernie mentality that College is the new High School.

[Anonymous No.10372060]

>>10368857
It's also due to the sense that, even with a carefully reasoned set of beliefs, the average joe will have no ability to bring about change on any level. Take a look at social media: You can make as big a fuss as you'd like on an issue, have thousands at your side, and still see it all come to naught because the one man with power said "No".

[Anonymous No.10372088]

>>10372060
You think people have less political power today than they did in the late 19th-early 20th century, when middle class literacy was flourishing?

[Anonymous No.10372118]

>>10371954
There is a lack of interest because there is a lack of teaching.

In france, people talk about serious novels all the time because they are taught rigorously in high school. People read them, because people around them have read them, and they talk about them and even if you don't want in the beginning you are pushed into reading it.

But why should a teenager read Dostoevsky today? Who will he talk about it to? And if he does try to talk it to people they will either reply with a stare that says "I have no idea what you are on about" or he will called weird.

Culture has to be in circulation to be interesting.

[Anonymous No.10372121]

>>10372088
They executed kings, would that be possible today?

[Anonymous No.10372146]

>>10372121
Perhaps not, but not because the people have less power. People today are simply far more comfortable and materially well off than in the past. Note that I say materially. I think I agree with you that intellectually the people of the last century were better of than us, but for the great majority the most important thing in life is how much pleasure they have access to, and we undeniably have that in spades. Hence, no impetus for political change.

[Anonymous No.10372152]

>>10372118
I agree that culture has to revive itself constantly and I think it's not being revived now because most American education has to do with "inequality", "bigotry", "muh hitler", etc. It's a tired cycle and kids will be less and less engaged in classes when all they're taught is the bad things Americans are responsible for instead of the good Americans have contributed to the world.

[Anonymous No.10372161]

>>10372152
You do realize that you are telling me that Americans are being triggered by humanities because they are not enough of a safespace

[Anonymous No.10372186]

>>10372161
I think we're talking about two different things.. The safe spaces that exist now have to do with "privilege". I'm saying that education now encourages an anti-American identity that's justified by slavery. That's bad because without Americans that want to revive America, the culture will keep decaying.

[Anonymous No.10372235]

>>10372186
So after saying that humanities are not nice enough and americans avoid them because it makes them feel bad...

now you are saying that you are mad not because historians are reporting something false or inaccurate, but because what they are teaching is not useful to your political program...
ok.

[Anonymous No.10372258]

>>10372235
It's not useful for the United States for its young people to hate the country, and compared to what? Europe's track record? No other western country has turned into such a massive producer of goods so quickly. So what made United States successful? Why is that not in focus instead of mistakes that are dwarfed in comparison to those that other countries have made? Because of Christianity? Because there isn't a 1:1 ratio of men:women in every field?

[Anonymous No.10372330]

>>10372258
Compared to its stated goals of democracy and justice?

Hypocrisy devalues virtue, and part of the moral decay of the us is exactly because of the hypocrisy of its history. Hustlers, scammers, and charming snake-oil salesmen have been personal favorites of the culture for a while, and people have come to realize that the projected virtues are just a very effective pr campaign to be upheld in public, but be scorned in private.

You want to promote virtue? You have to be merciless and harsh towards you first, not like now where everyone is liberal with themselves and a scold towards others.

[Anonymous No.10372390]

>>10372330
But have these "favorites" of U.S. culture been the defining part of the culture? Have these hypocrisies compared in magnitude to the accomplishments by the culture? I just think it's a waste to disregard the accomplishments and only focus on shortcomings. Also, this view that America is strictly founded on lies by slavers and rapers, what good has this view done for culture? As far as I can tell it's only led to high (and low) society non-achievers and "intellectuals" trying to take shots at the legend, but the legend will outlive them.

[Anonymous No.10372444]

>>10372390
But they are not on the same footing.

That the US was funded by slavers it is true, that the us is a virtues nation is false.

Defending virtue with lies is self-defeating. The truth might not be much better at it, but it is the truth and like virtue its own reward.

[Anonymous No.10372445]

>>10364753
Straussian bullshit

[Anonymous No.10372463]

>>10372444
ok so from that logic if any person makes an accomplishment but they also wronged people in the past, their accomplishments are nullified and any research into how the accomplishments were achieved is not productive. If that's the game you choose to live by then by all means continue not-achieving and postulating, but that's not the game I play. I think results are more important than purity because nobody in the world has lived a totally pure lifestyle.

[Anonymous No.10372512]

>>10372463
I don't think that there aren't historians of any political stripe that recognize the achievements of the us. Even people incredibly to the left like Tony Judt speak loudly about the american achievements and about its role in reconstruction after world war 2.

On the contrary, the fact that a ridiculous idea like american exceptionalism is still taken seriously in public discourse it shows how actually the culture skews to the right.

The problem here is not that historians are being too disruptive, but that the public is offended and triggered when they hear what really happened.

I was reading an article by one of Bill Clinton's economic advisors doing a series of traveling lectures about the birth of lobbies and how businesses have imposed their will against consumers starting in the 70s. And he said that one lady stood up and got mad at him for "making her feel bad." Not because what he was saying was untruthful, but because hearing the tactics that were used maked her feel ashamed and he blamed him for bringing that to his attention.

This may or may not be true. I don't know. But this is what your argument seems to me.

[Anonymous No.10372629]

>>10372512
Ok I do think there is a strange sense of entitlement that modern people have. It's becoming illegal to offend in some places (NYC has anti-transphobia laws). I think living in a society driven by this mindset has split the populous and could continue to split it further.

[Anonymous No.10372788]

I don't know what the idiot in this thread is on about. I go to Penn State, which could probably be considered one of the more prestigious public schools out there. I've taken several intro-to-medium level philosophy courses to fulfill some gen-ed requirements. It's been a pretty wide-range of courses such as logic, epistemology, existentialism etc, and I really haven't read anything Greek in any of these classes. The earliest thing I think I was given to read was a piece on Agrippan skepticism by Sextus Empericus, who I guess is considered part of the Greeks but he's really at the tail end. And in literally every single course I've taken with the philosophy department, the last 1/3 of the class has always been devoted to postmodern stuff that's come out in the last few decades regardless of what the course was supposed to focus on, stuff like critical race theory, feminist epistemology, white ignorance, etc. I mean I remember taking an European Existentialism class and the entire last 1/3 of the course was African American existentialism. I've never been given anything by Plato, or even Kant or Hegel. And nearly every single one of my professors has been openly left wing, whether that be supporting Marxism or the Green Party or what have you. It's sort of discouraging in a way, I always feel I have to tiptoe around my words in these classes because I don't want to piss off the guy who's going to be grading my papers for the next semester. I feel bad for the other students too though, because while I find philosophy genuinely interesting and read on my own outside of the class, most people don't and they're just being spoon-fed this bullshit without much of a choice.

[Anonymous No.10372835]

>>10365230
>the right is responsible for the state of humanities
>in a largely left leaning academic atmosphere
Kek

[Anonymous No.10372847]

>>10372512
Except American exceptionalism is hardly a righr wing idea. Even Obama believes in it.

Your thesis is that a culture is rightwing that has been going nowhere but to the left for a century now, even against the will of the great majority as well as the spirit of the constitution

[Anonymous No.10372916]

>>10372788
The fun part is that it's very easy to disprove.

Let's see a couple of professors:

Bernasconi:

Recent Courses:
Medieval Ethics
Hegel's Philosophy of Religion

Mendieta:
Recent Courses
Homer’s Iliad
Ethics and Temporality
Philosophy of War and Peace

Moore:
Recent Courses
Socrates through the history of philosophy (a graduate seminar)
Ancient philosophy (a yearly intermediate undergraduate course)
Introduction to epistemology
Philosophy of education
Greek language and literature

Uygar Abaci:
Current Projects

I am currently working on a book on Kant’s revolutionary theory of modality.


Bowman:

Courses
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
The Philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Literature
19th Century Philosophy
Modern Philosophy
Introduction to Epistemology
The Philosophy of Spinoza
Philosophy of Religion

Sentesy:

Ancient Philosophy (with Amelie Rorty) -- With Amelie Rorty, you even had one of the best scholars on Aristotle on campus lol

And this is from a very continental oriented campus, do we want to see the programs somewhere more conservative... I don't know carnagie-mellon?

Spoiler: it's all epistemology and logic there

[Anonymous No.10372930]

>>10372847
As you can see, the whole "the left doesn't say anything positive they are just piling hate on america" is false.

Look it's very easy what the game is:

Conservatives like to defund universities: they don't want to pay taxes plus the less educated are other people's children the less competition there is for their privately educated elite school kids

But then they have to blame someone for the state of ignorance and decay of the school system, so they point their finger professors in the humanities departments (who everyone dislikes anyway because they are so cultured and sophisticated) and say that those guys who teach poetry are the powerful figure who hate our society and our culture and aim to destroy it.

Meanwhile, they have lived 30 years with no job security and on the poverty line so that they could study and teach kids.

[Anonymous No.10372946]

>>10372930
Funding is hardly the main problem that universities have. Why is it so hard to get this through your thick skull? We produce students and professionals who see everything in a black and white way, conformable to leftist thought.

Le ebil conservatives are probably right do defund what is left of the himanities.

[Anonymous No.10372950]

>>10372916
Of the people you've listed I've taken epistemology courses with Bowman and Moore and both inserted postmodern stuff like feminist epistemology and critical race theory into the end of their courses. The worst part though is how they presented it. Neither would come out and say that this is the sort of stuff that they genuinely believed, they presented it as "let's look at this stuff it sure is wacky and absurd!" But then if anyone in the class points out how it really is wacky and absurd, they got shot down immediately. I know Bowman's boss is Nancy Tuana, who's known for writing about the heterosexist epistemic ignorance of the female orgasm and how we should should just support Foucoult's pleasure for pleasure's sake.

[Anonymous No.10372965]

>>10372950
Again that is common everywhere, departments have a line that is pushed more or less. At chicago u you can't praise judith butler because Pippin hates her. At Carnagie Mellon you can't mention a continental.

Yet don't you find strange that this cries about the loss of our culture only happened when people started to read Foucault and Fannon?

Where were the conservatives when the neo-positivists dismantled the whole teaching of history of philosophy in the US? The continentals had to fight before it started to be slowly brought back into departments in the 1990s. And a lot of the difficulty of teaching history of philosophy it's because analytic philosophy thought that it was useless.

[Anonymous No.10373010]

>>10372946
Look Trump is in power now: why is he not improving the teaching condition of the humanities in middleschool. Teach philosophy in highschool, why isn't he doing it?

Why hasn't Bush done it?

Why hasn't reagan done it?

Why hasn't Nixon done it?

They are not even proposing it. Instead what they are proposing is: cut taxes, defund public schools, offer vouchers for charter schools. What good does that to culture?

[Anonymous No.10373013]

>>10372965
I'm not saying that they're necessarily against the teaching of the classics, but that they only want the classics to be taught so that they can use it to push their own heavily politicized bullshit. They want you to learn it, but they also want you to interpret it through an anti-male, anti-white, anti-heterosexual lens and anything else is not really given the time of day. Frankly I'd rather classics not be taught at all then be used for the ends these people seek to use them for.

The worst part is that a lot of this stuff is obviously not written in English, so it requires a translated version for undergraduates. What I think you're going to be seeing more and more is this type of stuff-
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html
Where the book is not only being interpreted through a feminist/critical race theorist/anti-heteronormative lens, but entirely translated through that lens. They're changing the very foundation of what the classics are for an entire generation, I don't know how you could possibly see that as a positive.

[Anonymous No.10373077]

>>10373010
Whst is he supposed to do? Go in and tell people to start teaching in proper manner?
I'm sure they'd listen to him and not start screaming that he's part of a Russian conspiracy to undermine American universities.

[Anonymous No.10373156]

>>10373010
The far right wants to defund schools because they've realized they lost the battle for academia. The radical left has taken over education in the US so the only route they see left is to cut it off at its source, because whatever fills the space can't possible be more hostile to them.

[Anonymous No.10373476]

>>10373013
Have you read that trabslation? It’s fabtastic, one of the best translation works I’ve read. Again you are letting your ideology clouding your judgment. You should be happy that someone dedicated their life to do that.

[Anonymous No.10373495]

>>10373077
Like put philosophy in the curriculum for high schools?

>>10373156
Excuses. There is plenty of conservative departments and plenty of non-politicized depts. Philosophy in the us is still predominantly analytical, and the classics departments have been for years extremely conservative. They are still getting torn to pieces because businesses don’t care.

[Anonymous No.10374112]

>>10373495
My personal experience with the philosophy department at a large well known school says otherwise, as does what other's have told me about their schools as well as the modern literature I've been exposed to. You can claim whatever you want, but I have yet to see any evidence that American academia is dominated by extreme conservatives. Quite the opposite.

[Anonymous No.10374123]

>>10364753

This book honestly shocked me to the core. A valuable document for our time and for the foreseeable future.