/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22699187]

I’m in a grad program I hate to support a job I also hate. Some dumb bitch is posting feminist positionality and standpoint epistemology in a 3000 course about fucking nothing at all.

What are the best critiques of post-structuralist / solipsistic / 21st century gay tranny woo out there that aren’t from the Benzo Canada guy or some YouTube philosopher?

[Anonymous No.22699195]

Verification not required.

[Anonymous No.22699238]

>>22699187
lmao just reflect on what you're saying and what you are.
'I'm somewhere I don't want to be despite choosing to be there, to support a job that I hate despite staying there', and 'someone else in my program is posting philosophy that I don't like yet clearly do not understand given I'm asking for easy gotcha talking points' rather than just reading about it.
You're coming to a board of idiots who do not read to ask for advice on how to face up to the one thing that you're supposed to be good at. This is what you do and who you are, yet the 'dumb bitch' has stumped you. Maybe try reading what she's talking about and coming up with counterpoints? Maybe try understanding a fraction of the ideas there before asking for ways to discredit it. You might come to realise the post-structuralism is not the same as 'standpoint epistemology', and neither of them have anything to do with solipsism.
I doubt you're actually in a grad program anyway; probably an undergraduate who will memorise a couple out-of-context conservative views against 'neo-marxism', but you'll be much too afraid to actually speak up in class or post online, so you'll just seethe quietly.
The best part is you're so beholden to your ridiculous conservative idiocy that you're forced to admit that all of this is your fault for not trying hard enough and making enough of yourself.
>inb4 projecting leftie
not even close, you're jumping at shadows

[Anonymous No.22699244]

>>22699238
Drop your recommendations whenever you’re done with whatever the fuck all that was.

[Anonymous No.22699247]

>>22699244
i recommend you do your assigned readings, dickhead. get off 4chan

[Anonymous No.22699263]

>>22699247
I don’t know if you’re actually an assblasted leftist or legitimately autistic. It’s a research methods course focused on rhetoric and we’re on the feminist methods section. I had to read Donna Haraway and it’s just fucking awful. It’s people turning science into literary criticism. Haraway’s critique of science is literally solipsistic - she purports that experiences outside of humanity are impacted by human perceptions.

I’ve been subjected to post-structuralist and standpoint authors exclusively in this course and it’s bugging me. I asked for recs and you shat out that dildo of a post up there. I specifically asked for recommendations that WERENT conservative or reactionary, or did you not understand I meant Jordan Peterson when I said Benzo Canada?

[Anonymous No.22699294]

>>22699263
>donna haraway
>solipsistic
this is why I told you to do your readings kid. Haraway does refer to situated knowledge, but she's trying to rehabilitate objectivity against a variety of naive epistemologies that have steadily been demolished throughout the 20th century (foundationalism, coherentism, naive realism). Just because she suggests that knowledge is produced socially and from a local perspective, does not make her a solipsist. That is a ridiculous exaggeration. She's just denying retarded 'view-from-nowhere' epistemologies of yesteryear. Get with the fucking program. No serious historian of science has endorsed naive scientific realism in 150 years. Haraway goes goes for embodied objectivity instead. Get that? Objectivity. She's basically Kantian insofar as knowledge is produced by translatable consensus across perspectives. If this is too much for you to understand then you are not up to the task of thinking.
You don't need recommendations to refute this stuff because you don't even understand it yet.
Moreover I can't imagine you're surprised to be pegged as a conservative, given your disdain for "21st century gay tranny woo". Don't act shocked when I call a duck-walking, duck-talking thing a duck. I don't give a shit if you don't like jordan peterson.

[Anonymous No.22699298]

>>22699294
kek mad as fuck leftist detected

[Anonymous No.22699312]

>>22699187
*vents dissatisfaction on internet*
*gets vitriol*
Surprised pikachu face.jpg

Anyway, yeah dude the educational institution in this country is a rotten corpse, buckling under the weight of its victim-adherents

Maybe you’re the type of guy who can drink liquid shit 8 hours a day for some auxiliary goal. I don’t know. Why not just stop drinking liquid shit?

[Anonymous No.22699329]

>>22699294
>kid
I’m glad the twenty minutes you spent frantically Googling who this person even is gave you enough confidence to say “kid” on 4chan unironically.

Haraway is absolutely a solipsist because she infers human perceptions into non-human entities. She attacks viewpoints that were already discredited by scientists from before her time, and dismisses bias-reducing qualities of science in favor of “embodied” objectivity, which does away with objectivity in favor of the same tired oppressor/oppressed binary she sprinkled throughout the entire piece. She is not Kantian; where did Kant ever write that translatable consensus was reducible solely to self-identified societal positionality? These are inventions of Haraway. She, like you, ignores the specifics of the theories she mangles in favor of the aforementioned gay woo.

21st century gay tranny woo has been critiqued from numerous left wing perspectives, mainly because it produces reactionary fuckwits like yourself who pounce on any perceived criticism of your pet theories as attacks from an oppressor class. Drop the recs or stop posting you silly goose.

[Anonymous No.22699332]

>>22699294
>me poopoo in my daipies
ty for your contribution

[Anonymous No.22699378]

>Manufacturing Consent
Describes how U.S. interests manipulate and controls the media
>The Society of the Spectacle
Explains modern techniques of control by said U.S. interests in current times
>the Democracy Project
Describes the rise and downfall of the occupy movement
>Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Explains how U.S. interests have coerced the rest of the world into control through debt
>People's History of the United States
Point to focus on: historical context of the downfall of the labor movement
>The Utopia of Rules
Explains the bureaucratization of the world, especially schools (pic related)


Basically, it boils down to the fact that after OWS, U.S. interests cemented the final nail in the coffin of class consciousness by targeting identity issues. The rise of identity issues within the zeitgeist convinced colleges to spend money on it. People paid money and did awful things to get the subject first on your mind and subsequently painted as the core of your problems instead of asking: 1. why am I in a grad program I hate and why am I working a job I hate?

[Anonymous No.22699400]

>>22699378
Thanks, I’ll check them out. I’ve already read Manufacturing Consent.

[Anonymous No.22699723]

>>22699244
Nta, but that was you getting BTFO

[Anonymous No.22699727]

>>22699723
kek, another seething leftist with no book recommendation

[Anonymous No.22699737]

>>22699727
This looks right up your alley, king

[Anonymous No.22700195]

>>22699723
Could you respond to >>22699329 before you pretend to be another person!? I feel like you’re taking this all very personally and I’m not sure why.

[Anonymous No.22700270]

>>22699187
>grad program
Got me beat there

Just keep in mind women would kill each other if men didn’t exist

[Anonymous No.22700276]

>>22699294
>Moreover I can't imagine you're surprised to be pegged as a conservative
There it is, folks. The classic leftist academic snark

[Anonymous No.22700281]

>>22699378
>muh American boogeyman
Is he hiding in the closet?

[Anonymous No.22700333]

>>22699187
The best rebuttal is a coherent theory of morality and freedom, not anything setting out to engage in le culture wars.

Pic related is pretty good, although I think it tends to read later advances from the Patristics and Neoplatonists back into Plato. The book title is misleading for two reasons. First, Plato is way more of a focus than Hegel. Second, the focus really isn't mysticism, except to the extent that the theory of freedom, morality, and a duty to knowledge gets grounded in a vertical view of reality, where things that are more necessary and more self-determining are, in ways, more real than mere "bundles of cause." The mystical side is this, not played up in the direction you would expect, and for something that actually looks at mysticism, I would suggest William Harmless' "Mystics" or Thomas Merton's "The Inner Experience."

The basic idea is this:

1. As Plato points out in the Republic, man wants what is truly good, not what currently appears to be good to us. We are self transcending to the extent that we go beyond ourselves, beyond our current desires and beliefs. This is why people reject going into the "Experience Machine" that makes us feel good all the time, or want to "wake up from the Matrix," in thought experiments.

Further, I feel like the thesis can be improved by noting this: knowledge, freedom, and morality are deeply related. Why? Because morality is likely to be complex because our world is complex, and it will be difficult to discover objective moral principles to live by (note, objective is not a synonym for noumenal, in-itself, or true, objective means "lacking the biases associated with specific perspectives.")

This said, we clearly need knowledge to be moral subjects, to discover how to be good people. So we have a duty to knowledge. Second, we can only be good people if we are free to do so. But freedom must be developed. Self control, discovering our authentic selves, setting up social institutions that promote freedom (both negative freedom from constraint (rights) and positive "freedom to" (e.g. universal literacy so people are "free to study").

Knowledge also enhances freedom by advancing our causal powers. We aren't free to traverse oceans in a day without first inventing airliners. So there is also a duty to knowledge in terms of freedom.

One free man can choose to take away another free man's freedom, which is why freedom always has a social dimension (Hegel) and involves institutions shaping our identity (the family, markets, states) and causing us to identify with the other (love in its pure form).

So, even if we lack objective moral principles for practical use, we have an objective duty to advance knowledge and freedom to promote mortality, and this is exactly the sort of self transcendent agenda that Plato, the Patristics, and Hegel have in mind. It is a life grounded in going beyond, in the search for knowledge and that rational self control of the self...

[Anonymous No.22700344]

>>22700333
...and love. Not love in the "feel good" shallow sense. By love we mean identity of the self in the other. As Hegel says, "feeling at home in the world." This is where the mystical perception of unity becomes key. For we are only uncaused by that which lays outside of us when we fail to properly identify with the greater transcendent whole.

Recognition of this transcendent whole is strong in the Patristics and some medievals, which is why they are rightly labeled panentheistic (not panthesism) rather than classically theistic by scholars.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is good too, but dense and not a fully coherent system IMO.

[Anonymous No.22700350]

>>22700276
gonna cry?

[Anonymous No.22700355]

>>22699263
Objectivity a Very Short Introduction is a pretty good critique of the old positivist "objectivity = truth" may may that doesn't drift into POMO and structuralism. It's also only 90 pages. Worth checking out IMHO.

Still, it falls into the same sort of Kantian nonsense that most philosophy today does. I always laugh when people say "whoa, Kant was such a genius, neuroscience says he was right about how experience relates to objects," because, of course he seems right, the same dogmatic presuppositions are already baked in. They are assumed at the beginning in a lot of theory, uncritically. A lot of "indirect realism" and Kantian crypto dualism is just baked into the starting assumptions.

Books on getting past this are harder. There is Houlgate's commentary on the opening of Hegel's Greater Logic. It's excellent but also quite difficult. Still, best analysis showing the glaring flaws in a set of ideas that have massive influence in the sciences today. It might not convince you Hegel was right, but it will probably convince you Kantians are wrong.

[Anonymous No.22700470]

>>22699238
spbp