What does postmodernism perform?
The term “postmodernism” (or “poststructuralism”) is notoriously elusive; it’s sometimes said that if you think you know what it is, you don’t. But that doesn’t stop its practitioners from talking...
View ArticleDeconstruct the subject, deconstruct the object
Lately I’ve been noting a pattern that seems to pop up across in the history of philosophy. Once philosophers deconstruct either the thinking human subject – the self – or nonhuman objects, new...
View ArticleDialectical and demonstrative argument
I closed my post about Peimin Ni’s gongfu with an important argument of Ni’s, which I didn’t have the space to address there. I had been arguing against Ni’s ends-relativist viewpoint, in which...
View ArticleHow to answer the perennial questions
It’s often said that philosophy is about questions rather than answers. Yet it is in the nature of a question that one who asks it at least wishes to find an answer, even if that answer remains...
View ArticleAcademia’s details
A decade or so ago, in David Hall‘s graduate class on method and theory in the study of religion, Hall asked the class why the study of religion in recent years had focused so much on particular...
View ArticleWilber’s post/modern turn
I’ve recently been writing an article on Ken Wilber’s thought, and have come to realize just how much his ideas have changed over the past ten years. His readers, and increasingly he himself, have come...
View ArticleOn innovation through conservatism
I noted two weeks ago how Ken Wilber’s recent post/modern turn (“Wilber-5″) is right in important respects, but suggested important problems with it. Last week I noted empirical problems: sociological...
View ArticleOne way to classify philosophy
As of this Thursday, Love of All Wisdom will be three years old. I’m happy with the way the blog has been working out – the ideas I’ve been able to get out to the world, and the discussion they’ve...
View ArticleOn the economic value of the humanities
[This entry will be cross-posted at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.] I’ve been asked to expand on some brief comments I made a little while ago in a Facebook thread. They pertain to the...
View ArticleMust we come to terms with postmodernity?
This post is a followup to last week’s, and is best read in tandem with it. I argued that the difference between modernity and modernism (which is to say, the difference between modern and modernist)...
View ArticleWe shouldn’t avoid “should” statements
Last year my friend Craig Martin made an interesting post on the subject of normativity – what we might, for lack of a better word, call value judgements – in academic religious studies. I disagree...
View ArticleLet us not define ourselves by biological categories
In my mind, one of the most important implications of qualitative individualism is that we human beings should not be defined by bodily or biological categories. I think that point has done a great...
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