Something which I found mildly amusing is a page which present randomly generated post-modernist philosophy papers:
elsewhere.org/pomo/
They are rubbish, of course.
It is not a valid critique of post-modernism, but perhaps a valid performatic critique of people who read philosophy with ‘pretentions of understanding’.
Hi Qoeleth:
I remember using this Postmodernism Generator for fun several years back, after I had been informed of “the Sokal Affair”. For those who are not yet aware of it, in 1996, New York University Physics Professor Alan Sokal was fed up with what he saw as the pretentiousness and academic silliness of postmodernism in the Universities (particularly in the English departments and Social Sciences, but there are many other offenders). Basically, he took issue with the postmodernist idea that knowledge of the outside world is not real, or empirically/scientifically testable, but rather a “social construct”; ie, the mind constructs reality based upon its sense impressions (a big part of postmodernism is the idea that people create their own “meaning” from sensation, so your reality/truth may not be the same as mine…moral relativism, anyone?). As a physicist/astronomer, I was forced to go through a lot of this nonsense in the few “liberal arts” courses I took at the universities, and I used to lampoon it mercilessly every chance I got…so you can probably see where I’m going with this.
Anyway, Sokal thought that he could create a similar “postmodern” physics, as a hoax…argue that you could have a “socially constructed” reality for something esoteric, like quantum mechanics or gravity (an incredibly stupid idea, as gravity exists regardless of whether anyone in the world is there to “socially construct” it). So he wrote a super-abstract paper called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, using all the postmodernist language/theories to argue that much of modern physics was not objectively real, but rather, was a “social construct”. He submitted it as a joke to the Academic Postmodernist Journal Social Text, and guess what? They loved the paper! Finally, even the “hard sciences” would fall under the postmodernist spell! This was just what the intellectual philosophers wanted to hear. Completely taken in, they published it and gave it high praise. Then Sokal went public, and informed all the intellectuals that the whole thing was a hoax, and they had been roundly fooled by
“a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics”. Of course the postmodernist philosophers were furious, and the scientists all had a good laugh at their expense.
Background here if you’re curious to know more:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Wikipedia includes one of the mathematical put-ons in the article…ie, it sounds learned, but if you know what he’s talking about, you can see its a big joke:
“Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and ‘pro-choice’, so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice.”
LOL…or should I say, “the experience or manifestation of mirth, amusement, scorn, or joy, carried out in a rambunctious or amplified manner, suitable for the hearing or sensation through the aural mechanism, of a humanoid biped”
Jacques
Had I taken a philosophy course in college, I probably would have had to buy “Philosphy for Dummies” first.