Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Postmodernism

  • Truth Rediscovered: A Humanistic View of Rationality

    By Jay Jeffers ___ The Buddha said, “Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” Or maybe he didn’t. Scholars would have to chime in on the popular interpretation through the lens of history, linguistics, and the like. Either way it’s a vivid quote. The real problem isn’t whether or…

  • The (Im)Possibility of Discussion on Social Media

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Sheena Mason (SUNY Oneonta) and Kevin Currie-Knight dialogue about the perils and promises of discussion on social media. (Sheena is more optimistic about the potential than Kevin is.) Along the way, they talk about perspectives on truth and whether humans are capable of getting it in an objective way, the postmodern-y…

  • Life of a philosophy youtuber … and postmodernism

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ In this wide ranging discussion, Kevin talks with YouTuber Lewis Waller, of the philosophy/history YouTube channel Then and Now (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkS_…​). They talk about YouTube as a venue for intellectual content, how and why Lewis does what he does with his channel, how Postmodernism influences his (and Kevin’s) intellectual approach, and more.…

  • Thought Control and Cultural Decline

    by Mark English ___ Late last year I wrote a piece about censorship and humor, alluding to the fact that in times of oppression and excessive censorship, humor tends to bubble up and create a space for the expression of dissenting thoughts and feelings. The self-expression involved here may be controlled and deliberate (as in…

  • Exhaustion of the Dialectic as End of History

    by E. John Winner ___ (1) Every field of human endeavor requires communication, and in communication, language generates ideas in the ordinary sense of that term (and sometimes in the technical philosophic senses of the term, as well).  Since communication is a process, developing over time and in concrete contexts of social involvement, every idea…

  • Postmodernism as Truth in Advertising

    by Kevin Currie-Knight __ Does postmodernism spell the death of reason? If you have been caught up in some recent online discussions of it, you’d think so. Postmodernism, its critics (often of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web) say, poses an existential threat to reason, a bedrock value of “the West.” An article on how French…

  • Experientialism and Reality

    by Mark English Daniel Kaufman has written on a number of occasions of certain unfortunate trends in contemporary culture, some involving a disconnect between self-perceptions and social reality. In the past he has highlighted the moral vacuousness and hypocrisy associated with ‘the cult of the self’ as well as the distortions and dangers of identity…

  • There are Four Lights: Trump and Postmodernism

    by David Ottlinger We should have known something was seriously wrong when Oxford dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ the word of the year for 2016. (1) It was a sign that a deep confusion had taken root in the fertile soil of our public’s widespread philosophical illiteracy.  “The nature of reality is an open question in the…