Don't throw Foucault out with the Judith Butler bathwater

While I like Helen Pluckrose and agree with much of Critical Cynical Theories, here is an antithesis from the Genspect Bigger Picture Conference last month. 

Heather Brunskell-Evans, a Quaker and a philosopher, explains why we shouldn’t throw the Foucault baby out with the Judith Butler bathwater. The Confluence of Philosophy, Feminism & Queer Theory. 

Also at Genspect Bigger Picture Conference: Gender Ideology as a Religion with Colette Colfer.

Masculinity, toxic and otherwise

This post compares two thinkers on the topic of masculinity and whether it is, to coin a phrase, toxic or not. They are Will Storr and Richard Wrangham.

Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy – recommended by Jordan Peterson – is free to read as a PDF and listen on audio at www.stephenhicks.org/explaining-postmodernism

Here are extracts from the Introduction about postmodern ‘Critical Legal Theory’ and the postmodern view of education.

Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis by Richard Webster
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Rarely have I read a book where the author tries so hard to impress upon his readers the breadth of his study and knowledge of his subject. It's hard to believe that Webster would have intended to make his readers feel small and ignorant. But if he truly intended to write for a lay audience, surely he should have fleshed out some of his vast generalisations and explained the background and context for people who haven't already read everything by and about Freud, as he seems to have done.

Examples:
“The resemblances which Brown and Erikson found between Lutheran Protestantism and classical psychoanalysis can scarcely be disputed.” (Introduction, page 5: why )
“Sulloway’s book, like Roazen's, is a curious mixture of sceptical historicism and irrational piety.” (Prologue, page 21)

I gave up at Chapter One, entitled “Caul and cocaine”, where Webster writes: “[Freud] had been born in a caul …” In a 500-page book, where “caul” is in the title of a chapter, Webster does not deign to explain what it is. A phrase like “the amniotic sack in which a baby is held in the womb” would have been helpful. But no, the implied message (in my humble opinion) seems to be that if you are that ignorant you shouldn’t be reading this book.

I wish Webster could have explained in his Intro and Prologue why he thought Freud was wrong. What I got was mainly ‘Why Freud was Big-headed’ and ‘Why other people agreed with his high opinion of himself’.

Webster was recommended to me by a good friend and the book has a gushing endorsement from Dervla Murphy on the cover, so I had high expectations of this book, but they were not fulfilled. I look forward to hearing about a book that explains why Freud was wrong!

View all my reviews

Murray Bookchin

The Murray Bookchin Reader is available as an ebook at libcom.org and a free audio (MP3) download at www.archive.org, which summarizes it thus:

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Latest version of On Anarchism was published 2014 by Penguin, earlier versions available as PDF.

Colin Ward

Colin Ward (1924-2010) wrote Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction in 2004 (one in the Oxford VSI series).

Max Planck on dualism and creation

As a postscript to two-miracles, here is Max Planck on dualism and creation. Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum theory.

Two miracles

There are two miracles which are routinely denied by thinkers whom I otherwise admire and respect who can be termed materialists (or atheists or physicalists). The first miracle is the creation of the universe. The second is human consciousness. I don’t understand how materialists can bring these two phenomena coherently into their system.

Descartes Meditation 6

Finally, in Sixth Meditation, Part 2, Descartes mentions how the mind and body interact:

Cartesian Dualism, Mysterians and miracles

More links for the book group discussion on Cartesian Dualism. Sorry that so many links are to Wikipedia.

Cartesian Dualism and Free Will

This is to inform our book group discussion on Cartesian Dualism. I've added the related topic of Free Will.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig - GoodReads calls it 'one of the most important and influential books written in the past half-century.' Here is my favourite one of the 6,662 Reviews (by Richard):

Tonio Kröger

Just read an old school report from my VI form German teacher who said I was a bit like Tonio Kröger when I was 17. Tonio who?

Gerald Priestland The Future of Violence

Comments on Gerald Priestland's The Future of Violence, Hamish Hamilton, 1974.

My main problem with this book is that Priestland does not really consider ‘structural’ violence. He dismisses it as ‘injustice’ that does not count as violence because it is not ‘physical’ (page 10-11). On the contrary, economic and social forces can be just as effective as physical forces in perpetrating violence. This is for at least two reasons. Firstly, economic and social forces can starve people into submission or death just as effectively as physical violence. Secondly, they can be - and often are - backed, beneath a thin veneer of civilisation, by physical violence from the same powers as carry out the structural violence.

There are countless examples of structural violence:

• benefit sanctions and unemployment that starve people into submission;
• the soft cops of social services that remove people’s children (and will call in the police if the parents resist)
• schools that punish pupils in all sorts of ways short of coproral punishment. 

And so on.

Priestland is also mistaken about the role of the media in manufacturing consent. He thinks ‘the media have tried to cultivate sympathy for the Biafrans, the Bengalis, Uganda Asians, gipsies, Ulster Catholics and inner-city coloured people’ (page 12). But contrast this with the history of racism towards foreigners in the British media. In the 1930s there was the hatred towards migrants shown by the Daily Mail when it campaigned against allowing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany into Britain. Most of the media had racist stereotypes of black people in the 1960s and 70s as muggers, druggies and sexual predators. The media today, especially the Daily Mail, are equally vitriolic about Muslims, asylum seekers and EU migrants. The targets may vary, but the racism of the media remains the same. Against that background it is hard to believe that there was a golden age of tolerance to foreigners in 1974 when Priestland wrote ‘The Future of Violence’.

Quaker Testimonies

My take on the Quaker Testimonies (or Quaker Values)

Pagan Sabbats

There are eight Sabbats that make up the Wheel of the Year. The Sabbats are solar, seasonal and represent the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. They are: Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, Beltain, Litha, Lughnasadh, and Mabon.

Ethics - book recommendations

Book recommendations (by my friend DB).

• Alasdair MacIntyre - history of ethics - very good on the Greeks. 
• Phillipa Foot - good on how our philosophical concepts of morality are governed by a very Protestant Christian assumption that it's all about actions. And that the actions are somehow objectively right or wrong (God ordained, or, in the absence of God, still somehow not determined by humanity, timeless) rather than flowing from humans. 
• Bernard Williams and Geoffrey Warnock - very good on utilitarianism. (Bernard Williams was married to Shirley Williams for a while - possibly one of the brightest philosophers ever.)

A miracle for Richard Dawkins

Scene:   Nosstick and Agnes are a couple of café philosophers and, as usual, they are sitting in a café discussing life, the universe and everything. Nosstick believes in God but Agnes is not so sure.

the triumph of advertising in the culture industry

Just seen a bus stop billboard that exemplifies my 'Last word' from yesterday -