Posted on 07/12/2015 3:05:42 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
A philosophy and religion professor at Syracuse University gave an interview to The New York Times Thursday in which he critiqued the notion of pure reason as simply being a “white male Euro-Christian construction.”
Prof. John Caputo was being interviewed by fellow philosophy professor George Yancy for the 13th installment of an interview series Yancy conducts with philosophers regarding racial topics.
Given its emphasis on first principles and abstract thought, it may be tempting to view academic philosophy as a turf where the race of participants matters little, but Caputo says that’s entirely untrue. In fact, race is of central importance, and it’s proven by the mundane phrases philosophers use.
“‘White’ is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why,” Caputo says in the interview. “I was once criticized for using the expression ‘true north.’It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem. We tend to say ‘we’ and to assume who ‘we’ are, which once simply meant ‘we white male Euro-Christians.’
The end result of critiquing whiteness, Caputo suggests, is the realization that the supposed “reason” underlying philosophy is just another form of white privilege … or something of that nature.
“I think that what modern philosophers call ‘pure’ reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction,” he says. “White is not ‘neutral.’ ‘Pure’ reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is ‘colored.’ Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and ‘white’ is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by ‘reason’ — and ‘we’ white philosophers cannot ignore it.”
What does this all mean for regular people, such as the Times’ readers? Beneath all of the postmodern philosophical rhetoric, it’s not easy to tell, but much like the litany of recent academics hurrying to comment on “white privilege,” Caputo takes time to stick his finger in the eyes of the “Christian right” and, of all things, freedom — as if those two are the major arbiters behind all the woes America faces.
“The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty,” he says. “But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it … The popularity of such cruel ideas, their success in the ballot box, is terrifying to me. The trigger-happy practices of the police … on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality. The scandal is that the Christian right has too often been complicit with a politics of greed and hatred of the other.”
Interesting! He describes himself more than he describes the white Euro-American; i.e. non-rational.
Needs more watermelon...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVzHOhGSC0
Law of Non-Contradiction - Ravi Zacharias
I am not a “fan”. I did appreciate how she saw political correctness and socialists though.
Too bad she never did figure out the good side.
Uh......uh........uh........uh.........uh........... Just dayamn.
"The philosophers of the past were superficial," Dr. Pritchett went on. "It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn't any."
Essentially he is saying that experiential reality (i.e. that which people experience) supercedes objective reality, because in his mind what we call objective reality is actually nothing more than white-male experiential reality.
The most polite thing to be said about this argument is that the good professor is obviously not a scientist.
Overpaid professors with cushy jobs and tenure is a white male construct.
Which is exactly why the left hates Western Civilization with such a burning zeal.
Had Ayn Rand been pro-God and pro-life (plus a better wordsmith), she would deserve a place in the Conservative sphere. But since she hated the unborn and was an unapologetic atheist, when evaluated dispassionately, ultimately Rand was a leftist in the most important of matters. Above all, there is Life and Life is only from Almighty God.
Toilet paper is white, initially.
I think they want everybody else to have a guilt complex about being white. This is pure projection. They love hating the majority of people in their own race. They do not really care about people of color and their head in the clouds ideology only makes their lives worse.
I read both Rand’s and Vonnegut’s stuff for the first time in my early teens-I’ve been ready for the revolution ever since. Ira Levin nailed socialist “utopia” in This Perfect Day in 1970, too-reading that one will have you making a plan to go to ground, too...
Reason is order-without it everything is chaos...
Academia is the last bastion of the truly demented. It’s always been the home of leftist nutcases.
Hey Affirmative Action Prof: REASON is a CONSERVATIVE CONSTRUCT!! You Lieberals wouldn’t know REASON if it bit you in the Gay Rear!
The first sign of a deceiver is their use and abuse of long understood and accepted terms. They take terms that people have embraced and they distort and redefine them. It is the shortcut to acceptance. Then as you use the terms, people hear one thing while you mean another. Slowly you bring them around to the new definition. It is the art of liars. It is the art of this professor. That’s one.
Second, to lead people into error you do not really have to prove your theory. You only need to place such a heavy burden of doubt on their beliefs that they become ripe for the picking. Then you carry along some security for them by using their old terms, only in new ways and voila: You are a minister of satan the great deceiver.
All this deception became possible because someone laid ground work. They failed to study and understand the truth they professed, or at least to teach it and pass it along to the next generation. So here we are in 2015 with a generation or two of people who have heard all the language of freedom from tyranny but have not been trained in who, what, why and how. They are pigeons for the con men. The con men are many.
OMG!!! OMG!!! My GAYDAR is off the charts!!!
I have been bemoaning the lack of respect for the truth for over three decades...and it keeps getting worse. We live in interesting times.
I read “Atlas Shrugged” back in the early ‘70’s and thought it a worthwhile novel. I have read it 6 or 7 times since...it now reads like the nightly newscast.
Reason, intelligence, common sense are all symptoms of white male privilege. It is unfair to have an IQ of over 99. There would be a fix for that. Everyone would be prescribed medication where no one would function higher than a moron. The Elite of course would be exempt.
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