If anyone ever wonders why I harp on about dangers to western civilization… behold:
Cornell summer seminar asks: Should we still use concepts like ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’?
From the PDF description of the seminar:
“Decolonizing Epistemology”There is a widespread skepticism about many sorts of knowledge claims today, and this skepticism has been promoted from both the right and the left. The skepticism is largely based on the realization that knowledge is always connected to power. But there is uncertainty about what follows from this: is it still ‘knowledge’?The decolonial epistemology project accepts the connection of knowledge and power but then moves to a different set of questions that are organized in two overall components: (1) to critique existing theories and practices concerning knowledge for the ways in which these theories and practices may be supporting the colonial structure of knowledge, and (2) to develop new reconstructed norms for improved knowing practices without reinscrib-ing colonial relationships. To advance this project, decolonial work in epistemology must address the following:
1. Do social identities matter for knowledge claims? How, exactly?
2. How is ignorance socially produced, and what is the solution?
3. Should we continue to use concepts like ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’?
4. How can science be done in a decolonial way?
5. How do we empower traditional and indigenous knowledges?
Such a project benefits epistemology as a whole. In exploring the ways in which the disen-franchised have been epistemically discredited, we can develop new insights and theories about the general nature of knowledge and of knowers. This project also benefits every community that is struggling for democracy and justice against the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and technocracy.Thus, the question of knowledge, and of who has knowledge, of what kinds of character traits and motivations will best assist knowing, and of how knowledge claims should be assessed, is key to social change. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it, “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.”
As has been repeated noted, you have to be university-educated to believe something so monumentally stupid.
Take, for instance, point 5: “How do we empower traditional and indigenous knowledges?” It’s quite simply: take each individual bit of “indigenous knowledge” and put it to a rigorous scientific test. If it succeeds, great! Now it’s not just “indigenous knowledge,” but, in fact, “knowledge.” If it fails, you can discard it.
And point #3: Define “we,” lady. Those of us who happen to like modernity, science, western civ? Why, yes, we should continue to use rationality and reason. You, on the other hand… by all means, please don’t. I look forward to how successful you are with your “other ways of knowing” when you contact cancer or get hit by a bus or your power goes out.
If Trump was the man that many people desperately wish he was, he’d have the FBI investigating these buffoons to see whether it’s China, Russia, ISIS or those dastardly Dutch who are secretly behind them, pushing them to tar American society down and turn this into a hellscape of idiotarianism and race wars. if Cornell was the university it aught to be, it’d stop funding these ridiculous seminars and “educators.”
The part excerpted above is only a small piece, from a single one of the contributors to this nonsensical waste of time, resources and potential. Go ahead and read the rest of it. It’s filled with stuff that can be *charitably* described as “gibberish.”
This seminar will take Erich Auerbach’s notion of figura, elaborated mainly in his 1938 essay with the same title, as a starting point for a broader inquiry into notions of figure, figuration, and the specific productivity of figural practices in creating aesthetic, perceptual, and cognitive spheres of experience. At its core the seminar will focus on the understanding of the capacity of figure and figuration in deploying ‘plastic’ effects, i.e., in the shaping of and the experimentation with sensual, affective, and cognitive land-scapes.
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Normatively shaped dys-functionalities, the fact that social practices erode in contradictory reactions that can no longer be made up for, is the “rock bottom” for a certain kind of critique, an immanent crisis critique of forms of life.
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It invites us to transcend modernity by replacing the alienated genea-logical hermeneutics of suspicion with a rationally recollective hermeneutics of magnanimity that is at once tradition-affirming and tradition-transforming.
I liked this bit:
Faculty and advanced graduate students of literature, the arts, the humanities, the related social sciences and professional studies are invited to apply.
Huh. it doesn’t seem like they’re inviting students of science and engineering. Just students of ridiculous nonsense.