Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society. "As Mr. Hofstadter unfolds the fascinating story, it is no crude battle of eggheads and fatheads. It is a rich, complex, shifting picture of the life of the mind in a society dominated by the ideal of practical success." —Robert Peel in the Christian Science Monitor
Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime takes up where Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 1: Radical Scholarship (2015) left off, foremost in terms of a critique of neo-liberal academia and its demotion of the book in favor of various mediatic practices that substitute, arguably, for the one form of critical inquiry that might safeguard speculative intellectual inquiry as long-form and long-term project, especially in relationship to the archive or library (otherwise known as the "public domain"). This ongoing critique of neo-liberal academia is a necessary corrective to processes underway today toward the further marginalization of radical critique, with many of the traditional forms of sustained analysis being replaced by pseudo-empirical studies that abandon themes only presentable in the Arts and Humanities through the "arcanian closure" that the book as long-form inquisition represents (whether as novel, non-fictional critique, or something in-between). As a tomb for thought, this privileging of the shadowy recesses of the book preserves, through the very apparatuses of long- and slow-form scholarship, the premises presented here as indicative of an anti-capitalist project embedded in works that might otherwise shun such a characterization. The perverse capitalist capture of knowledge through mass digitalization is - paradoxically - the negative corollary for the reduction by abstraction of everyday works to a philosophical and moral inquest against Capital. The latter actually constitutes a transversal reduction for works (across works) toward the age-old antithesis to instrumentalized socio-cultural production - Spirit. For similar reasons, the anti-capitalist sublime as presented here is primarily a product of the imaginative, magical-realist regimes of thought in service to "no capital" - to no capitalization of thought. This book seeks to re-establish paradigmatic, a-historical, and universalizing practices in humanistic scholarship associated with speculative inquiry as a form of art, utilizing in passing forms of art and exemplary paradigmatic practices that are also first-order forms of speculative inquiry - suggesting that first-order works in the Arts and Humanities are those works that may "suffer" second-order incorporations without the attendant loss of the impress of sublimity (Spirit).
Sanford Goldberg argues that a proper account of the communication of knowledge through speech has anti-individualistic implications for both epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. In Part 1 he offers a novel argument for anti-individualism about mind and language, the view that the contents of one's thoughts and the meanings of one's words depend for their individuation on one's social and natural environment. In Part 2 he discusses the epistemic dimension of knowledge communication, arguing that the epistemic characteristics of communication-based beliefs depend on features of the cognitive and linguistic acts of the subject's social peers. In acknowledging an ineliminable social dimension to mind, language, and the epistemic categories of knowledge, justification, and rationality, his book develops fundamental links between externalism in the philosophy of mind and language, on the one hand, and externalism is epistemology, on the other.
The America of 2021 bears little resemblance to that of merely a decade ago, and journalist Christian Schneider has been there to document it all - from the rise and fall of the Tea Party to a deadly pandemic killing nearly three-quarters of a million Americans to a violent insurrection in the halls of the U.S. Capitol. Schneider, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, has spent over a decade writing about the cultural phenomena that brought America to where it is today. While society once built on the knowledge of prior generations, Americans are now in what he calls the "Golden Era of Anti-Knowledge" - where all facts are negotiable and public figures are incentivized to hold tightly to preposterous positions, rather than backtrack to ones more plausible. "Anti-Knowledge: Essays From the Era of Negotiable Truth" is a greatest hits of Schneider's work from the past decade (or so.) Schneider's work, featured in USA Today, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review and other publications, blends wit and traditional conservatism to provide a unique perspective on the American culture over the past ten years.
Since 9/11 we have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond our comprehension. Before the 1970s, however, hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call 'terrorism' were considered the work of rational strategic actors. Disciplining Terror examines how political violence became 'terrorism', and how this transformation ultimately led to the current 'war on terror'. Drawing upon archival research and interviews with terrorism experts, Lisa Stampnitzky traces the political and academic struggles through which experts made terrorism, and terrorism made experts. She argues that the expert discourse on terrorism operates at the boundary - itself increasingly contested - between science and politics, and between academic expertise and the state. Despite terrorism now being central to contemporary political discourse, there have been few empirical studies of terrorism experts. This book investigates how the concept of terrorism has been developed and used over recent decades.
In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was published; a wildly popular book that drew attention to the shift in American culture away from the tenants that made America—and Americans—unique. Bloom focused on a breakdown in the American curriculum, but many sensed that the issue affected more than education. The very essence of what it meant to be an American was disappearing. That was over twenty years ago. Since then, the United States has experienced unprecedented wealth, more youth enrolling in higher education than ever before, and technology advancements far beyond what many in the 1980s dreamed possible. And yet, the state of the American mind seems to have deteriorated further. Benjamin Franklin’s “self-made man” has become a man dependent on the state. Independence has turned into self-absorption. Liberty has been curtailed in the defense of multiculturalism. In order to fully grasp the underpinnings of this shift away from the self-reliant, well-informed American, editors Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow have brought together a group of cultural and educational experts to discuss the root causes of the decline of the American mind. The writers of these fifteen original essays include E. D. Hirsch, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Dennis Prager, as well as Daniel Dreisbach, Gerald Graff, Richard Arum, Robert Whitaker, David T. Z. Mindich, Maggie Jackson, Jean Twenge, Jonathan Kay, Ilya Somin, Steve Wasserman, Greg Lukianoff, and R. R. Reno. Their essays are compiled into three main categories: States of Mind: Indicators of Intellectual and Cognitive Decline These essays broach specific mental deficiencies among the population, including lagging cultural IQ, low Biblical literacy, poor writing skills, and over-medication. Personal and Cognitive Habits/Interests These essays turn to specific mental behaviors and interests, including avoidance of the news, short attention spans, narcissism, and conspiracy obsessions. National Consequences These essays examine broader trends affecting populations and institutions, including rates of entitlement claims, voting habits, and a low-performing higher education system. The State of the American Mind is both an assessment of our current state as well as a warning, foretelling what we may yet become. For anyone interested in the intellectual fate of America, The State of the American Mind offers an accessible and critical look at life in America and how our collective mind is faring.
What form, or forms, might ethical knowledge take? In particular, can ethical knowledge take the form either of moral theory, or of moral intuition? If it can, should it? These are central questions for ethics today, and they are the central questions for the philosophical essays collected in this volume. Intuition, Theory, and Anti-Theory in Ethics draws together new work by leading experts in the field, in order to represent as many different perspectives on the discussion as possible. The volume is not built upon any kind of tidy consensus about what 'knowledge', 'theory', and 'intuition' mean. Rather, the idea is to explore as many as possible of the different things that knowledge, theory, and intuition could be in ethics.
The Omnidoxy is the founding treatise of the Astronist religion and was solely authored by the philosopher and religious founder, Cometan. Partitioned into twelve disquisitions, each of which are further divided into hundreds of discourses, which are themselves titled by those which are known as rubrals, The Omnidoxy has been codified according to a unique writing structure known as insentence. The Omnidoxy not only forms the foundations of Astronism, but it remains the primary modern contributor and the book that ignited the establishment of the Astronic tradition of religion which encompasses the philosophy of Astronism. Introducing brand new philosophical concepts such as cosmocentricity, reascensionism, transcensionism, and sentientism amongst many others, The Omnidoxy remains the principal signifier of a new era in philosophy. The Omnidoxy births hundreds of new belief orientations, schools of thought, neologisms, disciplines of study, theories, and concepts which, when combined and considered collectively, have formed the basis of Astronism. The authorship of The Omnidoxy rests with the single individual philosopher, Cometan who began writing The Omnidoxy at the age of seventeen driven by what he terms as personal inspiration. The historical origination of The Omnidoxy rests in its authorship by Brandon Taylorian during early 21st century England, specifically in the northern county of Lancashire. Like in all textual criticism, the timing and location of the codification of The Omnidoxy is integral to understanding why and how it was written, especially by considering the influential factors impacting Taylorian during his construction of the text, particularly the cultural, political, religious, and social contexts of Taylorian's personal life and of wider society at the time. This forms an important branch of study within omnidoxicology known as omnidoxical criticism, or omnidoxical exegesis in which scholars study and investigate The Omnidoxy in order to discern conclusive judgements inspired by how, where, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances The Omnidoxy was written.
"This book overturns the conventional thinking about organization and identity and puts in its place a wholly new theoretical synthesis. It is not just an extraordinarily incisive commentary on modern life but it is also a key to thinking about identity in new ways which will prove an indispensable guide as we move beyond social constructionism. Remarkable."- Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Warwick "I have to say that as usual I find very refreshing Paul du Gay′s courageous and unconventional approach, a clarity of vision that I find very appealing."- Professor Marilyn Strathern, University Of Cambridge Like many other popular academic terms, 'identity' has been asked to do so much work that it has often ended up doing none at all and, as a consequence, there has been a recent turn away from identity work. In this book, Paul du Gay moves identity theory in a new direction, offering a distinctive approach to studying how persons - human and non human - are put together or assembled: how their 'identities' are formed. He does through an engagement with a range of work in the social sciences, humanities and in organization studies which privileges the business of description over metaphysical speculation and epochalist assertion. At the heart of the book is an approach to the material-cultural making up of 'persons' that involves a shift away from general social and cultural accounts concerning the formation of 'subjectivity' and 'identity' towards an understanding of the specific forms of personhood that individuals acquire through their immersion in and subjection to particular normative and technical regimes of conduct. The book is written for postgraduate students and researchers interested in debates about identity, subjectivity and personhood in a range of disciplines - especially those in sociology, social anthropology, geography, and organization and management studies.