Should critique be tamed by realism? A defense of radical critiques of reason
- Critique, and especially radical critique of reason, is under pressure from two opponents. Whereas the proponents of "post-critical" or "acritical" thinking denounce critique as an empty and self-righteous repetition of debunking, the decriers of "post-truth" accuse critique of having helped to bring about our current "post-truth" politics. Both advocate realism as a limit critique must respect, but I will defend the claim that we urgently need radical critiques of reason because they offer a more precise diagnosis of the untruths in politics the two opponents of critique are rightfully worried about. Radical critiques of reason are possible, I argue, if we turn our attention to the practices of criticizing, if we refrain from a sovereign epistemology, and if we pluralize reason without trivializing it. In order to demonstrate the diagnostic advantage of radical critiques of reason, I briefly analyze the political and epistemic strategy at work in two exemplary untruths in politics.
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| Author: | Frieder Vogelmann |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-512547 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.61 |
| ISSN: | 2515-2076 |
| Parent Title (French): | Le foucaldien |
| Publisher: | Open Library of Humanities |
| Place of publication: | Cambridge |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2019 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2019/08/21 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2019/10/10 |
| Tag: | bruno latour; critical theory; critique of reason; feminist epistemology; post-truth |
| Volume: | 5 |
| Issue: | 1, Art. 5 |
| Page Number: | 35 |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 34 |
| Note: | Copyright:: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 455706379 |
| Institutes: | Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Gesellschaftswissenschaften |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |
