Thursday, August 06, 2020

"What They See as the Illiberalism of the Woke"

"And the authors certainly did their homework on queer theory, fat studies, and so on, which are the contemporary subdisciplines they're most invested in critiquing. They establish at least to some degree an intellectual lineage from the postmodernism of the 1960s to these subdisciplines and to the activism they're associated with. Questions remain about just how much was retained in this lineage, just how determinate it was, and just what it means that it exists. Somewhat more care in construction and interpretation could have rendered this book more philosophically helpful in addressing those questions. But provoking interesting questions is, after all, a virtue and not a vice of a book about ideas."

Oliver Traldi at Arc Digital reviews Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.

And Jason D. Hill interviews Pluckrose at Quillette.

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