In Defence of Knowledge

Is knowledge overrated, or vital to our future?

Is knowledge overrated? Many philosophers think so. They have been convinced by the horrors of 20th century totalitarianism that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is not only dangerous but ruinous for humanity. This mistrust of knowledge – particularly scientific knowledge – now percolates throughout the humanities.

If there is anything resembling an unassailable doxa in the humanities, it is the following: absolute truth is a totalitarian ideal and the desire to know everything harbours a murderous impulse. We should give up our Platonic obsession with knowing the reality behind appearances and appreciate instead the multifaceted ambiguity of appearances, as well as the plurality of perspectives on the world. These have become familiar tenets of postmodern skepticism.

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alina florence 29 March 2021

Nothing is overrated, especially knowledge!! I think the word overrated is just a state of the human mind, that is it. As I believe that everybody has their own choice and regarding their choice as overrated is wrong. Maybe this is the only reason I ended up getting https://bestassignmentwriter.co.uk/english-literature.php English literature essay help online when my topic was similar to this, sigh!

David Morey 2 21 August 2015

J W Burrow's The Crisis of Reason gives a good background to this issue. Nicholas Maxwell is interesting on the dualistic split that places values into the subjective half of the divide of reason, and suggests a good way to try and put the realisation of values, of what is of value, back into our approach to knowledge, challenging positivist assumptions that are so common no one needs to advocate them.

blank 20 August 2015

To call Brassier a philosopher is a joke, a trick played by the universities. He is wholly incompetent to distinguish between ancient skepticism and modern historicism. Those views have absolutely different grounds. Modern science itself is largely historisit, and does not believe in knowledge in anything like a philosophic sense, viz., there is no contemporary exponent of something like positivism worth mention. Any clever and reasonably literate undergrad could provide this 'philosopher's' manner of predictably superficial commentary dotted with Greek vocabulary words. It doesn't amount to anything philosophically. It's not even a suggestive account, but merely a stupid and ill-informed one based, I'm afraid, on what one might call a poor and misleading French-cafe understanding of the matters involved.

His use of the word doxa, as opinion, is likely what he genuinely takes it to mean. He simply doesn't have the philosophic training to even approximately approach any of the subjects he knows, true, with encyclopedic and formally erudite exactitude, in a serious way. He doesn't bring the matters to thought, but to a cheap polemic.

This would all be superfluous and unworthy of our attention but for the fact that the Brassiers, they are legion, are harmful to the cultivation of serious thought. It is not, of course, the fault of this fellow, but of the depleted and sad training currently available which encourages the infinite hoovering of information over what genuinely matters.

David Morey 2 20 August 2015

Enjoyed this, Brassier is an interesting philosopher.