15 Quotes by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

While scholars can, of course, be activists and activists can be scholars, combining these two roles is liable to create problems and, when a political stance is taught at university, it is apt to become an orthodoxy, which cannot be questioned.

Foucault adopted the position that there are no fundamental principles by which to discover truth and that all knowledge is "local" to the knower - ideas which form the basis of the postmodern knowledge principle. Foucault didn't deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.

The Postmodern Political Principle: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how

Because of their focus on power dynamics, these thinkers argued that the powerful have, both intentionally and inadvertently, organized society to benefit them and perpetuate their power. They have done so by legitimating certain ways of talking about things as true, which then spread throughout society, creating societal rules that are viewed as common sense and perpetuated on all levels.

Because of its rejection of objective truth and reason, postmodernism refuses to substantiate itself and cannot, therefore, be argued with.

Almost every socially significant category has been intentionally complicated and problematized by postmodern Theorists in order to deny such categories any objective validity and disrupt the systems of power that might exist across them.

[P]ostmodern Theory seeks not to be factually true but to be strategically useful: in order to bring about its own aims, morally virtuous and politically useful by its own definitions.

Those social sciences and humanities scholars who took Theoretical approaches began to form a left-wing moral community, rather than a purely academic one: an intellectual organ more interested in advocating a particular ought than attempting a detached assessment of is - an attitude we usually associate with churches, rather than universities.

[Theoretical humanities], in turn, influence and often hold sway over the social sciences and professional programs like education, law, psychology, and social work, and have been carried by activists and media into the broader culture.