A Free Left Blog

I have been seeing a lot of people lately blaming postmodernism and ‘post-modernists’ for our current malaise with identity politics. But I think this neglects the knowledge base of identity-based ideologies, without which they would fall apart. These ideas and claims seem to have reached a crescendo with the ' Grievance Studies’ hoax exposing how some identity-focused academic journals are happy to publish weapon-grade nonsense if it aligns to their own political, ideological objectives. (Anyone who is familiar with these ‘disciplines’ and not indoctrinated into them knew that anyway, but big credit to James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian for demonstrating it for the rest of the world in such an entertaining manner) "Postmodernists pretend to be experts in what they call “theory.” Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose expose this for the lie that it is. “Theory” is not real. Postmodernists have no expertise and no profound understanding." https://t...

The philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. He was a member of the party from 1 st May 1933, ten days after becoming Rector of Freiburg University and three months after the Nazis took power in Germany, to the end of World War II. This is problematic for the likes of me who have been profoundly influenced by Heidegger’s writings and find beautiful, even magical, insights in them. (For me, reading Division I of Being and Time , though slow and painstaking, was like turning a light on to the world as it really is.) Recently, with his so-called ‘ black notebooks’ apparently revealing deeper anti-Semitism than was previously thought, attacks on Heidegger and his philosophy for being Nazi have reached a crescendo. The Guardian for example published this article , entitled: ‘ Heidegger's 'black notebooks' reveal antisemitism at core of his philosophy ’. That piece and, it seems, the notebooks themselves, reveal nothing of the sort – though to begin with it is ...