Knowledge in the postmodern university

Educational Theory

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 157-177

  Simpson, Evan ^a  

^a MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0344841215     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00157.x     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Donald Davidson, "The Folly of Trying to Define Truth," The Journal of Philosophy, 93 (1996): 264-65.
2. "Knowledges" is a neologism of Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Interviews and Other Writings, ed Colin Gordon [New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). Genres of discourse are discussed by Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of; Minnesota Press, 1988).
3. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 113, and The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 223.
4. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 197.
5. Barry Allen, "Forbidding Knowledge," The Monist 79 (1996): 297.
6. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein's point that one's concept of a game does not extend beyond the examples that one can give of it, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), §75. This ana Wittgenstein's other later work, along with Kant's third Critique and his historical-political texts, are characterized by Lyotard as "epilogues to modernity and prologues to an honorable postmodernity," The Differend xiii
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Whoever seeks to mediate between two decided thinkers...lacks an eye for the unique; seeing similarities...is the sign of weak eyes," my translation of The Gay Science, § 228, from Nietzsche Wcrke, ed. Georgio Colli and Massino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973).
8. Rorty's critiques of foundationalism and realism are clearly articulated in a number of works, including Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979
9. Richard Rorty, Cohsequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982),11
10. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.) His attitude toward structuralist political theories and the second-level views of "the Foucauldian Left"; is expressed in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 37.
11. Of course, the associated issues extend more broadly. See the contributions to Anthony Smith and Frank Webster, eds, The Postmodern University! Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society (Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 1997).
12. The image of Chernobyl is consistently worked through by Robert Nola, Inquiry 37 (1994): 3-43."Post-modernism, a French Cultural Chernobyl: foucault on Power/Knowledge"
13. The play on "higher education" conies from Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
14. Michael Rosen That, commenting as a bookseller on the decline of popular interest in postmodernism in "What Was Postmodernism?" Socialist Review 21, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1992): 100.
15. The hopelessness of exchanging insults is well-illustratcc! Jacques Derrick, "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils," Diacritics 13, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 15
16. Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press 295, and 302., 1987), 282
17. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago 273-76 chap. 9, esp. Press, 1978), 263-65
18. Compare Fred Dallmayer, "Poststructuraiism and Deconstruction," in G. F. W. Hegel: Modernity and Politic? (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993), 233-38.
19. Thus, for example, when Charles Taylor charges that Rorty pays too little attention to the relation between truth and representations of reality, Rorty appropriately replies that we should drop the represcntationalist problematic all together. See Charles Taylor, "Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition, in-Reading Rorty, ed. A. Maiachowski (Oxford. Basil Blackwell, 1990), 272
20. Richard Rorty, "Taylor on Truth" in Philosophy in the Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, Ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29-30.
21. Compare Terry Eaglcson, Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), viii.
22. Derrida, "The Principle of Reason" 8. He does not note that the principle was also respected by Thomas Aquinas and the medieval university.
23. It is worth noting that even enthusiastic champions of the principle of reason acknowledge that it has been constrained in parts of the university. See for example, Immanucl Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M.J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 23-45
24. In any event, characterizations of "the modern university" deserve their own skeptic:,. Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom Lyotard names as important to its development, was at best an ambiguous defender of Enlightenment rationalism. Compare Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 32-33. This book will be cited as PC in the text for all subsequent references. For Humboldt's complex views see "Ideen iiber Staatsvcrfassung, durch die neue franzosische Constitution veranlasst," in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, 1960).1
25. Compare Michel Foucault, "The Subject of Power," included as an "Afterword," in H.L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d cd. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209-12.
26. John D jwey, Theory of Valuation, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 2, No. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I am grateful to Barry Allen for reminding me of Dcwey's view.1939), 40
27. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 60.
28. Mary Hesse, "How to be Postmodern Without Being a Feminist,"The Monist, 77 (1994): 448-456.
29. Thomas S. Kuhn's account of a community's paradigms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) has been read by postmodernists in this way. It is notable that this famous work was published as part of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a series devoted to the development of ideas in the tradition of logical empiricism.1962
30. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.
31. Richard Rorty Offers this characterization in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 131.
32. Jean Rnudrllard, Simulations, trans, by Paul Foss,. Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotcxt ©, 1983), 3-4.
33. Robert Hughes's review of Baudrillard, America is Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (London: Harvill Press, 1990), 378.
34. Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Rcalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15.
35. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, §378: "Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement."1969
36. In doing this, I necessarily leave aside the complexities of practices (evident in Lyotard's later work, The Differend, and Foucault's notion of disciplines) thnt make the language-game model decidedly imperfect. It is still useful.
37. Existing methods of peer-review appear to be in serious need of reform David Shatz, "Is Peer Review Overrated?" T he Monist 79 (1996): 536-63.
38. None of the proposed reforms obviate the need to depend upon professional judgment as a primary test of knowledge, however.
39. Dorothy E. Smith, Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations (Toronto: fn. 20. University of Toronto Press, 1999), 241
40. Jonathan E. Adler, "Testimony, Trust, Knowing," Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 264-75.
41. Lyotard, The Differend, xii.
42. For Foucault, the "delinquent" is fabricated as the object of penitentiary science in Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 255. Similarly, "mental illness was constituted by all that was said in the statements that named it," and discourses more generally are "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak," The Archeology of Knowledge, 32 and 49. Foucault does not give these cases as examples of a general thesis about the objects oi knowledge but as illustrations of the way:in which select forms of modern knowledge constitute their objects. Others do generalize. According to Susan Hekman, Carol Gilligan's "theory creates its own data"Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 19.
43. A useful account of these relations in the case of biology is offered by Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56-59.
44. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The lahuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 4-7, where he stresses the "naive indeterminacy" of the "inhuman."1991
45. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 262
46. G.F.W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 111
47. Dorothy Smith's characterization of George H. Mead's account of the individuated subjectDorothy Smith, Writing the Social, 109.
48. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in H.W. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 216.
49. Martha NussbaumFor useful reflections on emotional perception and know-how, see, Love's Knowl edge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature(New York: Oxford University Press), and Code, What Can She Know!1990
50. The universal form of this statement and its reference to "our sensitivity" might suggest that general agreements remain or should still be encouraged, but I assume that skilful philosophers do not make obvious mistakes.
51. FyodorDostocvsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David Magarshack)London: Penguin Books, 1982), 298.
52. Jacques Derrida, Du droit a la philosophic (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1990), 572.
53. Note, though, that Foucault appears to distinguish the responsibility to understand and the responsi bility to change the world in suggesting that "What the intellectual can do is to provide instruments of analysis....But as for saying, 'Here is what you must do!' certainly not." See Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 62.
54. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194. Compare Lyotard's distinction between power and force (which belongs only to the language-game of technology) and terror (which in the social bond is threatened with destruction), The Postmodern Condition, 46. Foucault also distinguishes power and force in Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, eel. L.D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 83.
55. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 2, 57.
56. John Kekes, "Academic Corruption,"The Monist, 79 (1996): 564-76.
57. Possibly this is Foucault's meaning when he says, perhaps one must not he for consensuality, hut one must he against nonconsensuality, "Politics and Ethics: An Interview" in Paul Rabinow, The FcAicmut Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 379.
58. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 36.
59. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 94.
60. A series of books published by the University of Minnesota Press advertises this as its general objective in Lingua Franca (September-October 1992): 21.
61. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 92.
62. These points are nicely set out by Elizabeth S. Anderson, "The Democratic University: The Role of Justice in the Production of Knowledge," Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 186-219.
63. Derrida, Du droit a la philosophie, 569.
64. Donald R.C. Reed, Following Kohlberg: Liberalism and the Practice of Democratic Community (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1997), 196-97.
65. Lyotard on justice, which "does not merely consist in the observance of rules....it consists in working at the limits of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new games"; Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Théhaud, Just Gaming [Manchester: Manchester University.Press, 1985], 100.
66. Steven Seidman, Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), ix.
67. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 5-25.
68. Speaking of the "arbitrariness" of the "tree of knowledge" Diderot says, "if on this ocean of objects surrounding us, there should appear ? few that seem to break through the surface and to dominate the rest like the crest of a reef, they merely owe this advantage to particular systems, to vague conventions, and to certain events that have nothing to do with the physical arrangement of beings"; cited in Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, I am grateful to Wayne Thorpe for this reference.1984), 195
69. Lyotard and Thebaud, Just Gaming, 73.
70. On the central place of philosophical incredulity, sec Nicholas C. Burbuies, "Postmodern Doubt and Philosophy of Education"Philosophy of Education 1995 1998).