Developing a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism
The dream of the imminent end of the world inspired the struggle of the early Christians against the Roman Empire and gave them confidence in victory. Scientific insight into the inevitable disintegration, now taking place before our eyes, of the prevailing social order . . . is sufficient guarantee that the moment a truly proletarian revolution breaks out, the conditions for its immediate initial (if certainly not idyllic) modus operandi will also be there. –Karl Marx
Critical Pedagogy, Latino/a Education, and the Politics of Class Struggle
Due to the fact that critical pedagogy constitutes a narrative of universal emancipation (at least those versions that have escaped attempts by postmodernists and neoliberals to domesticate them), critics on both the political left and the right not only have dismissed its politics as yet another example of the colonizing incarnations of the Western educational canon but also have rejected it as a valid means for social transformation. They have accused it of possessing, among other toxic attributes, an outdated and historically discredited working-class tri-umphalism premised on vulgar economic reductionism that should have been abandoned long before Fukuyama2 famously announced that the teething pains of capitalism were over and that liberal capitalist democracy had finally ascended to the zenith of humankind’s ideological achievements through its ultimate victory over its conquered rival ideologies of hereditary monarchy, fascism, and more recently communism.3 Of course, the primary object of attack is Marxist theory itself, which has been making some significant inroads of late within the critical pedagogy literature, more specifically as the central theoretical armature of the critique of the globalization of capitalism and the pauperization of the working masses in the wake of recent “free trade” agreements and the economic and military imperialism of the Bush Jr. administration.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.