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Non-Usefulness Of Critical Thinking In The Humanities

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(1575)An Analysis of Non-Usefulness of Post-Modernity and the Importance of “Critical Thinking” in the Humanities

This sociological study will define the non-usefulness of “post-modernism” as a threat to the scientific foundations of modernism in the lack of “critical thinking” in the humanities. The premise of modernism is defined by the notion of human “progress” through a deterministic and scientific view of the humanity into higher functionality of civilized society. In contrast to this objective view of human progress, post-modernism has created various subjective assumptions about western civilization, which form academic opinions that are not based on objective reality. Latour’s (2004) examination of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” …show more content…
historically, academics, such as Henry James, formed the foundation of modernism through deterministic theories on the validity of science as distinguishing factor on the development of higher human civilizations. However, the paradigm of determinism and scientific inquiry has been co-opted by the subjective sciences, such as social and cultural studies, which deny these terms as being too simplistic a narrative to define the development of human progress by science in and of itself. The major pioneer of post-modernist theory, Jean-Franc Lyotard (1984), defines the “nostalgia” of scientific realism as a barrier to the study of …show more content…
Foucault’s (1984) support of post-modernism is defined along the lines of scientific development through the “Enlightenment” era, which has, he claims, set limitations on the way that science can confirm a modern society. More so, Foucault (1984) argument for post-modernism attempts to explore the social and cultural conditions of 20th century life, which make the 18th century philosophy of Immanuel Kant and other Enlightenment era thinkers irrelevant in terms of understanding modern issues in contemporary society during the 1980s:
This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' of the Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part (Foucault

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