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Category Archives: Being Critical

Human Self-Emancipation

Monday, June 26, 2006

Roy Bhaskar’s essay, “Critical Realism, Social Relations and Arguing for Socialism” found in the collection Reclaiming Reality, acts as both introduction to the volume and as an attempt to articulate the relationship between epistemology (specifically, his own) to politics (specifically, socialist). He writes,
I take it whatever our politics, in the narrow party or factional [...]

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Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

The past week has been good for new books: last week Foucault’s lectures on Psychiatric Power arrived and, this morning, Althusser’s Philosophy of the Encounter arrived. Haven’t had the opportunity to look at Foucault yet, aside from reading the index. Based upon the index, it looks far more interesting than I had expected: [...]

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Horkheimer

Thursday, April 20, 2006

From Max Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (pages 231-2):
The inability to grasp in thought the unity of theory and practice and the limitation of the concept of necessity to inevitable events are both due, from the viewpoint of theory of knowledge, to the Cartesian dualism of thought and being. [...]

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Veridical

Thursday, April 20, 2006

For the past week or so, I’ve been reading and reading the so-called “preliminaries” section of my social theory comprehensive exam. I hope to start writing on this tomorrow or Saturday. The comprehensive is structured as a mock course proposal, syllabus, and the ‘complete text of the final lecture’. While a moderately [...]

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Pedant

Monday, April 10, 2006

The primary virtue of that process known as “comprehensives” or “qualification” examinations in North American doctoral programs (in the social sciences and humanities) is that they force you to read things you wouldn’t otherwise bother to read or wouldn’t otherwise consider reading. Habermas is a good example. I’m not particularly interested in reading [...]

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Meta-Update

Thursday, March 16, 2006

I’ve put titles, abstracts, and affiliations of the participants in my “Pirate (and Other Nomad) Studies” session at the 2006 Congress of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association online here.
And (finally!) a chunk from my second comprehensive examination entitled “Being Critical”. I’ve opted to do the second exam as “syllabus”, which is intended [...]

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Critical

Friday, January 20, 2006

[Updated]
The manual for the doctoral programme in sociology at York University defines the meaning and intent of the comprehensive examinations as follows:
The comprehensives are intended to prepare the student for the dissertation, to do research and to teach in a field. Outside the structure of a course, the comprehensive provides the student with the [...]

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