{"id":61482,"date":"2022-01-15T10:27:35","date_gmt":"2022-01-15T15:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61482"},"modified":"2022-01-15T10:27:35","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T15:27:35","slug":"todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-xxxvii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61482","title":{"rendered":"Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVII"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVII<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Teotihuacan, Mexico (1988) Photo by author<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Got involved in a discussion after an Facebook Friend (Alice Friedemann, whose work can be seen\u00a0here<\/a>) posted a\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0on the decline of \u2018rationality\u2019 over the past few decades.<\/p>\n

My initial response was as follows:<\/p>\n

My initial thought is that this shift is more the result of a par<\/span>adigmatic shift in academia itself from \u2018Modernism\u2019 to \u2018Post-Modernism\u2019 that has slowly filtered into the mainstream than anything else. As a university student during the entire decade of the 1980s, I was exposed to A LOT of Post-Modernist philosophy that questioned \u2018Rationality\u2019. Off the top of my head I recall a number of the philosophies I was exposed to coming from such academics as: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Friedrich Nietzche, Martin Heidigger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stephen Jay Gould, G.W.F. Hegel, H.G. Gadamer, Thomas Kuhn, and Jurgen Habermas. The topics included: rationality, literary criticism, deconstruction, deconstructive criticism, hermeneutics, philology, metaphysics, and dialectics. These all reflected a questioning of the strict \u2018factual\u2019 or \u2018rational\u2019 universe at one level or another \u2014 especially the \u2018subjectivity\u2019 verses \u2018objectivity\u2019 aspects of \u2018science\u2019. Here\u2019s just a few of the books I still have in my dwindling collection:<\/p>\n

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The conversation has brought back some of my interests that arose during my university education (the ten years were in the pursuit of four degrees from biology\/physiology to psychology\/anthropology that culminated in an M.A. in archaeology and B.Ed. for a career in education; retired almost ten years now). It\u2019s been a while (decades) since I studied this stuff but here are my two cents on the topic:<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVII Teotihuacan, Mexico (1988) Photo by author Got involved in a discussion after an Facebook Friend (Alice Friedemann, whose work can be seen\u00a0here) posted a\u00a0study\u00a0on the decline of \u2018rationality\u2019 over the past few decades. My initial response was as follows: My initial thought is that this shift is more the result […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14309,6199,705,5833,1328,30370],"class_list":["post-61482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-objectivity","tag-rationality","tag-science","tag-steve-bull","tag-subjectivity","tag-todays-contemplation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61482"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61483,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61482\/revisions\/61483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}