Comments on: A Rhetorical Question

By: K

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:16:20 +0000

If Freud, Marx, and Hegel are no long taught in their disciplines it does not mean they are not relevant somewhere else.

Much of literary and film studies involves interpreting material produced long ago. Thus, what filmmaker and authors believed long ago is important. And for over half of the last century many believed Marx and Freud were right or at least made sense.

I refer anyone interested to the movies Spellbound and The Snakepit. Both were made in the 1940s and are still highly regarded. Yet today they make no sense w/o some knowledge of how Freud affected psychiatry.

For a glimpse of what Marx thought he was talking about read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

About Hegel. I offer no ideas. Perhaps his German is clear and well suited to language students.

By: anon

anon — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:21:17 +0000

Russell remarked of Hegel’s dialectic that it was the art of drawing a conclusion that did not follow, from two false and mutually contradictory premisses.

Quite so.

By: Chandran

Chandran — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:19:50 +0000

As far as philosophy is concerned it is simply false that Hegel is not taught. See http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/an-open-letter.html

By: Joe Triscari

Joe Triscari — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:06:11 +0000

I agree with Luis and would only add that it should be a major specific course required in the senior year of an undergraduate education. That way they have a chance to learn the topic before seeing where it came from. I do think that introducing lots of wrong or incomplete ideas just as you’re learning an area can be more confusing than helpful. In addition, sometimes the historical road to a particular conclusion is so convoluted that you can lose the path to what is really quite a simple notion.

D Johnson: That’s some Marx I can get behind!

By: D Johnson

D Johnson — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:03:47 +0000

Perhaps the Marx that is discussed in film studies is Groucho along with his brothers.

By: Wade

Wade — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:06:55 +0000

I agree totally with Luis that any subject taught should have cautionary tales and success stories. After all, we wouldn’t have Faraday if we didn’t have condescending nobelists decrying those not qualified.

People need to know the difference between good and bad science (and thought).

By: Luis Dias

Luis Dias — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:29:47 +0000

I agree with you, but I would focus in the thought that Freud and Marx and Hegel should be taught, nevertheless, to discuss what were their ideas, why they were so popular, what was the contextual mindset and why they were wrong, not only historically, but also theoretically.

The problem of not teaching this in their respective fields is that, at least with Freud and Marx, their ideas are so popular even today that if they aren’t taught with the utmost rigor in schools, then they will be spread as myths in popular “knowledge”, as some sort of counter-culture. And that’s bad.

Even if they aren’t taught in full, at least they should be mentioned as “big mistakes” and a summary of those. To teach critical thinking is the cornerstone of education today, and one should learn that every science has its history of flaws and misconceptions, that without the perception of this, and how wrong can people really be, then we are surely teaching people that science can never go wrong, and I don’t know, perhaps confuse great statistical graphics and models of really nasty and complex chaotic stuff as something “settled”.