Abstract
In this chapter, I will argue that academic practice or disciplines understood as part of the Enlightenment ideals — here represented by Jürgen Habermas’s communicative philosophy — must be contrasted with an understanding of ideals as normative regimes or imaginaries and how, then, academic practice must be reformulated as a historically and discursively based activity and set in the context of the late modern capitalistic society. I will focus attention on how the university as an institution is given a privileged position in society as a neutral provider of knowledge, expressed in the belief that technology and science will solve our fundamental problems, and as a democratic-moral corrective to the world outside — supposed to guarantee that political action is guided by knowledge, and that deeper and more encompassing scientific insights will provide a richer and truer picture of reality. The Enlightenment ideal, or understanding of modernity as a rationalizing process, has become one with Western, institutionalized science. I will discuss this problem complex by counterposing the image of modern academic institutions as a process of liberation through disciplinization and seen in light of our time's dogmas and fundamental beliefs: a free and open democratic polity, the free and just market economy and the autonomous pursuit of the truth called science (Wagner 1994). Common to these beliefs is a discourse of liberation which is tightly intertwined with a specific understanding of modernity.
I continue to harbour a special prejudice against those who, in adopting this approach [neo-Kantian projects] imagine an ideal speech situation in which everyone (everyone?) would make the same moral and cognitive judgments. There are no moral or cognitive judgments which are not mediated by our concepts, and it seems to me that even our most apparently abstract concepts are historical through and through.
Skinner 2009
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Notes
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(TRIPS — Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights).
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It can also be said that this form of formation of opinion allows only advisory and expository interventions in the public sphere, and not that which has been termed parrhesia, in which one engages power through informed critique, and thereby incurs personal risk or the accusation of being too radical.
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For example, in every number of the Norwegian Social Anthropologic Journal over the last eight years, there has been at least one article that explicitly treated one or more of the central scientific theoretical questions in the Western history of ideas: objectivity, generalization, representation, advocacy, etc. The rhetorical drills around method that every dissertation in sociology must include have an equivalent status: as long as science self-reflects on its methodological and scientific theoretical problems, it can choose to address that which separates it from other structures where meaning is constituted.
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For example, the psychiatric evaluation, released in the fall of 2011, which declared the perpetrator of the 77 murders on the 22nd of July of that year in Oslo and on UtØya as “criminally insane”, has served to strangify, defamiliarize and historicize psychiatry as a scientific practice. The discussion since this report has been a reminder that knowledge does not arise in isolation, but rather exists in a social and cultural practice in which diagnoses must be interpreted just as much as concepts defining social position and normality at a given historical moment.
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Øyen, S.A. (2012). The religious belief in rationality, science and democracy. In: Øyen, S.A., Lund-Olsen, T., Vaage, N.S. (eds) Sacred Science?. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen. https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-752-3_5
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