Fear of Knowledge An Introduction to Contemporary Debates About Truth and Reason

A student at a prestigious law school is declared "the enemy" when she questions the analogy between pornography and lynching. A Harvard professor is investigated by the Committee on Race Relations for reading from a plantation owner's diary as part of a lecture on the history of slavery.Fear of Knowledge is the first book to offer a satisfying diagnosis -- in layman's terms -- of a significant trend: the tendency to give enormous weight to political and ideological considerations even at the expense of logic, evidence, reason, or truth. More than merely identifying the flaws and pretensions of such thinking, however, Patti Boghossian supports readers' common sense instincts with logic. He clarifies the process of thought and faulty argument at the basis of the examples above and other incidents, and in a refreshing twist, argues that Women's, African-American, and Gay Studies don't need the justification of "bad" philosophy and are in fact hurt by it.The perils of woolly "social constructivist" reasoning -- as when health care workers argue that schizophrenia is socially constructed and pull patients off their medication -- areBoghossian, Paul is the author of 'Fear of Knowledge An Introduction to Contemporary Debates About Truth and Reason' with ISBN 9780684853178 and ISBN 0684853175.