Critique Of Journalistic Reason

An encounter between philosophy and journalism recurs across the modern philosophical tradition. Images of reporters and newspaper readers, messengers and town criers, announcements and rumors populate the work of such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin. This book argues that these three thinkers’ preoccupation with journalism cannot be separated from their philosophy “proper” but plays a pivotal role in their philosophical work, where it marks an important nexus between their theories of history, time, and language. Journalism, in the tradition Vandeputte brings to light, figures before anything else as a cipher of the time in which philosophy is written. If the journalist and newspaper reader characterize what Kierkegaard calls “the present age,” that is because they exemplify a present marked by the crisis of the philosophy of history—a time after the demise of history as a philosophizable concept. In different ways, the pages of the newspaper appear in the European philosophical tradition as a site where teleological and totalizing representations of history must founder, together with the conceptions of progress and development that sustain them. But journalism does not simply mark the end of philosophy; for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, journalistic writing also takes on an exemplary role in the attempt to think time and history in the wake of this demise. The concepts around which these attempts crystallize—Kierkegaard’s “instant,” Nietzsche’s “untimeliness,” and Benjamin’s “actuality”—all emerge from the philosophical confrontation with journalism and its characteristic temporalities.

An encounter between philosophy and journalism recurs across the modern philosophical tradition. Images of reporters and newspaper readers, messengers and town criers, announcements and rumors populate the work of such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin. This book argues that these three thinkers’ preoccupation with journalism cannot be separated from their philosophy “proper” but plays a pivotal role in their philosophical work, where it marks an important nexus between their theories of history, time, and language. Journalism, in the tradition Vandeputte brings to light, figures before anything else as a cipher of the time in which philosophy is written. If the journalist and newspaper reader characterize what Kierkegaard calls “the present age,” that is because they exemplify a present marked by the crisis of the philosophy of history—a time after the demise of history as a philosophizable concept. In different ways, the pages of the newspaper appear in the European philosophical tradition as a site where teleological and totalizing representations of history must founder, together with the conceptions of progress and development that sustain them. But journalism does not simply mark the end of philosophy; for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, journalistic writing also takes on an exemplary role in the attempt to think time and history in the wake of this demise. The concepts around which these attempts crystallize—Kierkegaard’s “instant,” Nietzsche’s “untimeliness,” and Benjamin’s “actuality”—all emerge from the philosophical confrontation with journalism and its characteristic temporalities.

"This is the provocative argument that drives William McGowan's Coloring the News, a brave, searching work that examines journalism's most controversial issue. McGowan presents a fascinating insider's analysis of how a well-intentioned attempt to accommodate minorities and minority viewpoints has been overtaken by political correctness, which determines what stories get reported in the "elite" media and how. Along the way he dissects how the press has "mistold" key stories including California's Proposition 209 vote, the allegedly "racist" burnings of black churches in the South, the military's ongoing problems with the integration of women and gays, and the consequences of a chaotic immigration policy."--BOOK JACKET.

What different kinds of reason are possible, and which ones are the most appropriate for a legitimate, as opposed to a merely legitimated state?The book opens with an analysis of Weber as a figure who marks a key moment of sociological transition. Weber articulates a distinctly different view to Enlightenment thinkers who believe in the capacity of reason to improve society and emancipate humanity from ignorance and domination. Weber signals that the institutionalization of the instrumental reason particular to industrial society might actually be an effective tool in the struggle for social supremacy. He notes that in comparison with charismatic and traditional legitimation, modern forms of legal-rational legitimation are de-personalised, anonymously bureaucratic, and much more difficult to combat.The book then looks at various responses to Weber's diagnosis, from Lukács and Benjamin to Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, Arendt, Simmel, Foucault and Habermas. The study culminates with a sociological reading of critical theory that draws together Adorno's concept of non-identity with Habermas on communicative reason and Luhmann on social complexity and differentiation.

The Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. It inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the massive work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new Critique focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ conflict with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge. This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful. The Critique of Impure Reason proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness. The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of possible meaning are determined. Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, metalogical projection. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning. Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the Critique of Impure Reason develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems. CONTENTS AT A GLANCE Preface Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Acknowledgments Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call Introduction A note to the reader A note on conventions PART I WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN 1 Philosophical-psychological prelude 2 Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic 3 Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference 4 The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality PART II THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy 5 Reference, identity, and identification 6 Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference 7 Possibility theory 8 Presupposition logic, reference, and identification 9 Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference 10 Framework relativity 11 The metalogic of meaning 12 The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness 13 Projection 14 Horizons 15 De-projection 16 Self-validation 17 Rationality: Rules of admissibility PART III PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science 18 Ontology and the metalogic of reference 19 Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics 20 The conceptually unreachable: “The far side” 21 The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism 22 The projections of time, space, and space-time 23 The projections of causality, determinism, and free will 24 Projections of the self and of solipsism 25 Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields 26 Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference 27 Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference 28 Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory PART IV HORIZONS 29 Beyond belief 30 Critique of Impure Reason: Its results in retrospect SUPPLEMENT The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference APPENDIX I: The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers APPENDIX II: Epistemological Intelligence References Index About the author

The Moral Media provides readers with preliminary answers to questions about ethical thinking in a professional environment. Representing one of the first publications of journalists' and advertising practitioners' response to the Defining Issues Test (DIT), this book compares thinking about ethics by these two groups with the thinking of other professionals. This text is divided into three parts: *Part I includes chapters that explain the DIT and place it within the larger history of three fields: psychology, philosophy, and mass communication. It also provides both a statistical (quantitative) and narrative (qualitative) analysis of journalists' responses to the DIT. *Part II adds to scholarship theory building in these three disciplines and makes changes in the DIT that adds an element of visual information processing to the test. *Part III explores the larger meaning of this effort overall and links the results to theory and practice in these three fields. The Moral Media pursues connections among various intellectual disciplines, between the academy and the profession of journalism, and among those who believe that what journalists do is essential. As a result, this book is appropriate for aspiring journalists; scholars in journalism and mass communication; psychologists, particularly those interested in human development and behavior; and philosophers.

The important new book by GTraldine Muhlmann addresses these gaps in our understanding and goes a long way towards filling them. --

Since the first version of this classic work was published in 1974, major events in which American journalism has played a decisive role have cast the reporter increasingly as the subject for public examination. The newsman has become news. Though there are more serious, responsible journalists today than at any time in America, the less serious, less responsible also have great exposure. The loss of credibility of the mass media is widely acknowledged, and is a considerable concern to serious journalists. For not only is American policy-making hampered by sensational journalism, but also weakened is the philosophical foundation of a free society; a society committed to maximize the freedom of well-informed choice for individual citizens in a period of massification. This book presents a philosophy of journalism that not only relates to a journalist's everyday activities, but also deals with a broad Weltanschauung for journalism which is built largely on the ideas coming out of the Age of Reason. Areas of philosophy are political philosophy and its relationship to journalism, epistemological concerns primarily journalistic objectivity and truth-seeking, and journalistic ethics.