I'm, like, totally an intellectual! (a scathing parody)

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I'm like, totally an intellectual. I am always on the lookout for trendy new ideas that come my way. Right now I am, like, 110% neopragmatist. Richard Rorty is soooo dreamy. Everybody's reading him (except for that weirdo professor Jorkin, who's actually a Kant scholar. A Kant scholar. Is it any wonder that she has to sit at the Theologians-Botanists-and-General-Lamoids Table in the lunchroom? ROTFLMAO!).

I just cannot buh-leev that deconstruction is out. We thought that was THE S---. I cannot buh-leev that I bought all the Baudrillard and Derrida books. I keep them in the back of my closet with my pog collection and that box of dead tamagotchi pets so that nobody ever, like, sees them in my house. That is sooo embarrassing. There is actually a picture of me holding up this, like, butt-ugly postmodern sculpture and that picture is still on the internet somewhere. I hope my cool, intellectual friends never see it! Traumarama!

But we've all, like, made those kinds of mistakes before. I got my masters in Holocaust studies, which was you-can't-touch-this HOTTT when I was in school. All my friends were doing it. Then Schindler's List came out and we were all, like, "omigod, the bourgeoisie is totally in on our scene! We have to, like, split before we end up on Oprah or something!" Thank God I got out of the Holocaust racket and got my doctorate in gay studies, which is still sorta legit (I thankfully avoided women's studies. I would be soooo embarrassed if I had ever been involved with that).

You have to totally be on top of this stuff. Graphic novels are in, the Sartre revival is five minutes ago, and Transhumanism is completely out. If you ignore the trends you will never, ever, EVER get tenure. Like, there was this guy in the eighties who was still in semiotics (you know, that thing with the signifiers and the signifieds and the Star Wars and the eight-track tape players) when everyone had totally gone Foucault. He ended up working at Taco Bell!

Even though I ride the waves a lot, I try to set my own trends and have my own style. Right now I'm trying to bring Heidegger and bell-bottomed jeans back.

Hey. Im a big computer nerd, so Transhumanism is so in for me.
And Sartre.


There are actual trends ?! I dont see them.

If you look at the intellectual history of the past thirty years, you can see roughly fifteen fads that swept across the intellectual landscape, then utterly vanished. Today's academics do not put enough stock in That Which Endures, so they are stuck with That Which Is Hot Right Now. Examples: deconstruction, neoconservatism, post-structuralism, post-post-structuralism, memeology, second wave feminism, third wave feminism, post-feminism, and now neopragmatism.

I appriciate that you say that transhumanism will 'always be in' for you. We need more intellectuals who study what they feel like studying, not what the popular profs think they should be studying. A lot of people say that WWII is passe now, but it still has my attention.

Transhumanism and Sartre may or may not be out; my chronology is thrown off by the fact that this stuff MOVES SO FAST. The chattering classes are like chattering high school students, changing their image every three months to accomidate some shifting standard of dubious origin.

Meh, I am not surprised by intellectual trends. Frankly, I find it interesting the extent to which academia often seems to try to be critical of our society, this is not to argue the perfection of society, but still the extent seems odd and is often a subject of question for conservatives or libertarian scholars, such as philosopher Robert Nozick:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
Or economist Ludwig von Mises:
http://mises.org/etexts/anticap.pdf
Or economist and polymath Friedrich Hayek
http://mises.org/etexts/hayekintellectuals.pdf

And heck, a lot of the matter is probably more of a distaste for capitalism(as seen in the label bourgeois that you used) than a number of other areas. Certainly there is a distaste for the conservative Christian values, but those are seen as some poor misfortune to blight numerous individuals and to be manipulated the the evil, capitalist powers that be, not as a grand evil in and of themselves, and I would imagine that the same holds for an aggressive foreign policy as well. Perhaps I am just being paranoiac and cynical towards academia though.

To get more to the point, there will always be some neo-feminism, or neo-Marxism, or other class war idea to take a lot of influence over the scene.

I'm glad I'm an engineering major. Nerds don't know of these things. They mostly play video games and program. I'll have to investigate these trends, and see what I like

In a post-modern world, a rapid and unstable philosophical climate is a sign of intellectual vigor.

Almost everything in continental European philosophy in the past 60 years is crap, the Postmodernist idiots especially. In Anglo-American philosophy I have little use for the Neo-Pragmatists and other types influenced by Logical Positivism who think science is only about prediction and dismiss explanations as "metaphysics"

My philosophical views can be described as follows:

1. I am a metaphysical Realist, that is, there is an objective reality outside of our senses and that scientific theories are an approximation of that reality.

2. I am a Nominalist, that is, I consider universals like "dog," "tree," "person," etc to be just mental conceptualizations, Platonic Forms and Aristotelian Essences do not exist.

3. I am a Materialist, that is, the physical world is all that exists, there is no supernatural realm or immaterial souls.

4. I am a Weak Emergentist, that is, though elementary particles and their associated quantum fields are the basis of the physical world and are the world's fundamental objects emergent processes, like living organisms, societies, minds, etc. can also be said "to exist."

5. I am an epistemological Fallibilist in the tradition of Karl Popper, that is, a concept can only be called truly objective (AKA "scientific") knowledge if it is falsifiable.

6. I am an Existentialist, that is, life has no inherent purpose, we must decide ourselves what our life's purpose should be.

7. I am a Transhumanist, and that all sapient beings; human, non-human biological intelligence, or sapient AI; deserve "human" rights."

I sometimes hear word of the objective base-things being the cause of "living organisms, societies, minds, etc.", but my personal preferred thought is that they are "aspects" rather than "causes". Will you clarify your position on this?

Could you elaborate? I'm not really understanding the question.

Hey, I like graphic novels.

Other than that, your post was funny.