She just can’t help making unwarranted generalizations: “These examples are for the benefit of those victims of modern philosophy who are taught by Linguistic Analysis that there is no way to derive conjunctions from experience” (49)-NB that she cites no example of her interlocutors here. She is comical insofar as it kinda is correct in defining epistemology as a "science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge” (47), but the problem is that this sentence does not describe this text, which re-urges some warmed-up empiricism from centuries ago-but nothing is cited, explained, or established.
She somehow thinks that concepts exist apart from language: “the learning of words is an invaluable accelerator of a child’s cognitive development, but it is not a substitute for the process of concept-formation: nothing is” (25).ĭumb definitions everywhere: “consciousness is the faculty of awareness” (37), for instance. The dogmatic, unevidenced, undefined, or even unknowable assertions are as obnoxious as ever: “The first concepts a child forms are concepts of perceptual entities the first words he learns are words designating them” (24). She is of course superdumb insofar as she says: “integral calculus, used to measure the area of circles” (17)…uh, wurt? Similarly, “Adverbs are concepts of the characteristics of motion (or action): they’re formed by specifying a characteristic and omitting the measurements involved” (20)-huh? She lays out much work early with the notions of same and similar, though they aren’t rigorously presented, and everything she says is absolutely crushed by implication in Foucault’s The Order of Things. She deploys her normal ‘collectivist’ subject in stating such things as “The building block of man’s knowledge is the concept of an ‘existent’” (6) (never mind how silly the argument might be otherwise). The argument skips over two issues of ancient ontology in order to get to its philistine epistemology: “the validity of the senses must be taken for granted-and one must remember the axiom: Existence exists” (4). And it should go without saying that she examines no post-Renaissance texts at all, ever. This is stated without benefit of quotation of pre-Renaissance or Renaissance proper philosophy to establish the distinction with purported post-Renaissance philosophy’s so-called ‘attack’ on the conceptual faculty. She is in her normal state of batshit insane when she proclaims, without reference to any texts whatsoever “Under all the tortuous complexities, contradictions, equivocations, rationalizations of the post-Renaissance philosophy-the one consistent line, the fundamental that explains the rest, is: a concerted attack on man’s conceptual faculty” (3). And the equation of ‘concepts’ with ‘universals’ is just, uh, wrong. This is of course not the ‘central’ issue in philosophy, though it is something considered in certain older ontological discussions. Opines in the forward that “the issue of concepts (known as the ‘the problem of universals’) is philosophy’s central issue” (1). Sophomoric beyond belief, suffering from her normal defects, as described elsewhere in this series. Opines in the Part XI of a multi-part review series.
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