ABSTRACT
The critical theoretical strategy discussed in Chapter Seven is identified as “anti-modernist.” This response to the challenge of postmodernism comprises a set of emancipatory pedagogical theories that are characterized by particular political interests (such as feminism, multiculturalism or anti-racism, for example) and that explicitly reject the modernist idea of reason as an emancipatory force. The chapter shows that the strategic rejection of philosophical legitimacy in the name of politics is a theoretical error. It is argued in particular that “anti-modernists” are scholars who attempt to reverse the categories of logic and rhetoric by appealing to the sublime, the mystical, the rhetorical or the different (for example) in the place of logic. As the first two chapters of the book clearly show, the reversal proposed by these theorists is based on the assumption that the categories of logic and rhetoric are separable and reversible, and this assumption is mistaken. Consequently, this strategic approach is also untenable.
