A synthesis of forty years' work by France's leading sociologist,
this book pushes the critique of scholarly reason to a new level.
It is a brilliant example of Bourdieu's unique ability to link
sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical
thought.
"Pascalian Meditations" makes explicit the presuppositions of a
state of "scholasticism," a certain leisure liberated from the
urgencies of the world. Philosophers, unwilling to engage these
presuppositions in their practice, have brought them into the order
of discourse, not so much to analyze them as to legitimate them.
This situation is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical,
and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological
critique.
This critique of scholarly reason is carried out in the name of
Pascal because he, too, pointed out the features of human existence
that the scholastic outlook ignores: he was concerned with symbolic
power; he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking; he
attended (without populist naivete) to "ordinary people"; and he
was determined to seek the "raison d'etre" of seemingly illogical
behavior rather than condemning or mocking it.
Through this critique, Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy that
calls into question some of our most fundamental presuppositions,
such as a "subject" who is free and self-aware. This philosophy,
with its intellectual debt to such other "heretical" philosophers
as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional
questioning of the concepts of violence, power, time, history, the
universal, and the purpose and direction of existence.
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