Just Theory

An Alternative History of the Western Tradition

David B. Downing

• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780814100417
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

In Just Theory, David Downing offers an alternative history of critical theory in the context of the birth and transformation of the Western philosophical tradition.

Rather than providing a summary survey, it situates the production of theoretical texts within the geopolitical economy of just two pivotal cultural turns: Cultural Turn 1 (roughly 450–350 BCE) looks at the Platonic revolution, during which a new philosophic, universalist, and literate discourse emerged from what had long been an oral culture; Cultural Turn 2 (roughly 1770–1870) investigates the Romantic revolution and its nineteenth-century aftermath up to the Paris Commune.

While focusing on the quest for social justice, Downing situates the two cultural turns within deep time: Cultural Turn 1 gave birth to the Western philosophical tradition during the Holocene; Cultural Turn 2 witnessed the beginnings of the shift to the Anthropocene when the Industrial Revolution and the fossil fuel age began to alter our complex biospheres and geospheres. As described in the epilogue, the aftereffects of Western metaphysics have dramatically shaped our twenty-first-century world, especially for teachers and scholars in English and the humanities.

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE: WHAT IS JUST THEORY?
• Cultural Turn 1. Inventing Western Metaphysics
• 1 Introduction: Framing the Common Good
• 2 Why Is Plato So Upset at the Poets, and What Is Western Metaphysics?
• 3 Reframing the Republic: From the Homeric to the Platonic Paideia
• 4 Finding Love (and Writing) in All the Wrong Places: Plato's Pharmacy and the Double-Edged Sword of Literacy in the Phaedrus
• 5 Aristotle's Natural Classification of Things: When Dialectic Trumps Rhetoric and Poetry Gets Rescued
• Cultural Turn 2. Rewriting Western Metaphysics: Aesthetics and Politics in the Age of Capital
• 6 Rewriting Western Metaphysics for a Revolutionary Age
• 7 The Prelude to the Revolution: The Limits of Literary Freedom in a Market Society
• 8 Women's Rights, Class Wars, and the Master-Slave Dialectic: Signs of the Rising Countermovements
• 9 The Struggle between Communality and Hierarchy: Lessons of the Paris Commune for the Twenty-First Century
• 10 From God's Great Chain to Nature's Slow-Motion Evolution: Reframing Our Regulative Fictions
• Cultural Turn 3. Surviving the Sixth Extinction and Resolving the Crisis of Care
• Epilogue
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX
• AUTHOR