Talk:List of critical theorists

Shouldn't this be 'List of notable figures in critical theory'? Or 'List of notable cultural theorists'? Or 'List of cultural theorists'? More suggestions? Pteron 20:52, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

List of cultural theorists Q9 21:54, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Lists. The title shouldn't include "major" in it. --Jiang 03:48, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

I disagree with the desire to merge this list into critical theory. Certainly all of these guys need to be sorted in, but this should remain, as the critical theory category is not going to have a "critical theorists" subcategory (They're instead being listed by subfield within critical theory). Snowspinner 02:32, Jun 5, 2004 (UTC)

To be more precise, I think a subcategory of Critical_theory should be created, Critical_theorists. It's OK if this duplicates information in the sub-field categories; each article on a critical theorist should be a member of the subfield and the Category Critical Theorists, since these are both useful ways of slicing the world. (Otherwise, this list wouldn't need to exist at all.) -- Beland 20:51, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I don't want to over categorize, honestly. I'm annoyed enough at people like Deleuze and Guatarri who need two categories. So I'd rather leave this as a list article, and have the categories arranged in the most useful way to browsers, which I think is topically. Snowspinner 21:13, Jun 5, 2004 (UTC)

As I've said elsewhere, I don't agree that Foucault, my personal area of expertise, is a critical theorist, on the ground that he had no theory. I think several of the figures here are not infact candidates for the list.--XmarkX 16:01, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

You're not the only one to argue that. However, I think that Foucault is taught in enough theory courses than excluding him would be silly. Snowspinner 16:45, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)

what I'm saying is that, while it's acceptable to call our project critical theory, claiming that these thinkers are part of a single movement called critical theory is just misleading. There is no unifying factor here.--XmarkX 00:06, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

My sense of the unifying factor is "These people are taught in theory courses in humanities departments at universities." Snowspinner 00:17, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)

I don't mean to be antagonistic, but could you direct me to such a 'theory course' which is called 'critical theory' (if it's just called 'theory', then it doesn't justify calling these guys 'critical theorists')? I don't think this is the case outside North America in any case.--XmarkX 04:01, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, that's been debated - the courses are most often taught as "theory," whether "interpretive theory," "literary theory," or what. Really, the stuff in question is most often referred to broadly as theory, which is a pain, because WikiProject: Theory would just be a mess of a title. Critical theory seemed like the best adjective at the time - it's used with some frequency, and the top journal in terms of X theory is probably Critical Inquiry, so "critical" seemed a pretty good adjective. Though CI typically just calls it "theory" as well. So I suppose my question is, what unambiguous adjective would you apply to theory to catch this set? I've certainly heard "critical theory" used to describe theory at large by a number of professors... Snowspinner 06:21, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)

As I say, the name of our *project* is not so important - but this list pertains to be an encyclopedia entry. An objective description of this list would be "List of philosophers fashionable in contemporary literary theory", as that is really the only thing that distinguishes them. I'm serious. Similarly, the Critical Theory project is also largely a matter of fashion, but it is a project to build entries whose content is not. This list should be titled to reflect the fact that the people in it have nothing in common other than being taught in the same courses, cited in the same works and read by the same people.--XmarkX 07:06, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I sort of agree with both of you - there's not really any way to categorize the people on this list, but "critical theory" as sort of a kludge works well enough. Critical theory as a shorthand for that fuzzy "theory" catagory snowspinner talks about. Deleuze 18:07, 8 July 2006 (UTC)