Drawing up some more battle lines...

Her are a few more of the major threads of the thesis as it stands so far:
- As the fairy tale suggests I am relying on an account of rationality that is de-centered. This is to say that rationality is not the defining or most important thing that humans do.
- This view of rationality in turn is tied to an abandonment of the distinction between facts and values that is traditionally part of western academic thinking.
- This is (so far) a naturalist account. A lot is being said about naturalism at the moment by philosophers who are jumping on this band-wagon and I am still not sure if I agree with them entirely on this score. At the moment though it is safe to say that a heavy dose of Kantian realism is in the mix. The best account of naturalism that I know of can be found in the work of Roy Bhaskar, even though I think his account of what Kant and Hume were saying is a little dubious.
- As already mentioned this thesis will be heavily critical of what some people consider to be major 20th C philosophies. Included inthe firing line are post-modernism, existentialism and that deconstructionist loser, Derrida.
-This will also be critical of traditional psychology. Although it may turn out that I don't have any more content to say on this matter than Foucault did.
- Also as already mentioned I will be critical of a lot of commonly held myths about people and society but also of commonly held misconceptions about science, art and history.
- And finally (in case I haven't mentioned it enough already) I will be attempting to draw connections from Kant through to Simmel and Weber and then on to Foucault and the recent developments in cognitive science.

The idea is a big and complex one. One attempt at giving a nutshell account is to say that I am trying to give an account of sociology that situates it within a realist/naturalist theory and blurs the boundaries between sociology, cognitive science, biology and history (and probably a few other things besides). This blurring of the boundaries is necessary as per the tennants of naturalism, it will overcome some of the limitations of sociology and give a more accurate account of the world.
My intuition is that this can be achieved by attending to the developments of ideas from Kant through to Simmel and Weber and then through to late 20th C sociology and cognitive science. Of course there are many connections that can be made with/attached to these developments but I think that this progression is the main thread that needs to be established for this task.
What is more...attending to this main thread will help us muck out the philosophical stables. That is, we will be able to demythologize a lot of mistakes made by modern thinkers along the way. Among these are the above listed philosophical targets (post-modernism, existentialsim, etc) but they also include a lot of pre-conceptions and conclusions that are attached to academic pursuits (the sciences in particular) and a lot of general cultural assumptions.