"This is an object. Our modern authorities admit they can't explain it. Could it be a power struggle? Ancient critical theorists say 'yes.'" That's the level of

"This is an object. Our modern authorities admit they can't explain it. Could it be a power struggle? Ancient critical theorists say 'yes.'" That's the level of rigor in the paper and the in the view of history as progress. A house without a foundation is still a house, and an indistinguishable representation from one that has one, but it's durability and coherence over time that makes one real and the other a representation. I really don't think the author is the first to try throwing out the past, and there were some odd setups in the essay where he expected the "mighty dead" to make a case for themselves today, instead of it being on him to make the case for what he has to improve on them. The underlying view of history as progress and his implied materialist view of epistemic value, I think, isn't new. If you substitute ideology for philosophy, then iterate ideological theorems from it, you can produce what are essentially holographic projections of consistent ideas that seem to encompass everything, and the easiest ones are structured like the Ancient Aliens reference above. The genius of that show is that it is as rigorous a critical theory of archeology as any other critical theory, it's just that everyone thinks their fancier version is different. It's as though we needed Ancient Astronaut Theory to convince us that other critical theories are real. The last century has emphasized some interesting problems that were the consequence of our new ability to simulate and represent much of our experience as artifacts of computation and language, along with critical theories designed as solvents for the artifacts of language, where objects could be decoupled from their meanings, and then re-assigning meaning seemed like just an exercise in power over subjects - but that only works on a certain kind of mind. If you have ever seen an animal react to a magic trick, it's the same slight of hand effect on an intellectual level, I think. You can't navigate without waypoints, and any new philosophical ideas that are not informed by the foundations are just going to be post-hoc moralizations of exigencies in the present.