What is criticism and what does it mean to criticize? These are the questions at hand. Criticism or critical theory has many different meanings to different writers or "critical theorists". Critical theory first emerged from the work of German theorists who were collectively known as the Frankfurt School (Calhoun, 1995, p 13). To criticize something means to problematize a problem or to look at a perspective from an alternative point of view, looking at something from a different sense. This essay will discuss what criticism or critical theory is by examining the various approaches illustrated in the work and research of Craig Calhoun, Dorothy Smith, and Fuyuki Kurasawa. Craig Calhoun describes the "philistine" as someone who is unthinking, passive, someone who does not look deeper than what they see on the surface in an academic sense. He sees him as someone who is content with a world that is in no way fully understood and very unexplored, basically an inability to think more than he deems necessary (Calhoun, 1995, p 1). In a sense it is an academic failure to deal with the real world and is unable to be critical of this real world as they are distracted by exercises or academic manner. Calhoun's description of the philistine is interesting because it underlines in a certain sense what it means to criticize, but in the opposite sense to what has just been explained. He sees that academics or social scientists are very interested in exploring this unexplored world, but when they explore they seem to be held back by the boundaries. These can be seen as boundaries of conventions, or boundaries of knowledge structures that are self-evident, considering that they do not go beyond the familiar and do not realize other possibilities (Calhoun, 1995, p 2). It's... middle of paper... she wants change so that women's perspectives and experiences are seen in the same prominent position. Works Cited Calhoun, Craig. 1995, Rethinking Critical Theory, in Calhoun, Craig, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference, Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass., 1-42. Smith, Dorothy. 1990, Women's Experience as a Radical Critique of Sociology, Sociological Inquiry, 44(1): 7-13. Smith, Dorothy. 1997, Commentary on Hekman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited," Chicago Journals, vol. 22 (2): 392-398. Smith, Dorothy. 1999, Sociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchy in Feminist Texts, in Smith, Dorothy, Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 45-69. Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2000, The ethnological countercurrent in sociology, International Sociology, vol 15(1): 11-31.