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Postmodern philosophy/Postmodern philosophy talk
Postmodern philosophy, like other fields of philosophy, is a set of interesting questions that leads to a set of equally interesting answers. This specific set of questions fundamentally tries to ask how people know and believe the things that they do.
The origin of Postmodern philosophy comes from the rift between Existentialism and [modern philosophy]?. Classical philosophy is very much concerned with logic and rational thought; as in Rene Descartes' argument I think, therefore I am. Existentialism, in contrast, draws its arguments from emotive state, "I am my emotions". The gap between these two ways of building an understanding of the world was what gave rise to the postmodern philosophical inquiry.
Episteme, Paradigm, Paradigm Shift, and Deconstructionism are all specific arguments of post modern philosophy.
Episteme is the set of philosophical assumptions that underly a particular reader's understanding of an argument. A scientist with a rationalist episteme might for instance have difficulty in understanding the emotional argument of a woman in love, or the faith argument of a religious man. In the book ['Writing and Difference'], Jacques Derrida examines a nonsensical argument and shows that even though your fundamental belief system or episteme prevents you from consciously considering the argument, that there is never the less evidence that the argument took place in your mind even while you were rejecting it as nonsense.
See the entry on Epistemology for a full discussion on thought boundaries.
Paradigm is a less extreme but still fundamental way of classifying things in the world. Paradigm is a means of categorizing things that you know; recognizing things that you see by placing them in certain categories which thereby imply how you expect them to interact with one another. Paradigm shift comes when you rearrange those categorizations to see the same real world things with a new understanding.
Deconstructionism is the scientific method of post modern philosophy. It is a means to pull apart a system until you understand the way that you have categorized its pieces; then to reexamine the whole and find new ways of pulling the system apart, leading to new models of understanding.
Could you possibly rewrite this article so that it makes a little sense? I'm a philosopher, and honestly, I can't make heads or tails of it. --LMS
I will try. Hopefully a bit clearer. -- ksmathers
Each of the philosophical ages has been accompanied by art that reflects that age, so that comment might apply to all of the history of philosophy. I could substitute Modernism for Existentialism in the text above, but Modernism unlike postmodernism is only loosely defined by the set of philosophies which were being argued during that period of time. Also I wouldn't say that it is a reaction against modernism so much as it takes an interest in the distinction between Modernism and Classical. In other words it Post Modern art should be thought of as orthogonal to the classical/modern axis. That might be my bias though. -- ksmathers
Postmodern philosophy (and Continential philosophy more general) is the half of philosophy I never really got. But I can list some names: [Jacques Derrida]?, [Michel Foucault]?, [Julia Kristeva]?, that guy whose name begins with B -- Simon J Kissane
Barthes? AMT
How about this for an entry (although I am not a philosopher):
Postmodern philosophy is very similar to post-structuralism; whether one considers the two identical or fundamentally different generally depends on how invested one is in the issues. People who are opposed to either postmodernism or poststructuralism often lump them together; advocates on the other hand make finer distinctions.
Postmodern philosophy is for the most part an outgrowth of Continental philosophy, and is heavily influenced by Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein is also very influencial. It is generally characterized by a rejection of the Enlightenment project, especially its claim to progress through the accumulation of positive knowledge. It is more specifically characterized by a rejection of metaphysics and a of humanism. Although many critics therefore characterize postmodernist philosophy as a form of nihilism, postmodernists themselves generally see their's as a liberatory philosophy. Some people have identified postmodern philosophy with relativism, although postmodern philosophy makes more, and more specific, claims than relativism (most important, most postmodernist philosophers locate postmodernity historically; it is not a purely abstract or logical argument).
The most well-known postmodernist philosopher is Jean-Francois Lyotard. He argued that modern philosophies legitimized their truth-claims not (as they themselves claimed) on logical or empirical grounds, but rather on the grounds of accepted stories (or "metanarratives") about knowledge and the world -- what Wittgenstein termed "language-games." He further argued that these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth-claims. He believes that in the wake of the collapse of modern metanarratives, people are developing a new "language game" -- one that does not make claims to absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever-changing relationships (among people and between people and the world).
The philosopher Jacques Derrida, and the historian Michel Foucault, are also often cited as postmodern philosophers, although each has rejected the other's views. Like Lyotard, both are skeptical of absolute or universal truth-claims. Unlike Lyotard, they are (or seem) rather more pessimistic about the emancipatory claims of any new language-game; thus some would characterize them as post-structuralist rather than postmodernist.
Others who have written about postmodernity are the literary critic Frederic Jameson and the geographer David Harvey. They distinguish between postmodernity, which they use to describe an objective historical condition or situation, and postmodernism, which they use to describe a particular way of talking about postmodernity. They have further identified postmodernity with what the Marxist Ernest Mandel called "late capitalism," and have characteized postmodernism as the ideology of late capitalism.
I leave it to LMS or another philosopher to decide whether this could be the basis for an article on postmodern philosophy, and to modify it as necessary.