Talk:Postmodern philosophy

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I agree with LMS, this article is terrible. Most philosophers do not consider postmodernism to have much if any influence on the mainstream of their discipline. A real philospher should rewrite this.

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Regardless of what any formal definition of postmodernism means, this article serves no purpose to define _what_ postmodernism is: it merely serves to tell us what it is like and what it has spawned. I would believe this was a subculture with many different aspects if I wasn't already familiar with the subject. This article reads like the Principia Discordia.

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Just a note for anyone interested, in the "History of Philosophy" Index, the link to "21st Century philosophy" links directly to Postmodern Philosophy, which is not how I would characterize it. Of course, it does require a new article, but properly speaking, the two main lines of thought are Continental (which has petered out a bit from what I know - are there still active phenomenologists?) and Analytic (which is most definately still going strong.)

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Please wait for a philosopher to write an article on this subject. The following is philosophically incompetent--to put it bluntly. I don't think it can be rescued; a philosopher would have to start from scratch. That's why I've put it on this page. --User:LMS

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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.

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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. --User:LMS

I will try. Hopefully a bit clearer. -- User: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. -- User:ksmathers

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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 -- User:Simon J Kissane

Barthes? AMT

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Barthes is better described as a structuralist. Perhaps Baudrillard?

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By the way, if you're interested in the structure of postmodern discourse, check out the postmodernism generator --User:Seb

Contents 1 Ken Wilber a postmodern philosopher? 2 Postmodernism series 3 Just A Note 4 'Anti-Foundationalism' 5 Postmodernism versus postmodernity: NPOV? 6 post-marxism 7 Redirects 8 Traditional Philosophy 9 Buridan. 10 Eclectic and Elusive? 11 Early Influences Section 12 Ken Wilber a postmodern philosopher? 13 Postmodernism series 14 Just A Note 15 'Anti-Foundationalism' 16 Postmodernism versus postmodernity: NPOV? 17 post-marxism 18 Redirects 19 Traditional Philosophy 20 Buridan. 21 Eclectic and Elusive? 22 Early Influences Section 23 Definition 24 Criticism section.

[edit] Ken Wilber a postmodern philosopher?

Why is Ken Wilber included as a postmodern philosopher? I'm not that familiar with his work, but from his Wikipedia article he seems to be a consumate modernist in the Joseph Campbell/Carl Jung tradition. COGDEN 03:22, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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Is it just me, or is postmodern philosophy just the west catching on to very old eastern ideas? I see eastern philosophies listed in the box with links, but the connection isn't mentioned in the article.

Just would be an extreme exageration. Generally such "West Goes East" philosophical trends are under the catagorey of "New Age Philosophy" Stirling Newberry 16:24, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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I don't understand the section on Derrida at all. Possibly it's just me...but can anyone rework that paragraph with less jargon? Raistlinjones 19:33, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)

Anything specific - Derrida is fairly thick with jargon. Stirling Newberry 09:51, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Postmodernism series

I've created a template feel free to add other important examples of postmodernism - broadly defined - in this template so that readers can gain a better understanding of the terms involved by comparing and contrasting their use over several articles. Stirling Newberry 17:19, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Of course we could define the terms in, you know, the articles about them, but that would just be silly! Misodoctakleidist 23:29, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Just A Note

I know this doesn't help the article, so don't mind it, but can't the people who name movements and fields "Contemporary Art, Postmodernism, Modernism, and the like see that those names might have temporal issues at some point in the near future? :)

P.S. This has clearly already happened. Modernism is no longer the most modern philosophy, so now we have Postmodernism? What's next? Superm401 02:30, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

P.P.S I realize these names don't usually come from the members of the movement themselves.

I think the next step in the progression is here: neocon philosophy. Not2plato 20:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I was watching a documentary about art critics inventing "isms" recently (sorry, forget the title). They actually used the term ismicity. They should have gone with ismism.

In terms of the next movement, I think we've hit a wall, and we're either going to go backwards - e.g. neocon - or start progressing in a very different way - e.g. the technological singularity. Tim opensourcethought

Philosophers do talk about neo-modernism... especially in connection with Habermas.

Actually, though, for most people in fields where you talk about "modernism" and "postmodernism," I doubt this is much of a concern, since you learn pretty early on to detach words like "modernism" from the lay-person understanding of "modern." Modernism is just the title for a specific period in human history. It's not an especially big problem to say that we've moved past it, any more than it's a problem to say we've moved past the Victorian age. It is, on the other hand, always going to be a contentious issue, since these big picture stories we tell about our past and present (i.e. "modern" "postmodern") always come loaded with all sorts of values and ideologies.

[edit] 'Anti-Foundationalism'

"Postmodern philosophy is generally characterized by a skepticism toward the simple binary oppositions predominant in Western metaphysics and humanism, such as the expectation that the philosopher may cleanly isolate knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, or presence from absence. This is anti-foundationalism...."

That final assertion in this passage is badly mistaken. Foundationalism is not about making distinctions, per se, and anti-foundationalism is not about denying them. Whatever the correct term is here, it is not 'anti-foundationalism', though PMists do often describe their view in this way (and, on a side, vastly overrestimated there originality in denying 'foundationalism')

Agreed. The entire fight against binary oppositions is a pretense. It seems to be mere all or nothing fallacy, too. 71.212.196.138 21:01, 8 April 2006 (UTC)not2plato

[edit] Postmodernism versus postmodernity: NPOV?

I was just wandering through, and I know very little about post-modernism, but the section 'Postmodernism versus postmodernity' seems to be ridiculously lacking in NPOV. Can someone with a scholarly understanding of this please review that section? Blade 03:41, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Update. I made an edit rmoving a lot of (what seemed to me) blatant lack of NPOV. Looks like it got reverted. So I have added the NPOV-section template to this section of the article. I don't see how statements like "Many say that postmodern philosophers exist or existed primarily to justify lies and lying. But they also exist to make themselves famous, and can hardly be expected to give a damn about anything other than that." can be considered to even remotely have a neutral point of view. If this is a common critism, can we see substantive sources on that? Blade 15:32, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I removed the entire section. I'm not sure where to begin with regards to its problems, but they seem insurmountable without a complete rewrite. Here are my official reasons, though:

- Violation of the Neutral point of view policy. See Blade's comments for this.

- Statements like "Many say that postmodern philosophers..." and "Many believe that this is due to the fact that..." fail to avoid weasel words.

- The entire section lacks citations and is not obviously or trivially true to the reader (except, perhaps to whoever wrote the section), and thus violates Wikipedia's No original research policy.

Besides that, it's just poorly written. If anyone wishes to write new content for this section that avoids the above problems, knock yourself out. Until then, I recommend keeping the section deleted. Simoes 14:55, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] post-marxism

the post-marxism article was pointing to neo-communism, i split it out, but it will need much work to get it up to a basic level. if people are interested, please contribute what you know, edit my starter drivel :), and help build that article too. --Buridan 13:02, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

This is just wiki, not a philosophy journal. The article is just supposed to tell me what postmodern philosophy is. I don't know what it is, and want to learn. It is not a debate or a super-complicated thing.

It should not be offering editorial opions like this: "As Postmodernism questions the established paradigms and institutions of the conservative culture of the privileged, as did existentialism, it is often attacked and maligned, and its definitions and hypotheses deliberately distorted by those consumed with a sort of conservative "Culture War" mentality."

I am not saying the text in quotes is false. It might actually be true. But it is not part of objectively telling me what post-modernism is. Artman772000 05:15, 27 June 2007 (UTC)artman772000

of course nothing will tell you objectively about anything... --Buridan 11:14, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

The text in quotes above is very much the basis of the postmodernism debate. It's simply not possible to say anything meaningful about postmodernism without mentioning this -- and not mentioning this would certainly not be anything close to an 'objective' description of postmodernism. Also, the guy who wanted 'a real philosopher' to re-write the article takes a stand in this debate. Postmodernism is very much a rebellion against the basis of 'real' philosophy. Every book or article about postmodernismen, written by philosophers, that I've read, have got central parts of postmodernist thinking completely wrong (quite often so wrong it looks like a deliberate distortion). One point might be that postmodernism is not a set of fixed ideas that's to be defended by their creators; it's rather an ever continuing discussion. For instance, Foucault rejected any attempts to understand his writings as a philosophical system -- every book or article of his was to be read as a challenge to all systems (he didn't even want to be associated with as vague a 'system' as postmodernism). As for Barthes (above) he was certainly no postmodernist. A structuralist, very briefly a sort of poststructuralist, a phenomenologist -- he simply followed the currents of French humaniora in whatever direction it might take, and from time to time happened to publish the latest thoughts at the right time, without ever being a major contributor to the development of these thoughts. Very much the same for Kristeva -- thoug she is at least responsible for introducing Bakhtin in the West.

[edit] Redirects

I was redirected to this page from "Computer age philosophy."??????????? Please explain. –––––

[edit] Traditional Philosophy

The phrase occurs 47 times in Wikipedia and in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I don't see why it's objectionable. PostModernists would not be at all concerned with Wittgenstein's criticisms of Logical Atomism, which was long dead even in the '50s, nor would they even be interested in his criticisms of previous Analytic Philosophy, because PostModernism emerged after Continental and Anglo-American philosophy had largely stopped interacting with one another. the interest is rather in his general criticisms of foundationalism, essentialism, language as primarily fact-stating, meaning understood on the model of names, the Cartesian view of the self, and the whole notion of philosophy theory-building rather than as a therapeutic clarification of problems Wovon 07:48, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I mostly agree, but it probably depends on which "postmodnerists" we're talking about. Your claims seem accurate to, say, Lyotard, who as far as I know never discussed Logical Atomism at all, and focused much more on the general Wittgensteinian themes you mention. But Richard Rorty was concerned with Wittgenstein's criticisms of Logical Atomism and was even more concerned with his criticisms of Analytic Philosophy in general. It's true that the French were mostly oblivious to Anglophone Analytic philosophy, but I think there's an important strand of (Rortian) "postmodern philosophy" that wants to draw deeper connections than Lyotard did. Although Rorty tended to stay away from the term "postmodernism" himself, I think there's a sense in which we could try to read him as suggesting that a "postmodern" sort of philosophy emerged contemporaneously in both the continental and analytic traditions.

[edit] Buridan.

There is simply no good reason to include it in the article. If it was true there might be, but it is not. How does it help the reader understand pomo?

All it does is mislead the reader into thinking that the accusation has some validity (becuase why else would it be in the article?). It creates false balance. It is like quoting false accusations about "big pharma" in the alternative medicine article.

––— FWIW, I am a Wittgensteinian who actually loathes PoMo. Now, I have a few questions. Do you want a reference for PostModern philosophers offering such defenses/counter-attacks? (They are common and the only challenge would be finding one best representative - which I'll leave to someone who enjoys reading this stuff) Or are you asking for a reference demonstrating that some PoMo critic is protecting their privilege?

I agree with the view that there were POV problems, which is why my edits were made to reflect that these are the arguments offered, where previously, the arguments were presented as flat assertions. However, the reason such arguments are relevant (and also a difference between such arguments and talk of "big pharma") is that claims that standards of rationality are instruments of preserving the privilege of some while marginalizing others are not merely ad hoc defenses: they are central to PoMo thinking and so essential to understanding the movement/style/fashion.Wovon 10:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I meant a reference to a pomo making such accusations. I don't think they are really any more central to pomo than gripes about big pharma are to alternative medicine. If we are going to include it we should avoid making it seem as though wikipedia endorses it, and I don't think using weasle words such as "some say" really does that. A quotation from a postmodernist would be better, but I am still sceptical about the value of including it. Perhaps if we used an example it would make it easier to put it in an accurate context. We could say something like "pomo challenges X. However Y challenged X and was taken taken seriously by acadmic philosophers" which would be more neutral. Misodoctakleidist 12:22, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The assumption that academic philosophers are authoritative should be suspect even to non-Postmodernists. A great many philosophers on the Continent (in contrast to Anglophone philosophy) have not been employed as philosophers in academia. But if that's a requirement, I suppose Rorty would have to do. Again, someone more immersed in PoMo can undoubtedly find something better, but just cheecking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which I happen to have handy, we find (unfortunately, before he was identifying his positions with "Postmodernism"), "Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein." (I cringe at this misrepresentation of Wittgenstein, btw, but it is a reading that some exegetes endorse). Hopefully, someone else can dig up a quote identifying this explicitly with PoMo. FWIW, and to those about to dig in their libraries, these (from PMN) are in the general direction (but I know his later stuff is more polemical: just don't have it handy): "The eventual demarcation of philosophy from science was made possible by the notion that philosophy's core was 'theory of knowledge,' a theory distinct from the sciences because it was their foundation." "...the more 'scientific' and 'rigorous' philosophy became, the less it had to do with the rest of culture and the more absurd its traditional pretentions seemed."

Sorry, I'm not sure what your point is. I mentioned academic philosophers because the section I removed from the article originally said that academic philosophers criticised pomo because they felt threatened by it so I took the reference to critics of postmodernism to mean specifically critics in academic philosophy. I wasn't suggesting that we should treat academic philosophers as a source of authority. Just that if we are going to include the claim that their criticism is a result of pomo undermining their assumption in the article then we should put it in the context I suggested above. Misodoctakleidist 17:04, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

—— Ok, I clearly misunderstood your "and was taken taken seriously by academic philosophers" remark. As you may know, I was merely trying to more neutrally represent the dispute (though your "weasel words" comment is not without merit), but perhaps the original author or someone better read in PoMo can find a good quote. I'm thinking in part of places (it's been awhile) where Rorty decries the professionalization of philosophy as resting on an unsustainable image of itself as legitimating science and legitimating itself as arbiter of knowledge and therefore holding a privileged place in culture, with epistemology as "queen science". There are many less clear, more polemical, and more clearly ad hominem attacks to be found in PoMo lit, but I am unsure which ought to be taken as best representing the general attitude.Wovon 23:35, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Eclectic and Elusive?

Would anyone object to me getting rid of this at as the first words of the article? It seems like a bad way to start the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by DatDoo (talk • contribs) 05:38, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Removed, replaced with "new and complex" also, how is a trend of thought "elusive"? opening line might have seemed clever but it was really just bad. Kiyae (talk) 08:14, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Early Influences Section

If you are going to list how certain philosophers, types of art, etc. influenced pomo early on, please provide some explanation as to HOW they influenced pomo. Eg: None except those with expert knowledge on pomo will understand how some art forms and architecture influenced pomo. I know THAT architecture influenced early pomo (Foucalt was a photographer, etc.) but I have never understood its actual influence. Also, if you ar going to list early pomo philosophers, please write them in historical order-it makes things clearer for people linking to other pages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kiyae (talk • contribs) 08:11, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

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I agree with LMS, this article is terrible. Most philosophers do not consider postmodernism to have much if any influence on the mainstream of their discipline. A real philospher should rewrite this.

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Regardless of what any formal definition of postmodernism means, this article serves no purpose to define _what_ postmodernism is: it merely serves to tell us what it is like and what it has spawned. I would believe this was a subculture with many different aspects if I wasn't already familiar with the subject. This article reads like the Principia Discordia.

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Just a note for anyone interested, in the "History of Philosophy" Index, the link to "21st Century philosophy" links directly to Postmodern Philosophy, which is not how I would characterize it. Of course, it does require a new article, but properly speaking, the two main lines of thought are Continental (which has petered out a bit from what I know - are there still active phenomenologists?) and Analytic (which is most definately still going strong.)

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Please wait for a philosopher to write an article on this subject. The following is philosophically incompetent--to put it bluntly. I don't think it can be rescued; a philosopher would have to start from scratch. That's why I've put it on this page. --User:LMS

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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.

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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. --User:LMS

I will try. Hopefully a bit clearer. -- User: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. -- User:ksmathers

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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 -- User:Simon J Kissane

Barthes? AMT

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Barthes is better described as a structuralist. Perhaps Baudrillard?

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By the way, if you're interested in the structure of postmodern discourse, check out the postmodernism generator --User:Seb

[edit] Ken Wilber a postmodern philosopher?

Why is Ken Wilber included as a postmodern philosopher? I'm not that familiar with his work, but from his Wikipedia article he seems to be a consumate modernist in the Joseph Campbell/Carl Jung tradition. COGDEN 03:22, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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Is it just me, or is postmodern philosophy just the west catching on to very old eastern ideas? I see eastern philosophies listed in the box with links, but the connection isn't mentioned in the article.

Just would be an extreme exageration. Generally such "West Goes East" philosophical trends are under the catagorey of "New Age Philosophy" Stirling Newberry 16:24, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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I don't understand the section on Derrida at all. Possibly it's just me...but can anyone rework that paragraph with less jargon? Raistlinjones 19:33, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)

Anything specific - Derrida is fairly thick with jargon. Stirling Newberry 09:51, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Postmodernism series

I've created a template feel free to add other important examples of postmodernism - broadly defined - in this template so that readers can gain a better understanding of the terms involved by comparing and contrasting their use over several articles. Stirling Newberry 17:19, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Of course we could define the terms in, you know, the articles about them, but that would just be silly! Misodoctakleidist 23:29, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Just A Note

I know this doesn't help the article, so don't mind it, but can't the people who name movements and fields "Contemporary Art, Postmodernism, Modernism, and the like see that those names might have temporal issues at some point in the near future? :)

P.S. This has clearly already happened. Modernism is no longer the most modern philosophy, so now we have Postmodernism? What's next? Superm401 02:30, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

P.P.S I realize these names don't usually come from the members of the movement themselves.

I think the next step in the progression is here: neocon philosophy. Not2plato 20:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I was watching a documentary about art critics inventing "isms" recently (sorry, forget the title). They actually used the term ismicity. They should have gone with ismism.

In terms of the next movement, I think we've hit a wall, and we're either going to go backwards - e.g. neocon - or start progressing in a very different way - e.g. the technological singularity. Tim opensourcethought

Philosophers do talk about neo-modernism... especially in connection with Habermas.

Actually, though, for most people in fields where you talk about "modernism" and "postmodernism," I doubt this is much of a concern, since you learn pretty early on to detach words like "modernism" from the lay-person understanding of "modern." Modernism is just the title for a specific period in human history. It's not an especially big problem to say that we've moved past it, any more than it's a problem to say we've moved past the Victorian age. It is, on the other hand, always going to be a contentious issue, since these big picture stories we tell about our past and present (i.e. "modern" "postmodern") always come loaded with all sorts of values and ideologies.

[edit] 'Anti-Foundationalism'

"Postmodern philosophy is generally characterized by a skepticism toward the simple binary oppositions predominant in Western metaphysics and humanism, such as the expectation that the philosopher may cleanly isolate knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, or presence from absence. This is anti-foundationalism...."

That final assertion in this passage is badly mistaken. Foundationalism is not about making distinctions, per se, and anti-foundationalism is not about denying them. Whatever the correct term is here, it is not 'anti-foundationalism', though PMists do often describe their view in this way (and, on a side, vastly overrestimated there originality in denying 'foundationalism')

Agreed. The entire fight against binary oppositions is a pretense. It seems to be mere all or nothing fallacy, too. 71.212.196.138 21:01, 8 April 2006 (UTC)not2plato

[edit] Postmodernism versus postmodernity: NPOV?

I was just wandering through, and I know very little about post-modernism, but the section 'Postmodernism versus postmodernity' seems to be ridiculously lacking in NPOV. Can someone with a scholarly understanding of this please review that section? Blade 03:41, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Update. I made an edit rmoving a lot of (what seemed to me) blatant lack of NPOV. Looks like it got reverted. So I have added the NPOV-section template to this section of the article. I don't see how statements like "Many say that postmodern philosophers exist or existed primarily to justify lies and lying. But they also exist to make themselves famous, and can hardly be expected to give a damn about anything other than that." can be considered to even remotely have a neutral point of view. If this is a common critism, can we see substantive sources on that? Blade 15:32, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I removed the entire section. I'm not sure where to begin with regards to its problems, but they seem insurmountable without a complete rewrite. Here are my official reasons, though:

- Violation of the Neutral point of view policy. See Blade's comments for this.

- Statements like "Many say that postmodern philosophers..." and "Many believe that this is due to the fact that..." fail to avoid weasel words.

- The entire section lacks citations and is not obviously or trivially true to the reader (except, perhaps to whoever wrote the section), and thus violates Wikipedia's No original research policy.

Besides that, it's just poorly written. If anyone wishes to write new content for this section that avoids the above problems, knock yourself out. Until then, I recommend keeping the section deleted. Simoes 14:55, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] post-marxism

the post-marxism article was pointing to neo-communism, i split it out, but it will need much work to get it up to a basic level. if people are interested, please contribute what you know, edit my starter drivel :), and help build that article too. --Buridan 13:02, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

This is just wiki, not a philosophy journal. The article is just supposed to tell me what postmodern philosophy is. I don't know what it is, and want to learn. It is not a debate or a super-complicated thing.

It should not be offering editorial opions like this: "As Postmodernism questions the established paradigms and institutions of the conservative culture of the privileged, as did existentialism, it is often attacked and maligned, and its definitions and hypotheses deliberately distorted by those consumed with a sort of conservative "Culture War" mentality."

I am not saying the text in quotes is false. It might actually be true. But it is not part of objectively telling me what post-modernism is. Artman772000 05:15, 27 June 2007 (UTC)artman772000

of course nothing will tell you objectively about anything... --Buridan 11:14, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

The text in quotes above is very much the basis of the postmodernism debate. It's simply not possible to say anything meaningful about postmodernism without mentioning this -- and not mentioning this would certainly not be anything close to an 'objective' description of postmodernism. Also, the guy who wanted 'a real philosopher' to re-write the article takes a stand in this debate. Postmodernism is very much a rebellion against the basis of 'real' philosophy. Every book or article about postmodernismen, written by philosophers, that I've read, have got central parts of postmodernist thinking completely wrong (quite often so wrong it looks like a deliberate distortion). One point might be that postmodernism is not a set of fixed ideas that's to be defended by their creators; it's rather an ever continuing discussion. For instance, Foucault rejected any attempts to understand his writings as a philosophical system -- every book or article of his was to be read as a challenge to all systems (he didn't even want to be associated with as vague a 'system' as postmodernism). As for Barthes (above) he was certainly no postmodernist. A structuralist, very briefly a sort of poststructuralist, a phenomenologist -- he simply followed the currents of French humaniora in whatever direction it might take, and from time to time happened to publish the latest thoughts at the right time, without ever being a major contributor to the development of these thoughts. Very much the same for Kristeva -- thoug she is at least responsible for introducing Bakhtin in the West.

[edit] Redirects

I was redirected to this page from "Computer age philosophy."??????????? Please explain. –––––

[edit] Traditional Philosophy

The phrase occurs 47 times in Wikipedia and in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I don't see why it's objectionable. PostModernists would not be at all concerned with Wittgenstein's criticisms of Logical Atomism, which was long dead even in the '50s, nor would they even be interested in his criticisms of previous Analytic Philosophy, because PostModernism emerged after Continental and Anglo-American philosophy had largely stopped interacting with one another. the interest is rather in his general criticisms of foundationalism, essentialism, language as primarily fact-stating, meaning understood on the model of names, the Cartesian view of the self, and the whole notion of philosophy theory-building rather than as a therapeutic clarification of problems Wovon 07:48, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I mostly agree, but it probably depends on which "postmodnerists" we're talking about. Your claims seem accurate to, say, Lyotard, who as far as I know never discussed Logical Atomism at all, and focused much more on the general Wittgensteinian themes you mention. But Richard Rorty was concerned with Wittgenstein's criticisms of Logical Atomism and was even more concerned with his criticisms of Analytic Philosophy in general. It's true that the French were mostly oblivious to Anglophone Analytic philosophy, but I think there's an important strand of (Rortian) "postmodern philosophy" that wants to draw deeper connections than Lyotard did. Although Rorty tended to stay away from the term "postmodernism" himself, I think there's a sense in which we could try to read him as suggesting that a "postmodern" sort of philosophy emerged contemporaneously in both the continental and analytic traditions.

[edit] Buridan.

There is simply no good reason to include it in the article. If it was true there might be, but it is not. How does it help the reader understand pomo?

All it does is mislead the reader into thinking that the accusation has some validity (becuase why else would it be in the article?). It creates false balance. It is like quoting false accusations about "big pharma" in the alternative medicine article.

––— FWIW, I am a Wittgensteinian who actually loathes PoMo. Now, I have a few questions. Do you want a reference for PostModern philosophers offering such defenses/counter-attacks? (They are common and the only challenge would be finding one best representative - which I'll leave to someone who enjoys reading this stuff) Or are you asking for a reference demonstrating that some PoMo critic is protecting their privilege?

I agree with the view that there were POV problems, which is why my edits were made to reflect that these are the arguments offered, where previously, the arguments were presented as flat assertions. However, the reason such arguments are relevant (and also a difference between such arguments and talk of "big pharma") is that claims that standards of rationality are instruments of preserving the privilege of some while marginalizing others are not merely ad hoc defenses: they are central to PoMo thinking and so essential to understanding the movement/style/fashion.Wovon 10:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I meant a reference to a pomo making such accusations. I don't think they are really any more central to pomo than gripes about big pharma are to alternative medicine. If we are going to include it we should avoid making it seem as though wikipedia endorses it, and I don't think using weasle words such as "some say" really does that. A quotation from a postmodernist would be better, but I am still sceptical about the value of including it. Perhaps if we used an example it would make it easier to put it in an accurate context. We could say something like "pomo challenges X. However Y challenged X and was taken taken seriously by acadmic philosophers" which would be more neutral. Misodoctakleidist 12:22, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The assumption that academic philosophers are authoritative should be suspect even to non-Postmodernists. A great many philosophers on the Continent (in contrast to Anglophone philosophy) have not been employed as philosophers in academia. But if that's a requirement, I suppose Rorty would have to do. Again, someone more immersed in PoMo can undoubtedly find something better, but just cheecking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which I happen to have handy, we find (unfortunately, before he was identifying his positions with "Postmodernism"), "Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein." (I cringe at this misrepresentation of Wittgenstein, btw, but it is a reading that some exegetes endorse). Hopefully, someone else can dig up a quote identifying this explicitly with PoMo. FWIW, and to those about to dig in their libraries, these (from PMN) are in the general direction (but I know his later stuff is more polemical: just don't have it handy): "The eventual demarcation of philosophy from science was made possible by the notion that philosophy's core was 'theory of knowledge,' a theory distinct from the sciences because it was their foundation." "...the more 'scientific' and 'rigorous' philosophy became, the less it had to do with the rest of culture and the more absurd its traditional pretentions seemed."

Sorry, I'm not sure what your point is. I mentioned academic philosophers because the section I removed from the article originally said that academic philosophers criticised pomo because they felt threatened by it so I took the reference to critics of postmodernism to mean specifically critics in academic philosophy. I wasn't suggesting that we should treat academic philosophers as a source of authority. Just that if we are going to include the claim that their criticism is a result of pomo undermining their assumption in the article then we should put it in the context I suggested above. Misodoctakleidist 17:04, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

—— Ok, I clearly misunderstood your "and was taken taken seriously by academic philosophers" remark. As you may know, I was merely trying to more neutrally represent the dispute (though your "weasel words" comment is not without merit), but perhaps the original author or someone better read in PoMo can find a good quote. I'm thinking in part of places (it's been awhile) where Rorty decries the professionalization of philosophy as resting on an unsustainable image of itself as legitimating science and legitimating itself as arbiter of knowledge and therefore holding a privileged place in culture, with epistemology as "queen science". There are many less clear, more polemical, and more clearly ad hominem attacks to be found in PoMo lit, but I am unsure which ought to be taken as best representing the general attitude.Wovon 23:35, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Eclectic and Elusive?

Would anyone object to me getting rid of this at as the first words of the article? It seems like a bad way to start the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by DatDoo (talk • contribs) 05:38, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Removed, replaced with "new and complex" also, how is a trend of thought "elusive"? opening line might have seemed clever but it was really just bad. Kiyae (talk) 08:14, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Early Influences Section

If you are going to list how certain philosophers, types of art, etc. influenced pomo early on, please provide some explanation as to HOW they influenced pomo. Eg: None except those with expert knowledge on pomo will understand how some art forms and architecture influenced pomo. I know THAT architecture influenced early pomo (Foucalt was a photographer, etc.) but I have never understood its actual influence. Also, if you ar going to list early pomo philosophers, please write them in historical order-it makes things clearer for people linking to other pages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kiyae (talk • contribs) 08:11, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Definition

I say we keep this:

Postmodernism is a pejorative categorization applied by certain nobodies to disparate philosophers who threaten their belief systems and have difficult writing styles. Since they are so disparate, the term is hard to define. This serves the purpose of Dawkinists, Sokalites and Chomskyists, who ask the question “can anyone explain to me what postmodernism is?” and then ponce around, giggling viciously and asserting that if an intellectual (as if) like Dawkins cannot understand the term, then the average man mustn’t be able to and therefore (great inference from the rationalists) it must be a waste of time and just a bunch of ‘obscurantists’ trying to make themselves look smart with big words (someone should point out the similarity between Whitehead and Deleuze, but Whitehead is called ‘difficult’, Deleuze ‘obtuse’).

As Sokalites will confirm, it’s best to present some text purposely taken out of context to appear unintelligent after raising this question. Then you can point at it with your little monkey finger, jump up and down and sqauck “fashionable nonsense” repeatedly. Before paying attention to these men’s straw man accusations of relativism, irrationalism and misunderstandings of science and mathematics, did anyone think to read the philosophers for themselves, research their ideas for themselves? No! And they don’t have to now that internet websites like wikipedia allow the straw man to solidify (check out who is editing this article, so many desiring for Sokal’s name to be mentioned on every paragraph) and turn into a category to be thrown on the dung heap by newcomers as an incomprehensible waste of time.

I would say to read their books for yourself, because Foucault and Deleuze are very good philosophers, but I’ll probably be accused of well-read elitism by Sokalites. Hell, I’ll do it anyways. Read Nietzsche, Stirner (both retrospectively categorized), Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida for yourself. And yes, it won’t be easy, but neither were Hegel, Kant, Whitehead and Wittgenstein’s tractatus. That's right, you may have to put some effort in to make the fog lift and stop having everything handed to you in a fucking basket.

It's too accurate to be classed spam ripe for deletion. --Le vin blanc (talk) 23:41, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism section.

It's absolutely terrible. It only contains a couple of the many many criticisms of pomo, and even they are phrased in such a way as to insinuate that they are baseless. I am going to attempt a re-write. Misodoctakleidist (talk) 00:47, 2 May 2008 (UTC)