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Postmodern philosophy

Overview

Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like différance, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.

Jean-François Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition, writing "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta narratives...." where what he means by metanarrative is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the conceptualization of truth that metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers in general argue that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal and that truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.

Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, good from bad, and presence from absence.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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That ‘to be true’ _means_ to be thought in a certain way is, therefore, certainly false. Yet this assertion plays the most essential part in Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ of philosophy, and renders worthless the whole mass of modern literature, to which that revolution has given rise, and which is called Epistemology. Kant held that what was unified in a certain manner by the synthetic activity of thought was _ipso…
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
States what Postmodern philosophy is.
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The transcendental world discovered, _so that_ a place may be kept for "moral freedom" (as in Kant). Dialectics as the road to virtue (in Plato and Socrates: probably because sophistry was held to be the road to immorality). Time and space are ideal: consequently there is unity in the essence of things; consequently no sin, no evil, no imperfection, a _justification_ of God. Epicurus _denied_ the possibility of…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
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Anaxagoras has taken from Heraclitus the idea that in every Becoming and in every Being the opposites are together. He felt strongly the contradiction that a body has many qualities and he _pulverised_ it in the belief that he had now dissolved it into its true qualities. . . . . . . . _Plato:_ first Heraclitean, later Sceptic: Everything, even Thinking, is in a state of flux. Brought through Socrates to the…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two
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Postmodern philosophy

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