Explaining Postmodernism (Expanded Edition): Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Unabridged)
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4.4 • 16 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Tracing postmodernism from its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant to their development in thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty, philosopher Stephen Hicks provides a provocative account of why postmodernism has been the most vigorous intellectual movement of the late 20th century.
Why do skeptical and relativistic arguments have such power in the contemporary intellectual world? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant portion of the political left - the same left that traditionally promoted reason, science, equality for all, and optimism - now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism?
Explaining Postmodernism is intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy.
This expanded edition includes two additional essays by Stephen Hicks: "Free Speech and Postmodernism" and "From Modern to Postmodern Art: Why Art Became Ugly".
Customer Reviews
Strange Combination of Great and Pitiful
My 3 is really a combination of a very high rating (for the extremely insightful guide to postmodernist philosophical positions (where he does a very solid job of laying bare the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of postmodernism; worth buying just for that) and what would be a 1 for the attept to locate those developments within the trajectories of modern philosophical developments, especially the drivel about Kant's subjectivism and anti-Enlightenment stance. The whole point of Kant's First Critique is to establish the objectivity of natural science and to show how math and geometry apply objectively to the world, after the failure of empiricism and rationalism to do so. Hicks makes dozens of interpretive statements about Kant, and I couldn't find a single one which was not totally wrong. Postmodernism doesn't derive organically from streams in modern philsophy, despite their rattling on about Nietzsche and Heidegger; rather, it's an intentional resurrection of the positions of Gorgias, which Plato had undermined so successfully that they basically disappeared for more than 2,000 years. Book is worth getting, but skip over to the analysis of postmodernism.