CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers

8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 1/33



y modern comes from the Latin mondo meaning just now,

post-modern obviously means after just now or

sometimes beyond, contra, above, ultra, meta, outside-of-

the-present.

y post modern philosophy, literally speaking means after

modern philosophy.

y Post Modern Philosophy is not against reason but against

the Big Stories produced by modern philosophy which are

meant to explain everything (Cartesian Philosophy,Kantianism, the Hegemony of Formal Logic, authority of

Scientific Theories and others).



Hlynka and Yeaman (1992) outline some key features of Post Modern thinking (liberally paraphrased for simplicity):

1. A commitment to plurality of perspectives, meanings,methods, values everything.

2. A search for and appreciation of double meanings andalternative interpretations, many of them ironic and un-intended.

3. A critique or distrust of grand theories of philosophy,science and myths in our religions, nations, cultures, andprofessions that serve to explain why things are the way they are.

4. An acknowledgment that-because there is a plurality of perspectives and ways of knowing there are alsomultiple truths.



WESTERN PHILOSOPHY EASTERN PHILOSOPHY

1900 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French

Philosopher

Liang Shuming (1893

1988), Chinese Philosopher

1910 �Michel Foucault (1926-1984), French

Philosopher

�Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-21998),

French Philosopher

�Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994),

American Philosopher

�Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), AmericanPhilosopher

1930 �Rorty, Richard (1931-), American

Philosopher

�Peter Singer (1946-), Australian

Philosopher



y 1893- 1988y Widely recognize neo-confucian in the 20th century.

y A Chinese philosopher who bridges two great periods:

y Liang had been educated when modern

y He lived experiencing philosophy when post-

modern ideals was already firmly established.

y According to Liang Shuming , our desires made us seek

external material satisfaction, our moral intuition

(liangzhi) made us feel a need to act morally towardothers, and our intellectual wisdom or intuition enabled

us to see in life and recognize the ultimate truth.



y Confucianism needed to be related to cultural

matters and practical actions of the community.

y Liang was an avid student of the sundry Western

ideas (like the problem of mind, morality, political philosophy, and others) that we are being debated by

his peers, and there can be no doubt that these ideas

played roles in shaping his philosophy.

y He consider himself is a Marxist-Socialist, then more

of a Confucian, and then again, later in life, he

identified himself as a Buddhist.



y The central idea of Liangs famous work, Eastern and

Western Cultures and their Philosophies (1921), is that

there have been three major cultural paths:

y

the western, which took at its principle simply moving forward;

y the Indian, which took looking backward as its

guiding principle; and

ythe Chinese, whose guiding principle was harmony and a centralized balance.



y Post-modern philosophy in the West with the famous andcontroversial humanist and existentialist.

y Who preached the crucial role which freedom plays in our

life as a human person.

y Became attracted to Philosophy when he was still

teenager in the 1920s.

y He studied in Paris, and would later become the most

inf luential existentialist in post World War II France.

y He advocates the radical freedom and concomitant

personal responsibility of the individual.



y He began by dishing out Metaphysics (a perfect

product of modern philosophy which is viewed as

causally explanatory, offering accounts about the

ultimate origins and ends of individuals and of the

universe as a whole) by claiming that it raises

questions that we could not answer.

y He clarifies his motion of subjectivity and there from

introduced his concept of inter-subjectivity.



y Most famous work Being and Nothingness (1944).

y Sartre downplayed Metaphysics.

y Sartres two instinct and irreducible categories or kinds of

being, the in itself (en-soi) and the for-itself (pour-soi).y According to Sartre, we are ambiguous entities because

we are both beings in ourselves and for ourselves, that is

we find ourselves born in created world with a ready

made situation (viz., our facticity), yet we (as

conscious individuals) are also entities who must define

and redefine who we are, all throughout our lives.



y In-itself (en-soi) nonconscious; a being that is solid,self identical, passive and inert. It is simply is.

y For-itself (pour-soi) consciousness; a being that is

f luid, nonself-identical, and dynamic.T

he for-itself isa no-thing, the internal negation of things, that is, itdepend on its internal negation or nihilation of thein-self.

y Man, according to Sartre, is not an object he ismore than a chair, a tabel, or a paper knife.



y Jean Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

y Sees reality in terms of unique and unpredictable

happenings (events), rather than structured regularities.

y These events, according to him, can be interpreted in

different ways, and no single interpretation will captureevents accurately, that is, there is no universal law of

judgment, which will be able to take account of each and

every event in a way which does them all justice

(Browning, 2000).



y His concern of justice that arises between competing

interpretations of events led Lyotard to develop andintroduce the notion of pagan philosophy.

y Pagan refers to a way of thinking that takes into account

and strives to do justice to incommensurable differences

(he later abandoned pagan in favor of post-modern)

y He propounded his idea of a justice of rhetoric: all

discourse is narrative; all theory, politics, all law are

merely a collection of stories.

y He suggest that paganism is the most appropriateresponse to the desire for justice in the light of different

and contradicting interpretations or stories.



y Paganism is godless politics; it is the abandonment of

universal judgment for specific, plural judgments.

y It is the attempt to judge without pre-existing criteria,

in matters of truth, beauty, politics and ethics, in

short, in matters of Philosophy.y The theory of language games, as later Wittgenstien

puts it, mean that each of the various categories of

utterance can be defined in terms of rules specif ying

their properties and the uses to which they can beput.



y Lyotard makes three particularly important

observations.

1. The rules of language games do not carry within

themselves their own acceptance but are subject toa contract between players (interlocutors).

2. If there are no rules there is no game and even a

small change in the rules changes the game.

3. Every utterance should be thought of as s move in

a game.



y

Language games are incommensurable, and moves in onelanguage game cannot be translated into moves in

another language game, take these three examples of

utterances,

1. Denovativ e utterance is a utterance which attemptsto correctly identif y the object or referent to which it

refers.

2. P erf or mativ e utterance is a utterance which itself a

performance of an act to which it refers.

3. P resc r iptiv e utterance is a utterance which instructs,

recommends, requests, or commands.



y Lyotard abandoned paganism in favor of post-

modernism and his concept of interpretation assumed

the name of story, narrative, or meta-narrative.

y Lyotard defines post-modern as incredulity towards

meta-narratives; modernity as the age of meta-

narrative legitimation; and post-modernity as the age in

which meta-narratives have become bankrupt.

y M eta-narr ativ es or grand narratives, as narrations (or

stories) with a legitimating function.

y H omology or a system of meaning that is created and

legitimized through consensual validation of experts.



y There are two meta-narratives that Lyotard sees as

having been most important in the past, which

according to him, is no longer necessarily true or

universally authoritative:

1. History as progressing towards social enlightenment

and emancipation.

2. Knowledge as progressing towards totalisation.



Two general types of Knowledge

1. N arr ativ e Knowl ed ge prevalent in

primitive or traditional societies, and is

based on storytelling, sometimes in the form

of ritual, music and dance.

2. Sci enti f ic Knowl ed ge it is the kind of

knowledge which question of legitimationalways arises.



y Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994)

y Considered by most contemporary philosophers of science as the worst enemy of science.

y He is best remembered for his proposal that the

separation of church and state should besupplemented by the separation of science andstate.

y In Farewell to Reason (1987), Feyerabend argues

that relativism is the solution to the problems of conflicting beliefs and of conflicting ways of life.



y

In his Science in a Free Society (1978), he proposesto support the idea of cultural diversity bothpositively, by producing considerations in itsfavour, and negatively by criticising philosophies

that oppose it.y Relativism means the decision to treat the other

peoples form of life and the beliefs it embodies astrue-for-them, while treating our own view as

true-for-us.



y Michel Foucault (1926-1984)y One of the most influential early post-modern

philosophers.

y He usually viewed as a philosopher in either of both of

two ways:y As someone who carried out philosophys traditional critical

project in a new historical manner.

y Someone who critically engages with the thought of

traditional philosophers.y He was known for re-historicizing and destabilizing the

philosophical structures of Western thought.



y Like Socrates, Foucault experienced philosophy as anactivity which involves the questioning of acceptedknowledge of his day. And the focus of hisquestioning is the modern Human Sciences(biological, psychological, social) which purport tooffer universal scientific truths about human nature.



y Foucault employed two methods of investigation:1. Archaeology the premise of the archaeological

method is that systems of thought and knowledgeare governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and

logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines theboundaries of thought in a given domain andperiod.

2. Genealogy this method was intended to remedy the deficiency or weakness of the archaeological

method.



y Foucault employed his archaeological method and wrote his first major work, Madness and Civilization(1961).

y The treatment of the madman according to Foucault

consisted of:1. Punishing the madmen until they learned to act

normally.

2. Extended aversion therapy, including such treatments

as freezing showers and use of a straitjacket.y After Madness and Civilizations, return with full

force to social critique in Discipline and Punish(1975). Here, he employed Geneology as a method.



y At the core of Foucaults picture of modern disciplinarysociety are three primary techniques of control:1. Hierarchical Observation to a great extent, control

over people (power) can be achieved merely by observing

them.2. Normalizing Judgment involves discipline through

imposing precise norms normalization which allow forthe judging of individuals as normal or abnormalbased on their action.

3. The examination is a method of control that combineshierarchical observation with normative judgment.

y He introduced his notion of the carceral system.



y Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)y Best known in the world of Philosophy by introducing a

strategy called deconstruction which greatly challengedthe oppositional tendencies that have befallen much of the Western philosophical tradition.

y Derridas deconstructive thinking lies on the necessary but paradoxical concept, originary delay.

y Derrida argues that a first is only a first by consequence of a second that follows it. The first is only a recognizable as

a first and not merely a singular by the arrival of thesecond. The second is therefore the prerequisite of thefirst. It permits the first to be the first by its delayedarrival. The first recognizable only after the second, is inthe respect, becomes the third.



y According to Derrida, we can only understand thepriority of the sign by an enquiry into writing.

y In Off Grammatology (translated 1976), Derrida

argues that writing should not be subordinated tospeech, and this subordination is nothing more thanan historical prejudice.

y He distinguishes between a meditating on presence,

which he defines as philosophy, and the possibility of meditating on non-presence.



y Richard Rorty (1931)

y His aim is to attack this modern epistemologicallegitimation-project which has been a central concern inphilosophy since Descartes.

y According to Rorty, Epistemology (the philosophicalstudy of knowledge) is based on the notion that it is

wedded to a picture of minds structure working onempirical content to produce in itself items, like thoughtsor representations, which when things go well, correctly

mirror reality.y In Rortys view, the search for certainty, the search for the

objective truth, or the universal, is unnecessary for wecannot talk about then in general.



y Two general uses of vocabulary:

1. As a tool for deliberation about public goods andsocial and political arrangements.

2. Vocabularies developed or created in pursuits of personal fulfillment, self-creation, and self-realization.

y He calls his view epistemological behaviorism.

y Explaining rationality and epistemic authority byreference to what society let us say, rather than thelatter by the former.



y Peter Singer (1947)

y Controversial philosopher

y Post-modern philosophy also gave birth to aninteresting view about animal liberation in contrast

with mere call for humane treatment of animals.

y According to Singer, cruel practices are done toanimals because of the following man-centeredreasons:

1. For the sake of advancing human knowledge throughexperiments,

2. For human consumption

3. For human consmetics



y These practices, according to Singer, are unfair

because:1. Only humans benefit from these cruel practices.

2. Animals are also sentient beings like humans: they,too, suffer, agonize, and experience pain, like us.

y According to Singer, basing from Aristotles viewunthinking animals as things meant for thethinking mans food, science and play is not faraway.

y Speciesism is an unjustified bias towards ones ownspecie.

y Man for Singer, is guilty of such injustice: we exploitanimals for the sake of the interest of our species.

CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers

Documents

Transcript of CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers