Postmodern philosophy facts for kids

Postmodern philosophy is a way of thinking that became popular in the second half of the 1900s. It started as a way to question some big ideas from the Age of Enlightenment (in the 1700s) and Modernism. These older ideas often believed in one clear truth, progress, and reason.

Postmodern thinkers, like Jean-François Lyotard, questioned these "big stories" or "metanarratives." A metanarrative is like a single, complete, and universal story that explains everything. Postmodernists often believe that truth isn't fixed or universal. Instead, they think truth depends on history, culture, and who is talking about it. They also look at how power and language shape what we believe to be true.

This way of thinking often questions simple "either/or" ideas, like good or bad, true or false. They suggest that things are much more complex and connected.

What Postmodernism Talks About

Ideas on Literature

Postmodern philosophy is closely connected to critical theory, which is a way of analyzing and critiquing society and culture. Some critical theorists, like Jürgen Habermas, actually disagreed with postmodern ideas.

Ideas on the Enlightenment

Many postmodern ideas challenge values from the 18th-century Enlightenment. The Enlightenment focused on reason and science to find universal truths. Postmodernists often believe there can be many different ideas about what is right or wrong, even if they don't agree with all of them. They often look at how power and beliefs influence what we say and think. This way of thinking is similar to Philosophical skepticism, which questions whether we can truly know things, and Moral relativism, which suggests that moral truths are not absolute.

Ideas on Truth and Objectivity

A key idea in postmodernism is the belief that there might not be one single "truth" or "nature" that everyone can agree on. This means it might be hard to have completely neutral or objective thoughts. Some postmodern thinkers even suggest that social science research might not be able to find truly objective knowledge.

Jean-François Lyotard said that his ideas were not meant to predict reality, but to help us think about questions. He also said that postmodernism means being skeptical of "metanarratives," which includes being skeptical of science as the only way to find truth.

Jacques Derrida, another postmodern thinker, believed that everything we refer to, all of reality, is like a "trace" or a mark that gets its meaning from other things, not from a single, fixed source.

Paul Feyerabend, a famous philosopher of science, is sometimes called a postmodernist. He argued that modern science isn't necessarily more justified than other ways of understanding the world. He also criticized the "tyranny" of ideas like "truth" or "objectivity" because he felt they limit how people see the world. However, defenders of postmodernism say that these descriptions sometimes go too far. Feyerabend himself said he wasn't "anti-science" and accepted that some scientific ideas are better than others.

Who Influenced Postmodern Philosophy

Postmodern philosophy mostly started in France in the mid-1900s. But many older ideas helped shape it.

It was greatly influenced by 19th-century philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Later, philosophers from the early to mid-20th century also played a role. These included Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (who studied how we experience things), Jacques Lacan (who studied the mind), Roland Barthes (who studied how things are structured), Georges Bataille, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Postmodern philosophy also got ideas from art and architecture. Artists like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and artists who made collages, were important. Even the architecture of places like the Las Vegas Strip and the Pompidou Centre influenced these ideas.

Important Postmodern Thinkers

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault is often seen as an early postmodernist, even though he didn't like that label for himself. Following Nietzsche's ideas, Foucault argued that what we consider "knowledge" is created through power. He believed that what counts as knowledge changes a lot in different historical times.

Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard is known for his simulation theory. He believed that what people experience and think is real often comes from ideas and images spread by the media. He argued that the line between what's real and what's fantasy can disappear, leading to a widespread simulation of reality.

Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard's writings focused on how stories (or "narratives") work in human culture. He looked at how this role changed as society moved from modern times into a "postmodern condition." He argued that modern philosophies claimed to be true based on accepted stories about knowledge and the world, not just on logic. He compared these to Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of "language-games."

Lyotard suggested that in our postmodern world, these big stories no longer work to prove what's true. He thought that people are developing a new "language-game" that doesn't claim absolute truth. Instead, it celebrates a world where relationships are always changing.

Jacques Derrida

Derrida is known as the founder of deconstruction. He saw philosophy as a way of analyzing texts. He criticized Western philosophy for favoring the idea of "presence" and logos (reason or word) over absence and markings or writings.

Richard Rorty

In the United States, Richard Rorty was a well-known thinker who called himself a postmodernist. He believed that we should stop thinking of our thoughts or language as a perfect mirror of reality. He argued that truth isn't about getting things exactly right or representing reality. Instead, he saw truth as part of what we do in society. He thought language serves our purposes at a specific time. For example, ancient languages can be hard to translate because their words and ideas were useful in a different time.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze was another important philosopher. He wrote books about Nietzsche and also about psychoanalysis with his co-author Felix Guattari.

Criticisms of Postmodernism

Many criticisms of postmodernism exist. They often share the idea that postmodernism isn't clear and that it goes against ideas like truth, logic, and objectivity. Some critics say it can be meaningless or confusing. They also argue that it promotes relativism (where everything is relative) so much that it makes it hard to make any judgments about culture, morals, or knowledge.

What "Postmodern" Really Means

Some thinkers, like John Deely, have argued that calling thinkers like Derrida "postmodern" might be too soon. He suggests that if these "postmodern" thinkers still follow the very modern idea of idealism (focusing on ideas in the mind), then it's more like an "ultra-modernism."

Deely believes that true postmodernism should not just focus on "things" (like ancient philosophy) or just on "ideas" (like modern philosophy). Instead, it should understand how "signs" work, like in the ideas of John Poinsot and Charles Sanders Peirce.

Deely wrote that the ancient Greek and Latin philosophies focused on being (things existing on their own). Modern philosophy focused on how humans know things, but sometimes this made "being" less important. As the 20th century ended, Deely believed a new philosophical era was starting. This "postmodern" era could combine the ideas of ancient and modern thinkers. It would do this by looking at "experience," where the existence of things and what humans know come together. This new path, he suggested, is "the way of signs."

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See also

• Hyperreality
• Natural philosophy
• Ontological pluralism
• Physical ontology
• Postmaterialism
• Postmodern art
• Postmodernism
• Postmodernity