8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 1/33
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 2/33
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).
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 3/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 4/33
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
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 5/33
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 6/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 7/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 8/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 9/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 10/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 11/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 12/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 13/33
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).
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 14/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 15/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 16/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 17/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 18/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 19/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 20/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 21/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 22/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 23/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 24/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 25/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 26/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 27/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 28/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 29/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 30/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 31/33
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.
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 32/33
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
8/6/2019 CHAPTER 5 Post Modern Philosophies and Philosophers
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chapter-5-post-modern-philosophies-and-philosophers 33/33
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.