Posted: Jan 31, 2011 1:23 pm
UndercoverElephant wrote:Clive Durdle wrote:Is out of datedness a criteria for philosophy?
I thought Sokal had debunked it with the postmodernism generator.
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/
It doesn't work like that. Postmodernism is a position that philosophers end up at after they've realised that the previous history of philosophy can't possibly lead them anywhere else. So you can't "debunk it with the postmodern generator". You can ridicule it and you can fail to understand why the people who end up defending it end up defending it, but you cannot go back to pre-postmodernist philosophical positions once you understand it. The only place you can go forwards to is an anti-philosophical Rorty-esque pragmatism, or to an ultimate sort of cynical nihilism as displayed by CDP.
In other words, even if you think postmodernism is "out of date", it is still less out of date than the sort of position that most people who post on these boards like to defend (e.g. materialism or metaphysical realism, which are typical of "modernism").
Postmodernism in that sense does seem teleological in the Hegelian sense that there is a history of ideas and it leads to now (which might look suspiciously like a grand narrative). Shouldn't we anticipate it giving rise and then giving way to some kind of post-postmodernism? Why characterise the next step as having to be backwards?