“Postmodern” is one of those words we often hear, but which rarely gets defined. This is already a suspicious state of affairs, but when we add the fact that it’s almost always used as a pejorative or accusation which is hurled at one’s ideological enemies, our suspicion should intensify. If we are going to go around trying to disparage each other with 10-dollar words, we ought at least to know what they mean.

Right off the bat, though, let’s set some limits. The first thing to know is that “postmodernism” is used to refer to a range of different human activities: there is postmodern architecture, postmodern painting, postmodern literature, and postmodern philosophy—and I am sure there are plenty of other fields which host postmodern content, as well. Although there are some threads that connect these different kinds of postmodern activity, they are also very diverse: someone could like postmodern architecture, for example, but not like postmodern painting.

This is a substack about philosophy (and also other things, but none of those things are architecture or art), so I doubt it’ll surprise you hear that I won’t be addressing any kind of postmodernism except postmodern philosophy.1 So what is postmodern philosophy?

Continue reading at my substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/phenomenologyeastandwest/p/postmodernism-vs-postmodernism-part