Themes of Postmodern Philosophy

50 thoughts on “Themes of Postmodern Philosophy”

1. This is so confused it hurts to listen to it, right from the silly straw hut account of Enlightenment philosophy onwards.

2. Postmodernism is unjustly blamed for many ills, that it did away with Truth and left us astray. I would argue that postmodernism gave us the absence of truth as truth and challenged us to be ethical beyond good and evil.

3. Duck Soup. Horse Feathers.

4. It will be remembered as the theory that destroyed the world.

5. Really coherent lecture 👍😀

6. Excellent summary

7. I could be critical, but no one I have ever met has one final definition of postmodernism that they can all agree on.
   And maybe that is the point? Anyone?

8. 2+2=5, says the postmodernist from Orwell's 1984. The fact that Derrida, Foucault, etc. have expanded into mainstream from their obscurities in the '60s is frightening.

9. Why does that guy interrupt the lady? Perhaps she was included as a token. "Yea; but"

10. Well, I say there is a truth to everything. It is not relative to anything else. Who is right? The truth is.

11. I like reading John Donne AND also Derrida.. That is not a contradiction..

12. You have to laugh sometimes.. .. ..

13. I wonder if Derrida ever deconstructed the 'image of a pipe smoking man ' ?

14. Wasted 17 mins, I won't be getting back. He's not on point with his talk and better left unheard.

15. If I know why something is true, then that is the truth:
    it is impossible to split a perfect cube into 2 perfect cubes
    because every elliptic curve over Q is modular.

16. Postmodernists often offer a straw man version of science. Science does not claim to know reality perfectly and completely and with complete objectivity. It makes the best approximation it can, tested by the most stringent criteria it can, but it is an ongoing project which is always open to constant revision if new data emerges. The scientific approach is the most objective known method. It is not absolute truth.

17. This itself is however a metanarrative stated on to the world and proclaimed as truth. That is all we can do is, focus our best efforts on foundations on which we agree on and try to then develop a coherent theory from it. It must be coherent if it is going to be true. The second postmodernism rejects the demarcation of truth, the ability to distinguish between a likely and unlikely theory, it becomes useless to us. It's shutting down the discussion. Through intermingling our thoughts, like science does with empirical data, we may slowly trudge closer to truths, by having shown some theories as wrong.
    To believe no other theory can be truer than yours, is just intellectual sloppiness. Postmodern kidz just don't read good material like nozick to get some good deep theories with rigorous checks from many smarter a man than yourself. Don't bash Locke either. And Kant wasn't one of you, but ye be misplaced children of his, there ain't no categorical imperative with ye. Ye don't bring the same ethical rigour as Immanuel does.
    One is forced to do things by existence and this existence forces us to create a coherent story of everything. Of the great questions. I often find postmodernists are just yeeting out of arguments and just throwing the holy name of relativism as why no one's more right. This I just couldn't call myself a postmodernist, I dislike the bad side dish of beliefs that are so easy to also grab if you have the general name of postmodernist. I like creating meaning, postmodernism likes denying it.

18. Post-Modernists play dice with the universe.

19. So are they are right? But if they are TRULY right by their standards this mean they are wrong. oh wait. They mean nobody can find truth truth. Good excuse if you yourself struggle with this.
    How about they have the nuts at least to say they are completely wrong?

20. I would posit that Humanism helped pave the way to the postmodernist thought. The antithetical response to western Church, the rise in atheism, rationalism, relativism, all came about in the age of enlightenment into the Victorian era. Once the 20th century came about, philosophical thought began amalgamating and skepticism allowed people to change their views every minute, spawning a paradigm of less truth value and more dialectics and dichotomy than ever.

21. So does postmodernism have any positive content or is it mostly about negating and setting limits on what is possible?

22. Applying Postmodernism we can never be certain whether or not the earth is round or flat.

23. Aka postmodernists are garbage. If a villager believes that lightening is cast down from the gods the post modernists accepts it.

    Postmodernists are anti-science,

    Shameful, pseudointelectual, and regressive.

24. Great idea when someone's about to go into surgery for maybe a heart transplant or exploratory brain surgery, Yes! the expert you need is definitely a post-modern philosopher and not a doctor 😂

25. Best discussion of postmodernism I have seen

26. I really wish professors (who are usually outside the traditions of the figures whom they criticise, and who profit from this specious identity category) would stop talking about 'post-modernism' as if it was an intellectual movement with adherents, characteristic themes, etc. Nothing in history bears this out. For the most part, it is the invention of its critics, who rarely understand the philosophies they ostensibly criticise. There is really no such thing as post-modernism and almost no one, in the continental tradition, actually uses the term (save perhaps for some individual works by art theorists, Lyotard and Jameson); most of the people lumped into it don't even vaguely resemble the straw man that is built up around them. Nelson Goodman and Richard Rorty are every bit as 'post-modern' as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, or Nietzsche (none of whom are actually served well by the epithet). The only philosopher who really fits the brand is Baudrillard.

27. No references mentioned, no link to the original lecture, no idea who this James Anderson is ( not even a clarification on whether he's from Reformed theological Seminary or not ), the link about Derrida's thought is unavailable. With all due respect to this channel, this video cannot be considered a reference. we hope you provide us either with better clarifications or to remove this video since it may miss-lead a lot of philosophy lovers, Thank you.

28. All those assertions about what postmodernism is without any actual examples or references to any postmodern authors.

29. Derrida, Lacan and Foucault are Rich Phony Fakes getting the $$$ from Books and University for the sucker. Examine the life they Really live.

30. Very clear and plain-spoken. Good for students.

31. Postmodernists have socialized reality.

32. I don’t know if I can do this in a few sentences, but let’s try. The X-Files is much more postmodern than it’s thought to be. The I WANT TO BELIEVE suggests the profound desire to want to find absolute knowledge while denying it at the same time. In the show we constantly see the Derridian TRACE of Truth, which is constantly talked about, kind of seen, having indirect evidence for, but having it always one step ahead of everyone. The show is ultimately about searching for truth, rather than finding the truth, which would bring the entire play of signification to end. THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE is a desperate cry for ultimate truth. And I WANT TO BELIEVE is the admittance that we can’t believe unless there is an objective evidence, which takes us back to the TRUTH IS OUT THERE. And this elliptical language game is where we are trapped. No Exit.

33. I'm much more interested in PreModern philosophy. And so was Nietzsche.

34. So how are we sure the postmodernists got it right ? They can’t eat their cake and have it : can they ?

35. Please can someone explain to me, does the post-modernist reject the Descartian-Kantian-Humean view of metaphysics and the subject-object relationship. Or does he simply reject the idea of a pure subject?

36. Whatever the this very evident contemporary social perception is called, it's pathetic and I hate it and the hippies, phonies and hypocrites who behave in this manner.

37. >postmodern
    >philosophy
    Pick one.

38. Before I even knew what postmodernism was about I got suspicious of the claims of science. I noticed that every time a scientific discovery was proclaimed as the new understanding of reality it was quickly replaced by something else. I quit believing in the arrogance of science to give accurate descriptions of our world or reality. Actually you can find this in almost all human endeavor, Yesterday butter was bad for you and today it's the cure etc. and on and on. Postmodernists are a silly lot but they do have a real point.

39. TIL Jordan Peterson is a postmodernist

40. would be Thomas Kuhn considered a postmodernist?

41. Pomo is skeptical of "the truth is out there"? I don't think the presenter really understand this idea as well as he should. Most postmodernists don't dismiss objective or materialistic truths per se. What they are arguing is that we can not know those truths because of our subjectivity and the limits of our senses. That's to say that they don't reject it or say that it doesn't exist, just that humans don't have the tools to parse a priori type truths. That's a fine distinction but a necessary one. A structuralist would say that we've done very well with science but the structures we've developed with science do not actually correspond to the material reality that exists. Science only informs us with limited understanding, the relationships between the constructs we've created to understand certain hoknowable properties of material reality. For example, a priori truths of what an atom is, can not be known to us but we can still use science to probe properties of the atom and understand the relationships between certain rules we've made up about how it interacts with other things. All based on our collective subjective view of the atom.

    Many people mistake this for saying that pomo dismisses truths but it doesn't it actually refines it. People also often make the case that there is one truth, the materialistic one, because that is what modernism states. Postmodernism doesn't hold to that narrow definition and expands truth to include among others, subjective or a posteriori, which includes scientific truths btw.

42. This is a great lecture, but much too short. Don't you have the complete lecture?

43. So what about the text in the manual instructions ?

44. I don't understand how post Modernism can be a continuation of modernism and also a rejection of modernism

45. Drastic world changes usher in new trends in philosophy. The use of atomic bombs, the Kennedy shooting, The civil rights movement, the Veitnam war, the Moon landing, the computer & technology advancements, brain mapping, cloning and gene splicing, and 9-11-01 all helped push philosophy into new and different areas. Events and breakthroughs will continue to do so. My feeling is 9-11-01 brought us out of the "postmodern" era and into the "post everything" era. PoMo had enough time to assert new, radical ways of criticism, it had its merits. But we live in a vastly different world now, and philosophy will not be able to keep up with the changes. If philosophy falls behind the times, it will only be regarded as a mere "interest" for eggheads and stuffy schooled types of people. It wont have any real or lasting effect on people or society. But, if philosophy does have impact on states and conditions of "real world" situations, then it is there, where philosophy will do the most good.

46. Would it be accurate to say that the postmodernist didn't question reality, but did question how we question reality? Is that fair to say?

47. All nonsense. Postmodern? Understanding the future? Not a science. Good luck assholes!

48. And the march of mathemstics debunks postmodernist metanarratives about all knowledge. The calculus is always the calculus. 2-3 is always minus one. Godel's second Incompleteness Theorem is always true.

49. Who is the speaker? is the lecture longer, do you have a link to the full lecture?

50. Whether it was their intention or not, the post modernists accomplished what Sartre aimed to do: radical freedom in a modern world. We are so free to think what we want, to believe what we want and to share our own stories regardless of how others might interpret them. It is truly the end of philosophy, for now.

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