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-ofthe-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).

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 and alternative interpretations, many of them ironic and unintended. 3. A critique or distrust of grand theories of philosophy, science and myths in our religions, nations, cultures, and professions 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 also multiple truths.

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY 1900 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French 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), American Philosopher 1930 Rorty, Richard (1931-), American Philosopher Peter Singer (1946-), Australian Philosopher

EASTERN PHILOSOPHY Liang Shuming (1893 1988), Chinese Philosopher

y 1893- 1988 y 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 toward others, and our intellectual wisdom or intuition enabled us to see in life and recognize the ultimate truth.

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.

y The central idea of Liang s 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 y the Chinese, whose guiding principle was harmony and a centralized balance.

y Post-modern philosophy in the West with the famous and y y y y

controversial humanist and existentialist. Who preached the crucial role which freedom plays in our life as a human person. Became attracted to Philosophy when he was still teenager in the 1920s. He studied in Paris, and would later become the most influential existentialist in post World War II France. He advocates the radical freedom and concomitant personal responsibility of the individual.

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.

y Most famous work Being and Nothingness (1944). y Sartre downplayed Metaphysics. y Sartre s 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.

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 fluid, nonself-identical, and dynamic. The for-itself is a no-thing, the internal negation of things, that is, it depend on its internal negation or nihilation of the in-self.
y Man, according to Sartre, is not an object

he is

more than a chair, a tabel, or a paper knife.

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 capture events 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).

y His concern of justice that arises between competing

interpretations of events led Lyotard to develop and introduce 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 appropriate response to the desire for justice in the light of different and contradicting interpretations or stories .

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 specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put.

y Lyotard makes three particularly important

observations. 1. The rules of language games do not carry within themselves their own acceptance but are subject to a 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.

y Language games are incommensurable, and moves in one

language game cannot be translated into moves in another language game, take these three examples of utterances, 1. Denovative utterance is a utterance which attempts to correctly identify the object or referent to which it refers. 2. Performative utterance is a utterance which itself a performance of an act to which it refers. 3. Prescriptive utterance is a utterance which instructs, recommends, requests, or commands.

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 metanarrative legitimation; and post-modernity as the age in which meta-narratives have become bankrupt. y Meta-narratives or grand narratives, as narrations (or stories) with a legitimating function. y Homology or a system of meaning that is created and legitimized through consensual validation of experts.

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.

Two general types of Knowledge 1. Narrative Knowledge prevalent in primitive or traditional societies, and is based on storytelling, sometimes in the form of ritual, music and dance. 2. Scientific Knowledge it is the kind of knowledge which question of legitimation always arises.

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 be supplemented by the separation of science and state. 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.

y In his Science in a Free Society (1978), he proposes

to support the idea of cultural diversity both positively, by producing considerations in its favour, and negatively by criticising philosophies that oppose it . y Relativism means the decision to treat the other people s form of life and the beliefs it embodies as true-for-them , while treating our own view as true-for-us .

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 philosophy s 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.

y Like Socrates, Foucault experienced philosophy as an

activity which involves the questioning of accepted knowledge of his day. And the focus of his questioning is the modern Human Sciences (biological, psychological, social) which purport to offer universal scientific truths about human nature.

y Foucault employed two methods of investigation:

Archaeology the premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge are 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 the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. 2. Genealogy this method was intended to remedy the deficiency or weakness of the archaeological method .
1.

y
1.

Foucault employed his archaeological method and wrote his first major work, Madness and Civilization (1961). The treatment of the madman according to Foucault consisted of:
Punishing the madmen until they learned to act normally. Extended aversion therapy, including such treatments as freezing showers and use of a straitjacket.

2.

After Madness and Civilizations, return with full force to social critique in Discipline and Punish (1975). Here, he employed Geneology as a method.

y At the core of Foucault s picture of modern disciplinary

society are three primary techniques of control:

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 for the judging of individuals as normal or abnormal based on their action. 3. The examination is a method of control that combines hierarchical observation with normative judgment.
1.

He introduced his notion of the carceral system.

y Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) y Best known in the world of Philosophy by introducing a

strategy called deconstruction which greatly challenged the oppositional tendencies that have befallen much of the Western philosophical tradition. y Derrida s 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 the second. The second is therefore the prerequisite of the first. It permits the first to be the first by its delayed arrival. The first recognizable only after the second, is in the respect, becomes the third.

y According to Derrida, we can only understand the

priority of the sign by an enquiry into writing. y In Off Grammatology (translated 1976), Derrida argues that writing should not be subordinated to speech, and this subordination is nothing more than an historical prejudice. y He distinguishes between a meditating on presence, which he defines as philosophy, and the possibility of meditating on non-presence.

y Richard Rorty (1931) y His aim is to attack this modern epistemological

legitimation-project which has been a central concern in philosophy since Descartes. y According to Rorty, Epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) is based on the notion that it is wedded to a picture of mind s structure working on empirical content to produce in itself items, like thoughts or representations, which when things go well, correctly mirror reality. y In Rorty s view, the search for certainty, the search for the objective truth, or the universal, is unnecessary for we cannot talk about then in general .

y Two general uses of vocabulary:

As a tool for deliberation about public goods and social and political arrangements. 2. Vocabularies developed or created in pursuits of personal fulfillment, self-creation, and selfrealization. y He calls his view epistemological behaviorism. y Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society let us say, rather than the latter by the former.
1.

y Peter Singer (1947) y Controversial philosopher y Post-modern philosophy also gave birth to an

interesting view about animal liberation in contrast with mere call for humane treatment of animals. y According to Singer, cruel practices are done to animals because of the following man-centered reasons: 1. For the sake of advancing human knowledge through experiments, 2. For human consumption 3. For human consmetics

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 Aristotle s view unthinking animals as things meant for the thinking man s food, science and play is not far away. y Speciesism is an unjustified bias towards one s own specie. y Man for Singer, is guilty of such injustice: we exploit animals for the sake of the interest of our species.