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I was trained in analytic philosophy, and I'm not convinced you know what analytic philosophy is. Postmodernism isn't analytic philosophy--it's close to the exact opposite. In fact, analytic philosophy originated as a response to continental philosophy, the intellectual cesspool of Hegel and friends from which postmodernism is spawned.

Some analytic philosophers you may have heard of include: Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, R.M. Hare, A.J. Ayer, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Edmund Gettier, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Nick Bostrom. Many of these philosophers discussed morality and justice a great deal. Others discussed the logical underpinnings of science and mathematics--Popper in particular is highly esteemed by many scientists I've known, and Russell needs no introduction.

EDIT: There are of course many great analytic philosophers I forgot, but I found it worth editing this post to include W.V.O. Quine, in honor of whom we write programs which print their own source code.



If you reread the original link you'll see the main source of Dawkin's frustration comes from the misappropriation and misuse of mathematical logic and scientific fact with disregard for the preserving precise meaning.

This is a large problem not just in Postmodernism but in many areas of modern analytic philosophy as well, especially Philosophy of Mind.


I am by no means a philosopher, but I've read some Rawls and found him both clear and accessible. I wish more philosophical writing was this way!


It's not a universal view, but there's a decent number of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic who see Derrida and the later Wittgenstein as actually getting at pretty similar ideas. Both are fundamentally concerned with the indeterminacy of language, language as a kind of game, etc.


If you think postmodernism comes from Hegel, I'm not convinced you know what continental philosophy is.


I don't.


That depends on your view of Heidegger, doesn't it?


Let's be clear, though. Heidegger was an existentialist (in the continental tradition). He was dense, but understandable. Postmodernism is just gibberish.


Hegel was self-refuting enough to be pomo.




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