The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason: Chapter 3 of Explaining Postmodernism
At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Three of my book is now available online. This chapter covers Martin Heidegger’s integration of the two main lines of Continental philosophy, the origins and eventual collapse of Logical Positivism, and the resulting mid-20th-century epistemological void that enabled postmodernism.
Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [pdf]
Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition 58
Setting aside reason and logic 61
Emotions as revelatory 62
Heidegger and postmodernism 65
Positivism and Analytic philosophy: from Europe to America 67
From Positivism to Analysis 70
Recasting philosophy’s function 72
Perception, concepts, and logic 74
From the collapse of Logical Positivism to Kuhn and Rorty 78
Summary: A vacuum for postmodernism to fill 79
First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian
epistemology 80
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Tags: Analytic Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, Explaining Postmodernism, Heidegger and postmodernism, Logical Positivism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Nelson Goodman, Positivism, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, W.V.O. Quine
