“God is dead, and this is the best thing that could happen to us!”

I thought it was just rock n' roll that was dead.

You don't run into a heck of a lot of Black Atheists over here in the working class.

Wasn't it Nietsche who was revealed, in the end, to be the dead guy? Or was it General Francisco Franco (still)?

Ugh. If the stupid podcast weren't made up of so many damned advertisements, it would be a much better podcast. I used to listen to it, but I can't stand those stupid ads.

I'd tend to dispute the notion that science is democratic. It's correct in one sense, of course, in that anyone is free to do it. In the formal sense, though, it's far from democratic, with hierarchies of "truth claims" (if not Truth claims).

Post-modernism has its merits, certainly. Foucault gets ridiculous in treating science as a mere hierarchy of oppression, but Lyotard and others make legitimate points (so does Foucault, yet, but why go in and sift every bit of good from every bit of absurd nonsense?).

Then too, post-modernism and deconstructionism are often conflated by people. The latter is Heidegger-inspired BS. The former is a hodgepodge of conflicting ideas, many good, many bad.

The problem with a lot of post-modernism is that it deals in issues that really are better understood via anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Philosophy has its place in guiding the sciences, but it is no substitute for hard-nosed facts processed according to proven methods and theories.

Black America could use a great deal more skepticism than it generally has. Religion is holding them back more than many other groups.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

'God is dead and no-one cares'
Nine Inch Nails, Heresy.

I've always wondered about how it came to pass that African-Americans embraced Xinanity once they weren't being whipped, beaten and lynched encouraged to do so. If the white man's god was kind and loving why did he, in his so-called infinite wisdom, let them do what they did?

Post-modernist techniques employed in literature frequently results in awesome writing. Pynchon and DeLillo are both pomos, and they rank amongst my favorite living authors. When it comes to the philosophical wankery of Derrida, though, it's absolute crap. He was (intentionally) an obscurantist and though he might impress an easily daunted reader, he's basically full of shit and the master of taking things out of context. Foucault is better by far, in my opinion, and did a decent job of critiquing Derrida after the two had a falling out.

To say that God is dead presupposes that he was at some time alive.

--Roy Harper

Who really is a guy that needs to be on that list of godless rock that comes up every now and then. The lyric above, as well as the following can be found on "When an old Cricketer Leaves the Crease".

Love is the great triumph over Christianity.
She made a fool of silly priests, she mocked authority,
She filled her man with happiness, she gripped his loins with joy.
Felt ecstatic agony, screamed the sweetest cry.

Off-topic, sure, but I claim asylum on account of it's on-point for the headline.

I never really thought post-modernism was characterized as crazy, just kind of depressingly useless and cynical. But maybe I don't have my definitions correct...

"they saw religion as fundamentally anti-democratic"
That's a very true statement. The bible does not mention the idea of democracy even though it existed before christianity was invented. The christian god was not elected nor is he up for reelection. The laypeople have no say in church leaders and laws. When leadership becomes corrupt, it's very hard to make changes. The best way is to wait for the corrupt people to die or dump their corruption on secular authorities. Yep, religion is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-American.

In Doubt: A history, Jennifer Hecht devotes a few pages to Hubert Harrison, nicknamed the Black Socrates, who lived in Harlem in the first three decades of the 20th century. Hm.

In an article entitled "The Negro Conservative: Christianity Still Enslaves the Minds of Those Whose Bodies it Has Long Held Bound", Harrison wrote:"It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be found in the Free-thought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessings of Christianity."

Hm. I see, though, that he distinguished himself from Ingersoll... "Now I am an Agnostic; not a dogmatic disbeliever not a bumptious and narrow infidel. I am not at all of Col. Ingersoll's school."

He also had felt a certain attraction to Catholicism, it says, with its history and ritual and learning (he liked Latin), although he was not able to honestly convert or anything; he just felt wistful, I suppose, that there wasn't anything more to religion. He speaks of a general spirituality, again, with a certain longing.

I suspect that he would not have approved of the Great Desecration.

I've read long and hard for anything good in postmodernist philosophy. Haven't really found anything worth basing my life around yet.

For those into postmodernism, where is a good place to start? I went and saw Bill Bailey a couple of weeks ago and his act is very much embedded in postmodernist thought. It would be nice to read up more on it.

and you'll begin to realize it's not as crazy as the caricatures make it out to be.

I think it does a good enough job caricaturing itself. e=mc2 is a gendered equation!

There is a lot written on postmodernism, and it IS just as crazy as it is made out to be. The main journal of postmodernist thought was sent an article designed by critics which was made up of nothing but stereotypic mumbo-jumbo with no serious content. It was accepted and printed by the journal. These guys are beyond belief.

and you'll begin to realize it's not as crazy as the caricatures make it out to be.

I think it does a good enough job caricaturing itself. e=mc2 is a gendered equation!

Kel wrote:

I went and saw Bill Bailey a couple of weeks ago

Me too. Brilliant, wasn't he? I rate him far higher a live performer than Dylan Moran, who I saw last year.

The term "postmodernism" is even more diffuse: it has been used to cover an ill-defined galaxy of ideas in fields ranging from art and architecture to the social sciences and philosophy. I propose here to use the term postmodernism much more narrowly, to denote an intellectual current characterized by more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a "narration", a "myth" or a social construction among many others.

[...]

Let me stress that not all the authors whom I term "postmodernist" would identify with that label, since they may use the term in a sense different from mine (which is of course their right). Conversely, some authors who term themselves "postmodernist" may not be postmodernist in my sense. Finally, it should be noted that there exist many different currents within what I have called postmodernism, which interact only weakly. Thus, some postmodernists (in my definition) rely heavily on Derrida and Heidegger, others more strongly on Foucault, others on constructivist philosophy of science (Barnes, Bloor, Collins, Latour . . .), others on the feminist-constructivist subgroup (Haraway, Harding, Keller, . . .) others on the postcolonial wing (Nandy, Alvares, Shiva, Sardar, . . .).

— Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (2008)

Me too. Brilliant, wasn't he? I rate him far higher a live performer than Dylan Moran, who I saw last year.

Fully agree, though both were hilarious. Bill Bailey is just something else live, his mixture of art, music and ability to delve into philosophy is why I rate him so highly. I was front-row centre too.

Well, PZ, I guess I will have to take you word for it that if you

hang out with enough English professors, and you'll begin to realize [post-modernism] is not as crazy as the caricatures make it out to be.

So I won't call is crazy. Just incoherent.

I found Lackey's arguments against a corresponcence theory of truth less than convincing, to put it mildly. What his ideas boil down to are trivial inanities embroidered by big words.
Now, I may be completely misunderstanding him - and I am sure he would argue that - but here is how I interpret what he said about truth being an "invention" and a "construct":

Yes, the number 1 is an "invented construct", as is the operater "+" and the number "2". We also "invented" the word "apple" as a signifier for a particular kind of fruit - then agains, we did the same with all other parts of the "symbolic construct" we call language .
However, these symbols and inventions, unlike a number other, less meaningful symbols give us predictive power over the world in which we exist. If I put one apple together with another apple, I will have two apples.

Sound simplistic? Then listen to the podcast and tell me where Lackey brought an argument that made even one iota more sense.

Dying of the Light

By GARRISON KEILLOR
Published: October 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Keillor-t.html?_r=1&scp=…

"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," the book begins. Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death -- why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter.

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
By Julian Barnes

I enjoyed Dylan Moran - cynical, barely coherent, not-pausing-for-breath rants are something I do myself for the amusement of onlookers - but BB was just magic. I was about a third of the way back in the theatre.

Thumbs up for the book "Towing Jehovah", the premise of which is that God dies... and the Catholic Church contracts a tanker to tow His Body to be preserved in an ice floe.

Hilarity ensues, as they say.

Seriously, a wonderful book.

I've also wondered why African Americans gobble up the woo. The bible is full of slavery, and jezuz approves of it, and whipping them. Same thing for women and children.

Is the Bill Bailey you guys are talking about the English comedian that is on QI with Stephen Fry? The English crack me up more than any other people. All they have to do is say the word Ass, and I'm done in.

Is the Bill Bailey you guys are talking about the English comedian that is on QI with Stephen Fry? The English crack me up more than any other people. All they have to do is say the word Ass, and I'm done in.

Indeed.

He was also on Black Books and he played the voice of the Whale in the movie of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Funny funny guy

> You'll also hear a discussion of post-modernism; [...] you'll begin to realize it's not as crazy as the caricatures make it out to be.

Tried it, and it's just as crazy as it's made up to be: sheer pseudo-intellectual nothingness.

Good short read: Postmodernism Disrobed by Richard Dakwins

you'll begin to realize it's not as crazy as the caricatures make it out to be.

It most definitely is when applied to science and medicine. In fact, applied to science and medicine it's even crazier than the caricatures make it out to be.

I listened to it, and found it a really thoughtful and moderate articulation of post-modernism, and it did quell a tiny bit of the disgusted hatred that accounts by Pinker (in The Blank Slate) and Dawkins (in Unweaving the Rainbow) have built up in me. (who remembers the "You believe in DNA?" line?) :P
However, I still feel like even if there is a more thoughtful strain of post-modernism out there, its proponents just don't balance out the virulence of the more radical intepretations which infest academia, which are responsible for the caricature.

Also, to Mus, most modern media players allow you to track through an audio file. You can skip the ads very easily. :P

Here's my advice (as a philosopher) to science types willing to take seriously the idea that something might a) be not entirely crazy, and yet b) still fall into the category of "postmodernism."

1. Forget the usual Frenchy suspects. There's more relevant stuff closer to home.

2. Don't think of "postmodernism" as directed against science or even "modernism" specifically. If we widen the focus a bit, we can include a third player - the premodernist (or, often, Platonist). In this sense the "postmodern" criticism of modernism concerns the modernist criticism of premodernism just as much as it does modernism itself. Characteristic "postmodern" criticisms of modern criticism of the premodern are a) that it throws the rationalistic (i.e. non-empirical) baby out with the Platonist bathwater, and b) [the other pole, although it can also amount to pretty much the same thing] that it merely plucks the Platonist dandelion rather than rooting it out.

3. Similarly, a lot of what is good in "postmodernism" can just as easily be thought of, if necessary, as "modernism criticizing itself." Can there be a rational criticism of reason? What would such a thing look like? Different answers have different takes on that self-referential twist, from centering the whole story on it, to sweeping it under the rug. "Postmodernism" tends toward the former, but there's no sharp line. Kant and Hegel mark one such transition, but it's kind of hard to see an exact contemporary of Beethoven as "postmodern."

4. His trick was clever, but other than that Sokal's an ignoramus, philosophically speaking (although he's learning). You can't take what he says seriously.

5. As for whom to read, I'm not sure. W.V. Quine introduces some key ideas, but from a solidly naturalist and empiricist perspective. Donald Davidson takes them further, and he writes clearly, but he's hard to understand without a background in analytic philosophy of language. That goes double for Wittgenstein, but try him anyway. Richard Rorty is notorious for his enthusiasm for Derrida et al, and his own views (IMO) go too far in a relativist direction, but he's often around the plate, and is much easier to read than the Frenchies. Try the preface to his first collection, Consequences of Pragmatism (and "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism" in that volume). If the name makes you frown, know that Daniel Dennett, no Enlightenment-hater, thinks that everything that Rorty says is correct, once you multiply by .742. An excellent but difficult volume of sympathetic criticism is R. Brandom, Rorty and his Critics.

Again (see #1), none of these guys are "postmodernist" exactly, except possibly Rorty, but if you can see what they're up to, then I think it might be possible to see the non-stupid versions of (actual) postmodernism in the right light.

Hope that helps -

Again (see #1), none of these guys are "postmodernist" exactly, except possibly Rorty, but if you can see what they're up to, then I think it might be possible to see the non-stupid versions of (actual) postmodernism in the right light.
Hope that helps

Oh, a list of authors. Yay. Why is that always the response? "Read x, y, and z, and then come back." Nobody seems to have gotten around to distilling the concept down for the average person. Seems it's impossible to grasp until you've studied the entire run of philosophy back to Plato.

Hell, quantum mechanics is easier to understand.

Oh, also, Manuel DeLanda is a science-friendly interpreter of Deleuze. Check out his book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Of course FWIW one of his points is that Deleuze is *not* a "postmodernist".

Another collection documenting cracks in the naturalist orthodoxy, but (again) from closer to home: M. De Caro and D. Macarthur, Naturalism in Question. No postmodernists here, but many of the same concerns.

Oh, a list of authors. Yay. Why is that always the response?

Believe me, you don't want to know what *I* think. 8-)

You'll also hear a discussion of post-modernism; hang out with enough English professors, and you'll begin to realize it's not as crazy as the caricatures make it out to be.

Depends on which English professors you hang out with. All of the worst caricatures of postmodernist clap-trap I've ever encountered were produced by actual tenured (or tenure-track) postmodernists: There is a subset of self-styled "culture critics" - not all or most of them, but a significant minority - who produce self-parody of such absurdity that it can only be measured in palins (a recently introduced unit of measure for the proportion of nonsensical gibberish to readily discernible meaning in a given utterance or text).

Come to think of it, wasn't this blog supposed to support science and to fight superstition? When did it end up endorsing sophistical arguments to the effect that science is arbitrary and dogmatic just like superstition?

@ Robert Maynard:

> I listened to it, and found it a really thoughtful and moderate articulation of post-modernism

So you call the notion that science is a mere verbal convention with no objectivity "thoughtful and moderate"?

@ Robert Maynard

> (who remembers the "You believe in DNA?" line?) :P

If you listen to Lackey, you will notice that he doesn't even 'believe' in apples.

Wow, you guys sure have it easy labeling an entire body of diverging authors coming from many, many fields of thought with words like "crazy" and "caricature"...

Just so you know, the majority of authors that people lump into the "post-modernism" category do not refer to themselves as such. The p-word is in fact a vague classification of pretty much any theoretical work done in linguistics, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, etc. that does not adhere to strict Anglo-Saxon positivism (and the 'clarity' that it connotes). The whole continental/analytic divide in philosophy and elsewhere is just an artifact of the 'science war' of the end of the 19th century between those who thought the humanities should reform to emulate scientific methodology and those preferring heterodox approaches.

I applaud the rare people here who actually read one or more of those dreaded "post-modernists" before bringing massive generalizations to bear.

(Sokal is old news by the way. It perplexes me that people still bring that up as if one magazine's editorial laxity could be enough to discredit - again - an entire body of diverging authors coming from many, many fields of thought.)

> The p-word is in fact a vague classification of pretty much any theoretical work done in linguistics, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, etc. that does not adhere to strict Anglo-Saxon positivism (and the 'clarity' that it connotes).

I'm afraid you got it wrong. 'Postmodern' is not the same as 'obscure.' Also, there is nothing Anglo-Saxon about positivism (which originated in France and in Austria). Last but most importantly, you don't need to be a Positivist in order to see postmodernism for the nonsense it is. In particular, you may very well be engaged in Continental philosophy, and still have a bad opinion of postmodernism.

Your version of the history of the Analytic/Continental divide is imaginary. Are you a postmodernist historian, by the way?

> I applaud the rare people here who actually read one or more of those dreaded "post-modernists" before bringing massive generalizations to bear.

I read more of them - Ricoeur, Vattimo, Derrida, Foucault - and they were so bad that they almost made me give up philosophy.

Post modernism always struck me as being like the 'mystery' of the trinity. Just bollocks and word play. Michael Lackey talking about gravity in this podcast really didn't help change that opinion.
Z

@aleph

Yes, my view of the history of the divide is colored by own academic trajectory, though I would never use postmodernist to describe myself. The word is simply generally not relevant to any discourse outside its own boiling repudiation by laymen who seem to see in it some form of self-indulgent statu quo by the invisible, reigning intelligentsia of chain-smoking Frenchmen.

>you may very well be engaged in Continental philosophy, and still have a bad opinion of postmodernism.

Maybe because many of the supposedly postmodernist philosophers use the p-word, when they do use it (that is, rarely), to describe a state of the world they decry? (cf. Zizek, Baudrillard, etc.)

And I wasn't aware Ricoeur, Derrida and Foucault ever referred to their own work as "postmodernist". (I'm not familiar with Vattimo)

"Love is the great triumph over Christianity.
She made a fool of silly priests, she mocked authority,
She filled her man with happiness, she gripped his loins with joy.
Felt ecstatic agony, screamed the sweetest cry."

Wow. Hats off to Roy Harper.

@Antonin

I am aware that most authors people call postmodernist wouldn't accept this name, especially the post-structuralists. (Re-reading my previous post, I was a bot unfair to Foucault. He didn't help me with anything, but unlike the others he also didn't make me want to puke.)

However, when people talk about postmodernism, they don't mean 'academics who call themselves this way.' What they mean is people who use naive sophistical arguments to promote a form of radical scepticism that they direct against science, humanism, objectivity, universalism, and all dreams and/or achievements of the Enlightenment. Bruno Latour, for instance, has gone as far as to deny the existence of Koch's bacillum, because he thinks microorganisms are a mere fiction, on a par with centaurs and unicorns. You will understand why people despise postmodernism so deeply. It is even more unnerving to witness how this seemingly radical scepticism is replaced by the utmost credulity as soon as one's favorite beliefs are involved (they're "just as good as science," after all).

You can try this article for something more articulate. It's by Alan Sokal. Read it: unless what some people will claim, he is anything else than a philistine ;-)

Postmodernism and Pseudoscience

4. His trick was clever, but other than that Sokal's an ignoramus, philosophically speaking (although he's learning). You can't take what he says seriously.

Oh, with such a well reasoned and thoroughly argued position, case closed!

Why is it that those who allege emperor lacks clothes always such crude, unsophisticated ignoramuses anyway ? If only they were not blinded by the restrictive cultural dialectic of the objective-rationalist-mechanistic i-can-see-his-dangly-bits orthodoxy, they would appreciate the subtle grandeur of the most excellent imperial vestment... or at least accept i-don't-really-see-his-dangly-bits as an valid and useful system of knowing.

There's a reason Sokal's newest book is called Beyond the Hoax. Hint, hint. Even his earlier one, co-authored with Jean Bricmont, was not so much "about" the Social Text incident proper as it was a survey of the material he found while preparing his infamous prank. Sokal and Bricmont were also forthright in stating that the fact that one journal's editors were "derelict in their intellectual duty" (Sokal's words, not mine) did not compromise an entire profession. That is old news — 1997 vintage. The hoax was, or should have been, the spark of a conversation, not its fuel.

The term "positivist" is often flung at opponents of pomo radical relativism, as if that were the only alternative. It is not; it is quite possible, for example, to recognise that science is a social endeavour, influenced by cultural and political forces, without abandoning objectivism.

It's interesting that the defences of pomo here consist largely in saying "x isn't a postmodernist, postmodernism isn't y, read z for the worthwhile ideas even though it isn't postmodernist - oh, and Sokal is a philistine". "Courtier's Reply" occur to anyone else?

The p-word is in fact a vague classification of pretty much any theoretical work done in linguistics, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, etc. that does not adhere to strict Anglo-Saxon positivism (and the 'clarity' that it connotes). - Antonin

I find it telling that you put "clarity" in scare-quotes. if you abandon clarity, you've abandoned thought for self-indulgent posturing:

"The meaning doesn't matter
if it's only idle chatter
of a transcendental kind.
And everyone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
'If this young man expresses himself
in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man
this deep young man must be!' - W.S. Gilbert, from the libretto to Patience

Like many philosophies, post-modernism has something important to say, but has often been taken much too far.

The important point of post-modernism, from what little I know of the philosophy, is that it takes into account the fact that we are all very fallible humans. It correctly points out that we simply don't know a priori that all of our senses and memories are accurate representations of the world around us. In fact, in rigorous tests of our senses and memories, we have found that they are often very inaccurate representations of reality.

The entire progress in how science is performed has been in refining our methods to best correct for errors in sensing and cognition. There are real difficulties here that need to be highlighted. Post-modernism has a serious critique here that should be paid attention to. It's just that this critique should not be considered to be an unassailable obstacle, but a problem to overcome. And that's what science is all about.

Consider, for example, one of the essential components in any good science: verification. Independent verification is absolutely essential to all of science because we can't always detect all of the errors that we make. So it only makes sense to have different people using different methods, different instruments, and different analysis techniques to ensure that the original conclusion was accurate. Doing this properly ensures that there is a dramatically lower probability that any mistake will go undetected, as any error that is made is likely to cause the results of the independent teams to be very different.

If you look at any new science, this is often how things progress: when the science is born, you have lots of different groups claiming extremely different results, results that are entirely incompatible. The scientists put their noses to the grindstone, figure out what went wrong, and use that greater knowledge to discover what the truth actually is. As the science matures, as the scientists uncover the errors they are likely to make, their results come more and more into agreement.

But this still doesn't rule out some very real problems. For one, there could simply be something shared between all or nearly all humans that leads us to the same incorrect result again and again. In this way, simple agreement may provide misleading certainty as to a proposition, and it's something that all scientists need to be aware of. This problem is going to be less likely when studying things very, very different from the experiences that made up our evolutionary past, and much more likely when we're attempting to make use of such experiences. This explains why, for example, anthropology is nigh impossible to get right. The objectivity required to ensure independent verification is just not possible much of the time, because the object of study is ourselves.

At the same time, even the "hard sciences" like physics are not immune to the problem. A rather striking example I remember from my time as an undergraduate was this: the original measurement of the electron's charge was very, very wrong. It was incorrect in that the claimed value was off by much more than the claimed errors on that value. Subsequently, scientists working on refining the measurement of the electric charge, having believed the previous value, would "correct" their experiments closer to the previous measurement. It took a number of decades, but over time the value of the electron charge slowly crept up closer and closer to the true value. But for most of that time it was further from the true value than the claimed errors, due to scientists expecting a particular result.

Because of this and many other examples, yes, we should all be aware of post-modernism, and do what we can to guard against the problems it presents us.

Wow, that post was a bit longer than I was expecting.

Modernism embraces the notion that the universe is a rationally coherant whole (even if we haven't quite uncovered it all yet). Postmodernism embraces the notion that the universe isn't ultimately a rational coherant whole. It's really that simple.

A Physics example.

Modernist Statement: The double-slit experiment is inconclusive. We have yet to figure out how to monitor photons without changing their state.

Post-modernist Statement: The universe isn't just understood as probability, but is MADE of probability.

etc...

that does not adhere to strict Anglo-Saxon positivism

Oh man you really can't parody this stuff. Poe's law has imploded.

http://kithfan.org/work/transcripts/five/deadgod.html

"God IS dead. And here is the body to prove it.
...
The world is shocked. First to find out God did in fact exist and second to find out he was now dead.
But the world was most shocked to find out how small God was.
Imagine winds.... storms... the miracle of life. All from this tiny God with such tiny hands and feet."

The problem with postmodernism is not that it can't generate points of interest, or contemplation. The problem is, it does so using convoluted, overly wordy, gibberish, which often does little more than restate a known, or already examined, and sometimes absurdly trivial, premise, in a way that isn't directly and immediately an obvious rip off, followed by patting themselves grandly on the back for "sticking it to" who ever it is they happen to be annoyed with this weak.

In other words, its much like the whole "synthekaff" argument in your earlier post. It does nothing to truly advance any examination of anything, it just crams convoluted and overly obnoxious linguistic legerdemain into a discussion of things that have either already "been" considered, and rejected as irrelevant by the people being addressed by it, or are being examined, in a far less absurd fashion.

In other words, from a purely practical stand point, if you are discussing such matters its called philosophy, if your mangling them, to make it look like its a "fresh" examination of the matter, its Postmodernism. Or, at least that is what my, and some others, observations seem to imply. ;) lol

Jason Dick @ 48

Thanks for eloquently articulating what I think is at the core of my frustration when I find myself on the defensive in yet another postmodernism bashing session. In general, postmodernism is old news - people doing the interesting work in the humanities and social sciences aren't talking so much about it anymore. But there is something useful at the heart of it, which is the idea, as I believe Dave M put it somewhere upthread, of using reason to critically examine the practice of reason. Why is it such a crackpotty idea to take apart the practices of writing history - who does it, how it is written, etc.? Why is it so crazy to take note of the fact that science is done by people, that to expect perfect, infallible objectivity in experiment creation or interpretation is perhaps naive? Yeah, plenty of "postmodernists" go overboard, but why focus on the crazy people and ignore the more useful stuff in the center?

1. The only book whites wanted to teach blacks was the Bible.
2. There is no faith like the convert.
3. Appalling.

I have two further recommendations on this subject, both satiric: Frederick Crews' faux-essay collection "Postmodern Pooh" and Gilbert Adair's novella "The Death of the Author."

Manuel Delanda does do a very good job of bringing Deleuze's philosophy into an analytical and objective context and does so with clear and comprehensible wording. Worth a look, although it obviously does not forgive any obscurantist mumbo jumbo some do put forward in the "postmodern" vein of philosophy.