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# Postmodern philosophy/Postmodern philosophy talk

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Please wait for a philosopher to write an article on this subject. The following is philosophically incompetent--to put it bluntly. I don't think it can be rescued; a philosopher would have to start from scratch. That's why I've put it on this page. --LMS

Postmodern philosophy, like other fields of philosophy, is a set of interesting questions that leads to a set of equally interesting answers. This specific set of questions fundamentally tries to ask how people know and believe the things that they do.

The origin of Postmodern philosophy comes from the rift between Existentialism and [modern philosophy]?. Classical philosophy is very much concerned with logic and rational thought; as in Rene Descartes' argument I think, therefore I am. Existentialism, in contrast, draws its arguments from emotive state, "I am my emotions". The gap between these two ways of building an understanding of the world was what gave rise to the postmodern philosophical inquiry.

Episteme, Paradigm, Paradigm Shift, and Deconstructionism are all specific arguments of post modern philosophy.

Episteme is the set of philosophical assumptions that underly a particular reader's understanding of an argument. A scientist with a rationalist episteme might for instance have difficulty in understanding the emotional argument of a woman in love, or the faith argument of a religious man. In the book ['Writing and Difference'], Jacques Derrida examines a nonsensical argument and shows that even though your fundamental belief system or episteme prevents you from consciously considering the argument, that there is never the less evidence that the argument took place in your mind even while you were rejecting it as nonsense.

See the entry on Epistemology for a full discussion on thought boundaries.

Paradigm is a less extreme but still fundamental way of classifying things in the world. Paradigm is a means of categorizing things that you know; recognizing things that you see by placing them in certain categories which thereby imply how you expect them to interact with one another. Paradigm shift comes when you rearrange those categorizations to see the same real world things with a new understanding.

Deconstructionism is the scientific method of post modern philosophy. It is a means to pull apart a system until you understand the way that you have categorized its pieces; then to reexamine the whole and find new ways of pulling the system apart, leading to new models of understanding.

Could you possibly rewrite this article so that it makes a little sense? I'm a philosopher, and honestly, I can't make heads or tails of it. --LMS

I will try. Hopefully a bit clearer. -- ksmathers

Each of the philosophical ages has been accompanied by art that reflects that age, so that comment might apply to all of the history of philosophy. I could substitute Modernism for Existentialism in the text above, but Modernism unlike postmodernism is only loosely defined by the set of philosophies which were being argued during that period of time. Also I wouldn't say that it is a reaction against modernism so much as it takes an interest in the distinction between Modernism and Classical. In other words it Post Modern art should be thought of as orthogonal to the classical/modern axis. That might be my bias though. -- ksmathers

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