Q&A: Your opinion on postmodern philosophers
Your opinion on postmodern philosophers
Question
You often disparage the continental and French postmodernists (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Hayden White, Clifford Geertz, and others).
Have you actually read them, and on that basis reject them?
Or did you mark the target in advance, and because their chatter was entirely not to your liking, you didn’t bother reading more than a few pages?
Sorry about the wording—I’m dead tired and don’t have the energy to think about manners 🙂
Answer
I’ve read a very small sample (both the original sources and people who discuss them and rely on them), and I was always disappointed. By scientific generalization, I draw general conclusions from that. I don’t know whether that is what you, for some reason, call marking the target in advance—or whether it was the tiredness that caused that.