Ii ~
,~
III
lull
iv
pagan past, when the word ’modernus’ emerges for the first
time, or the new, with the birth or rebirth of the Renaissance,
as those writers who entered the quarrel between the an-
cients and the moderns of the late 17th century, post-modern
writers have denied the teleological progession of meaning
and truth in history altogether. We have, Lyotard believes,
given up the ’modernist’ myth of a rationality that is complete
or decidable, totally elucidated, ultimately ’grounded’ with im-
mediate foundations, archimedean points, pure givens, etc.
In this he parallels, for example, the recognition that is in-
8 volved in the problem of ’incommensurability’ between para-
vi
Habermas believed that the dialectic of knowledge and hu-
9 man reasonwhich he has proposed to ensure the unity which
vii
Still, this position should not be taken as one which loses its
commitments to democratic institutions. Rather, what it loses
is the metaphysics that takes consensus to be teleologically
the guarantee of the veracity and ethicality of the community.
As Merleau-Ponty stated vis-a-vis a similar recognition,
rather than guaranteeing the community its fulfillment,
democratic institutions guarantee that difference will not be
reduced by identity. They guarantee, rather, at least &dquo;a mini-
mum of opposition,&dquo; and only thereby, truth.25
VIII ,
ix
xi
xii
NOTES
5. Ibid., pp.262-263.
6. Ibid., p. 281. The emphases are mine In this text.
21 7. KI, p. 308ff.
9. Ibid.
19. Hence, epistemology at the level of ’as if’ is no more satisfying within the
rationalist’s program than its predecessor. If Paul Feyerabend is right, then
from the strictly rationalist standpoint, it is not incumbent that we recognize
that the alternative to philosophy as strenge Wissenschaft is "anything
goes"; we need now to recognize how it is that the rationalist program itself
has failed, and why we still believe that not everything goes See Paul
Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books, 1978),
p. 40ff.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 6.
37. "Prelimmary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren", tr. Thom-
as Repensek, October, Number 10, FAII, 1979, p. 59.
38. c.p. for example Martin Heidegger’s statement in Being and Time, tr.
John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962),
p. 191.
In such an interpretation, the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to
be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself, or the Interpretation can
force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of Being.
46. See, for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, "The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of
Enlightnment, tr. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
47. Nietzsche, p. 41.
48. Ibid., p. 126.
49. Ibid., p. 98.
53. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, tr. C. Blanchard (New York.
AMS Press, Inc., 1974), p. 37.
54. See Evandro Agazzi, "From Newton to Kant: The Impact of Physics on
the Paradigm of Philosophy," Abba Salama, IX (1978).
55. See Stephen Toulmin, "The Emergence of Post-Modern Science" in
Current Developments in the Arts and Sciences (New York: Enclopedia
Bntannica, Inc., 1981 ), pp. 70ff.
56. Jean-François Lyotard, "Réponse à La Question. Qu’Est-Ce Que Le
", Critique No. 419, Tome XXVII, 1982, 365.
?
Post-moderne
24
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