Postmodernism is old, let us go further : a pamphlet against decostructionism, constructivism, relativism, and methodological anarchism

This paper means to be a collective and intercultural pamphlet against the postmodern approach to knowledge. However, our criticism - mainly directed at deconstructionism, constructivism, relativism and methodological anarchism - is not grounded in old positivistic philosophy. We are young scholars and students whose teachers were mainly postmodernists, therefore we accept some of their ideas, but we also feel it necessary to stress the many limits of this approach and its inadequacy to respond to the challenges of the present day. From our perspective, postmodernism is not a new approach that must be simply studied, but an old one that needs to be surpassed. One of the merits of postmodernism is that it showed that positivism was too dogmatic and optimistic with regards to the progress of knowledge and civilization. However, in responding to positivism, postmodernism has gone too far in producing skepticism and pessimism. In addition, postmodernism is paradoxical when rejecting the categories of truth and progress, while still considering itself to be an approach better than positivism. Up to now the argument used to defend its preferability was its novelty. But an idea that is forty years old and was already anticipated at the beginning of the twentieth century cannot be treated as new. For all of these reasons this paper should be seen as one of the first examples of post-postmodern thought