Impure Postmodernity -- Philosophy Today

Hegel, Heidegger, Postmodernity reconsidered after 20 years

Lyotard and the postmodernity debate

Contemporary advanced Industrial societies are Increasingly computerised, and knowledge Is now a major stake In the worldwide competition for power. Jean-Françols Lyotard argues that such societies are postmodern, having rejected the principal doctrines of modern Ism. Lyotard's book, The Postmodern condition, proposes that social theory must change to reflect the arrival of postmodernity. This has generated a debate in social theory between advocates of modernity with Its liberalising potential, represented in this thesis by Jürgen Habermas, and the advocates of postmodernity, principally Lyotard, who argue In favour of an antifoundational approach to postmodern society. In this thesis, three main areas of Lyotard's Investigation of postmodern society are analysed in detail, and in the context of the debate between modernists and postmodernists. The three topics are culture, language and the organisation of society. The postmodernity debate highlights the options available to contemporary social theory, and the ways in which recent changes in social organisation have affected social theory

Beyond the 'postmodern university'

Copyright @ 2013 International Society for the Study of European Ideas. This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 18(1), 24 - 41, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2013.748119.As an institution, the “postmodern university” is central to the canon of today's research on higher education policy. Yet in this essay I argue that the postmodern university is a fiction that frames and inhibits our thinking about the future university. To understand why the postmodern university is a fiction, I first turn to grand theory and ask whether we can make sense of the notion of “post”-postmodernity. Second, I turn to the UK higher education sector and show that the postmodern university is a chimera, a modern artefact of competing instrumentalist, gothic, and postmodernist discourses. Third, I discuss competing visions of the future university and find that the progressive (yet modernist) agendas that re-imagine the public value of knowledge production, transmission, and contestation, are those that can move us beyond the palliative and panacea of the postmodern university

Modernity, mobility and the digital divides

The phrase ‘digital divide’ has been crucial over the last ten years in focusing attention and resources on the issues of access to and use of ICT, including e-learning, by a succession of excluded and marginal individuals and communities. This paper argues however that this is now a dangerously simplistic notion, especially in societies characterised by the postmodernity that has been catalysed by increasing mobility. The paper provides an introduction to some of the ideas and issues

The return of faith and reason to laïcité; Régis Debray and 'le fait religieux'

In 1985, Marcel Gauchet wrote of the ‘retour du religieux’ as an end to the social role of religion and the beginning of its privatisation. However, far from an indication of the withering of religion on the vine of modernity, the return of a religious discourse was resurrected by the democratisation of the ‘croyant’ in the mid-1980s. The ‘âge égalitaire’, coupled with the specificity of the ‘croyant’, created a platform on which to challenge the model of laïcité in contemporary France. This discourse sought to re-appropriate reason from the logic of secular objectivity and postmodern self-reliance, and re-signify it within a Catholic theological language of belief and faith. The transmission of religious ‘knowledge’ would also be seen to compete for intellectual equality with the forms and transmission of knowledge approved by laïcité in the republican school. Régis Debray's report to the Ministry of Education in 2002 on the teaching of the ‘fait religieux’ in French schools advances this debate by defending the introduction of the study of religion in school from the perspectives of theological rigour, the indivisibility of knowledge (the coexistence of ‘témoin’ and ‘savant’), and the inextricable links between faith and reason in their production of knowledge with a valid claim for public consumption

Ethics and Politics in the Postmodern Condition

In this paper I analyze the postmodern condition with particular reference to the ethical and political spheres. Postmodernism attempts a radical break with all of the major strands of post-Enlightenment thought. For postmodernists as the French Jean-François Lyotard and the Italian Gianni Vattimo, the orthodox Enlightenment “meta-narrative” of progress and the “speculative” narrative of Hegel and Marx have lost their explanatory force. In particular, Lyotard speaks about five large meta-narratives of Western culture: 1) Christianity (understood also in the secularized form which its values have taken into modernity); 2) Enlightenment; 3) Idealism as a “theory of progressive freedom in history”; 4) Marxism, and 5) Capitalism. According to Lyotard, one can consider “the incredulity” towards these meta-narratives (méta-récits or grands récits) as postmodern. He points out that after Auschwitz it is impossible to speak of rationality and progress in Western history: In the twentieth century the Nazi genocide showed that history is not a continuous ethical progress towards the best. From the philosophical point of view the precursor of postmodern atmosphere is Friedrich Nietzsche. This German philosopher elaborated a radically anti-metaphysical thought and proposed an ethic of emancipation. Postmodernists refer to Nietzsche’s thought and theorize ethical-political practices aimed at the emancipation of women and socially weak subjects. Postmodernism’s rejection of “totalizing” theories with universal pretentions is complemented by positive celebration of diversity or “difference” and emphasis on the ethical demands of “the other”: this is, for example, the ethical perspective of Michel Foucault

Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture, Technology, and Education

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the UnexpectedThis chapter argues that in order to understand the implications of how digital youth are now using new media and technologies in unexpected and innovative ways, we have to rethink many of the cultural oppositions that have shaped the Western tradition since the start of the modern era. To be precise, we can no longer base our analysis of culture, identity, and technology on the traditional conflicts between the public and the private, the subject and the object, and the human and the machine. Moreover, the modern divide pitting the isolated individual against the impersonal realm of technological mechanization no longer seems to apply to the multiple ways young people are using new media and technologies. In fact, this chapter argues that we have moved into a new cultural period of automodernity, and a key to this cultural epoch is the combination of technological automation and human autonomy

From Mother to Sister: The Development in the Understanding of Mission in the Life and Writings of St Thérèse of Lisieux and its Contemporary Relevance

This dissertation analyses the development in the understanding of mission in the life and writings of St Thérèse of Lisieux and considers its contemporary significance. The thesis is that Thérèse progressed from a ‘mother missiology’ to a ‘sister missiology.’ This missiological evolution is intrinsically united to Thérèse’s transcendence of the faith-categories of her era. Initially, with her Catholic contemporaries, Thérèse regarded it as her duty to ‘mother’ unbelievers into divine life. This ‘mother missiology’ gradually became ‘sister missiology’ as two movements of grace, namely the emergence of the ‘little way’ and Thérèse’s intensifying union with Jesus, the kenotic Christ, took Thérèse beyond her era’s vision of faith. The paradigm of ‘sister missiology’ has an entwined dual dynamic: radical solidarity with unbelievers and radical receptivity to the gratuitous outpouring of God’s love. Sister missiology is demonstrated to be a potentially vital enabler of the Church’s missionary agenda in the twenty-first century. It is able to facilitate the realisation of the missionary objectives of the Second Vatican Council and offers a road-map for the Church’s engagement with postmodernity. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Theology from the University of Notre Dame, Australia, 2006