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Knowing and Being: A Postmodern Reversal

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We hear much about our "postmodern" age, from enthusiastic endorsements by students encountering it for the first time and failing to grasp much at all, to bitter railings from evangelicals who see their foundationalist ground snatched out from under them with nary a forewarning. But why has modernism been abandoned? And what does postmodernism give us that privileges it above its predecessors? These questions are rarely addressed, but in this volume Mensch demonstrates clearly why all of the post-Cartesian attempts to conceive of the subject, rationalism, idealism, and empiricism alike, were doomed to fail. The then presents a postmodern view of the subject, rooted in Aristotle and an analysis of temporality, which avoids the perils that assailed our modernist forebears. Brilliant, a triumph from beginning to end, and a cogent demonstration of why philosophy and culture in general was bound to leave the certain shores of the foundational for the torrid but exciting seas of the postmodern.