This audiobook edition of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. The first three chapters now available with timestamps: Chapter One (What Postmodernism Is), Chapter Two (The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason), and Chapter Three (The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason), are here. Narrated by the author, Stephen R. C. Hicks. The next three chapters — Chapters Four (The Climate of Collectivism), Five (The Crisis of Socialism), and Six (Postmodern Strategies) — will be posted soon.
Timestamps: 00:00:00 EXPLAINING POSTMODERNISM 00:00:25 CHAPTER ONE: What Postmodernism Is 00:02:22 The postmodern vanguard: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty 00:09:22 Modern and postmodern 00:12:22 Modernism and the Enlightenment 00:22:50 Postmodernism versus the Enlightenment 00:25:06 Postmodern academic themes 00:29:51 Postmodern cultural themes 00:33:17 Why postmodernism? CHAPTER TWO: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason 00:38:11 Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science 00:40:20 The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment 00:47:05 Kant’s skeptical conclusion 00:50:56 Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism 00:57:36 Kant’s essential argument 01:05:26 Identifying Kant’s key assumptions 01:10:55 Why Kant is the turning point 01:17:37 After Kant: reality or reason but not both 01:22:21 Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche 01:27:49 Dialectic and saving religion 01:35:55 Hegel’s contribution to postmodernism 01:37:28 Epistemological solutions to Kant: irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche 01:48:49 Summary of irrationalist themes CHAPTER THREE: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason 01:50:10 Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition 01:55:54 Setting aside reason and logic 01:59:42 Emotions as revelatory 02:05:16 Heidegger and postmodernism 02:09:19 Positivism and Analytic philosophy: from Europe to America 02:15:13 From Positivism to Analysis 02:18:54 Recasting philosophy’s function 02:22:04 Perception, concepts, and logic 02:29:36 From the collapse of Logical Positivism to Kuhn and Rorty 02:31:25 Summary: A vacuum for postmodernism to fill 02:34:33 First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian epistemology
Information about other editions and translations of Explaining Postmodernism is here.
