How could they take him seriously? He writes rather plain English
intelligible to any educated reader. No one needs to go through initiatory
rites of reading thick and complex prose and search through the thickets for
some speck of sense. Postmodernism as a cultural phenomenom is inconsistent
with the style of the likes of Locke, Hume, or even Berkeley.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message -----
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 6:10 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:1428] Re: Hume & the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re:
pomoistas)
> >So why haven't post-modernists taken Hume seriously? Especially
> >since a lot of what I read from them sounds like it was cribbed from
> >Hume?
> >
> >Brad DeLong
>
> I don't know, but here's my speculation:
>
> 1. Presenting postmodernism as a reworking of Hume would diminish
> its claim to novelty, originality, and thoroughgoing criticism of
> Western Philosophy. Doing so would deprive it of a sexy apocalyptic
> charge & return it to the heartland of modernism. What would then
> become of the "post" of postmodernism?
>
> 2. Postmodernists, if asked, would tend to deny that they were
> empiricists & individualists, even though the implicit ontology in
> postmodernism is empiricist & individualist. Given their epistemic
> fallacy (insistence upon compulsory collapse of the world & human
> beings into discourse), they can't very well admit to having an
> ontology at all.
>
> 3. Postmodernists, being mainly of Continental persuasion, neglect
> Anglo-American philosophy (though they like Anglo-American literature
> & American movies). They also tend to neglect non-postmodern
> scholarship altogether.
>
> There are exceptions, though. For instance, Gilles Deleuze (e.g.
> Gilles Deleuze, _Empiricism and Subjectivity: an Essay on Hume's
> Theory of Human Nature, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991).
>
> Yoshie
>
