School #20
Postmodernism
Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard
Postmodernism rejects the grand narratives of progress, reason, and objective truth that defined modernity, holding instead that reality is fragmented, plural, and constituted through language and power. Jean-Francois Lyotard's 'The Postmodern Condition' (1979) defined postmodernity as "incredulity toward metanarratives" — the collapse of any single, overarching story (science, Marxism, Enlightenment reason) that claims to legitimate all knowledge. Michel Foucault's 'The Order of Things' (1966) and 'Discipline and Punish' (1975) showed how what counts as knowledge and truth is produced by historically specific regimes of power, not discovered by a neutral intellect. Jacques Derrida's 'Of Grammatology' (1967) argued that meaning is never fully present in language but always deferred through an endless chain of signs (differance) — there is no transcendental signified, no reality outside the text that could anchor meaning once and for all.
Worldview
The postmodernist inhabits a world without foundations, where every claim to truth is a move in a language game and every institution rests on contingent arrangements of power rather than eternal principles. Reality feels layered and unstable: beneath each confident assertion lies another interpretation, and beneath that interpretation, another. The fundamental orientation is one of playful suspicion, a refusal to be taken in by any grand narrative that promises final answers. Living inside this ontology means experiencing culture, identity, and knowledge as endlessly negotiable, never settled. There is a liberating vertigo in recognizing that the ground was never solid, and that creativity and critique are the only honest responses to a reality that is always being rewritten. The framework classifies this as None: postmodernism is suspicious of all metaphysical agency claims — no personal god, no cosmic ordering principle, no foundational spirits survive deconstruction. The framework reads this as Constructed moral authority: every supposed authority — Scripture, Tradition, Reason, even appeals to authentic Experience — is read as a discursive construction sustained by power and able to be re-described; nothing escapes the constituting work of language and community.
Moral Implications
Ethics in postmodernism resists universal moral codes, treating them as products of particular historical power configurations rather than reflections of an objective moral order. Responsibility shifts from obedience to fixed rules toward a vigilant attentiveness to whose voices are silenced and whose interests are served by any given ethical framework. Justice becomes a matter of deconstructing exclusionary structures and amplifying marginalized perspectives. Derrida's later work emphasizes an unconditional hospitality and a "justice to come" that can never be fully realized in any existing institution. The moral life is an ongoing negotiation conducted without the comfort of final moral certainty.
Practical Implications
Postmodernism encourages deep skepticism toward institutional authority, expert consensus, and standardized knowledge systems, fostering cultures of critique in education, media, and governance. In technology and science policy, it insists that no research program is value-neutral and that the social consequences of innovation must be interrogated rather than assumed to be beneficial. Environmental and social policy decisions are understood as politically contested rather than technically determined, demanding inclusive deliberation across multiple stakeholder narratives. Daily life under postmodern influence tends toward pluralism in identity, consumer culture as self-expression, and a pervasive irony about the narratives that structure social existence.
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I. Time
Time is emergent and constructed through language, narrative, and power — there is no single, objective temporal order. Multiple temporal frameworks coexist and no meta-narrative of time is privileged. Time's extent is both finite and infinite depending on the discourse. Direction is multi-directional because different narratives arrange temporal events differently.
Attributes
Extent: Both
Ontological Status: Relational
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Dimensionality: One
Direction: Uni-directional
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II. Space
Space is emergent and socially constructed — it is produced through power relations, discourse, and cultural practice (Foucault's heterotopias, Lefebvre's social production of space). Its curvature is undefined because the postmodernist rejects any single authoritative spatial description. Space is local in the sense that spatial meaning is always situated and particular.
Attributes
Extent: Both
Ontological Status: Relational
Curvature: Undefined
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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III. Matter
Matter is emergent and discursively constructed — what counts as "material" is shaped by the conceptual frameworks, power structures, and narratives of a given culture. Matter is conserved within the framework of physics, but the postmodernist treats physics as one language game among many. Matter's locality is non-local because material meanings circulate through discourse without fixed spatial boundaries.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Relational
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Non-local
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IV. Observer
No single vantage point is privileged — the observer is dispersed across multiple temporal perspectives and spatial locations, each equally valid, none central. All knowledge is local, partial, and constructed through the interplay of language, power, and social position; the dream of a total, neutral view of reality is itself an exercise of power. Knowledge is fluid, contested, and constantly subject to revision — nothing is permanently fixed or universally transmissible. The observer's own nature is variable: embodiment, identity, and agency are all constructed categories open to deconstruction. Multiple observers coexist in a fragmented landscape of competing narratives, each actively constructing the reality they inhabit.
Attributes
Time Instance: Single
Space Instance: Single
Extent of Knowledge: Mediated
Retainment of Knowledge: Partial
Physicality: Both
Agency: Active
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: None
Moral Authority: Constructed
Theological Method: N/A
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V. Energy
Energy is emergent and discursively constructed — its meaning varies across cultural and scientific contexts. Conservation is variable because different discourses may treat energy differently. Dispersibility is irreversible within the physics discourse, but the postmodernist resists granting this universal status.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Relational
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
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VI. Information
Information is constructed, contested, and deconstructible — there are no fixed informational truths. All information is embedded in power relations and cultural contexts. The framework places this as non-conserved at both scales: there is no stable cosmic information that escapes deconstruction, and no personal-identity pattern that persists beyond the contingent discourses that constitute the self.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational
Cosmic Conservation: Non-conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Experiments This School Responds To (5)
The Veil of Ignorance
The unencumbered self of the veil is a metaphysical fiction; persons are constituted by their attachments and traditions, and cannot reason about justice while pretending …
The Liar Paradox
A model case of the unstable, self-undermining character of language; the paradox is endemic, not a glitch.
Asch's Conformity Experiments
A neat empirical illustration of the situatedness of "truth": consensus is socially produced even at the level of immediate perception.
Wittgenstein's Lion
A canonical statement of the situatedness and incommensurability of forms of life — congenial to postmodern themes about untranslatability.
Curry's Paradox
A formal vindication of postmodern suspicion of totalising truth-claims: the very logic that supports them is self-undermining.
Films Reading Through This School (8)
Synecdoche, New York
Kaufman builds an explicit Baudrillardian structure: the simulation does not refer to a prior reality; it replaces it. The warehouse New York is the territory; …
Perfect Blue
The film is postmodern in form: the collapse of stable distinctions between original and copy, between performer and role, between web life and offline life. …
eXistenZ
The film is postmodern by structure: no stable original beneath the copies, every register of supposed reality (the focus group, the gas station, the trout …
The Truman Show
A media-postmodern reading: the film is about the colonisation of subjectivity by broadcast media. Truman's situation is the limit case of a more general condition.
Last Year at Marienbad
The film anticipates postmodern themes of unstable narrative authority and the constructive power of discourse. There is no fact of the matter beneath the competing …
Sans Soleil
The film is a postmodern essay in form: no single voice, no stable narrator, no argument that does not undercut itself, archive and footage intermixed …
Paprika
The film is postmodern in form: cinema history (Hitchcock, Tarzan, classic animation) appears as the texture of the characters' dreams, with no marker separating it …
I ❤ Huckabees
The film is postmodern in form: collaged sequences, direct-address illustrations, deliberate self-undercutting tone. Russell argues that the philosophical content survives the comic form rather than …
Debates Where This School Is Allied (11)
The Foucault–Chomsky Debate
Genealogist; critic of human nature
Sartre–Heidegger on Humanism
Thinker of Being
Carnap vs Heidegger on Metaphysics
Existential phenomenologist; thinker of Being
Husserl and Heidegger
Existential / fundamental ontologist
Habermas–Gadamer on Hermeneutics and Critique
Philosophical hermeneuticist
Plato vs Protagoras
Sophist; relativist
The Positivismusstreit
Frankfurt School critical theorist
Searle vs Derrida on Speech Acts
Deconstructionist
Putnam vs Rorty on Truth
Neo-pragmatist; post-philosophical
Adorno vs Benjamin
Dialectical critical theorist
Adorno vs Benjamin
Marxist-mystic cultural theorist
Works that name Postmodernism in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
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Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida · 1967
The Order of Things
Michel Foucault · 1966
Discipline and Punish (Late)
Michel Foucault · 1975
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La condition postmoderne) (Late)
Jean-François Lyotard · 1979
The History of Sexuality (Late (his last major project))
Michel Foucault · 1976 (vol. 1); 1984 (vols. 2-3, shortly before Foucault's death); vol. 4 (Confessions of the Flesh) published posthumously 2018
The Archaeology of Knowledge (Mid (methodological transition between archaeological and genealogical phases))
Michel Foucault · 1969
Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et simulation) (Late)
Jean Baudrillard · 1981
Letter on Humanism (Late)
Martin Heidegger · 1946 (drafted as a letter to Jean Beaufret); 1947 (published)
On the Genealogy of Morality (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1887 (composed in 20 days)
Beyond Good and Evil (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1886
Madness and Civilization (Early (Foucault's breakthrough work, his doctoral dissertation))
Michel Foucault · 1961 (Foucault's doctoral dissertation)
The Birth of the Clinic (Early-mid (between Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things))
Michel Foucault · 1963
Gender Trouble (Early)
Judith Butler · 1990
Bodies That Matter (Early)
Judith Butler · 1993
Can the Subaltern Speak? (Mid)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak · 1988 (essay in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture; rev. 1999 in Critique of Postcolonial Reason)
Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) (Mid)
Italo Calvino · 1972
Speech and Phenomena (Early)
Jacques Derrida · 1967
Margins of Philosophy (Middle (one of three 1972 volumes))
Jacques Derrida · 1972
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Mid (the breakthrough book))
Richard Rorty · 1979
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1989
Orientalism (Mid)
Edward W. Said · 1978
Culture and Imperialism (Late)
Edward W. Said · 1993
Against Method (Mid)
Paul Feyerabend · 1975 (1st edn); 1988 (2nd); 1993 (3rd)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1 (Late)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari · 1972
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2 (Late)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari · 1980
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Pouvoirs de l'horreur) (Mid)
Julia Kristeva · 1980
Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum, de l'autre femme) (Mid)
Luce Irigaray · 1974
Ficciones (Mid)
Jorge Luis Borges · 1944
Orlando (Mature)
Virginia Woolf · 1928 (Hogarth Press)
The Tempest (Last (probably Shakespeare's last sole-authored play))
William Shakespeare · c. 1610-11 (first performed Whitehall, 1 November 1611)
Limited Inc (Middle-late)
Jacques Derrida · 1977 (with later 'Afterword', 1988)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1883 (parts I, II); 1884 (III); 1885 (IV, private printing)
What Is Metaphysics? (Early)
Martin Heidegger · 1929 (Freiburg inaugural lecture, 24 July)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1962 (1st ed.); 1970 (2nd ed. with postscript); 1996 (3rd ed.)
The Birth of Tragedy (Early)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1872 (with "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" preface added 1886)
The Question Concerning Technology (Late)
Martin Heidegger · 1953 (Munich lecture); 1954 (published)
The Gay Science (Middle (between Daybreak and Zarathustra))
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882 (first edition, four books); 1887 (second edition, with added fifth book and preface)
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Early (the most ambitious early work, before the Arcades Project))
Walter Benjamin · 1925 (submitted as habilitation thesis, rejected by the University of Frankfurt); 1928 (published commercially)
Sister Outsider (Mid (the major prose collection of Lorde's career))
Audre Lorde · 1984 (collecting essays and speeches from the 1970s and early 1980s)
The Waste Land (Mid (the canonical modernist poem))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1921 (during Eliot's nervous breakdown and convalescence in Switzerland); 1922 published (edited substantially by Ezra Pound)
A Cyborg Manifesto (Mid)
Donna Haraway · 1985 (first published in Socialist Review)
Playing in the Dark (Mid-late)
Toni Morrison · 1992 (William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, 1990)
Writing and Difference (Early)
Jacques Derrida · 1967 (French; English 1978)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Late)
Walter Benjamin · 1935-36 (multiple versions); first published 1936 in French
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Mid)
Jürgen Habermas · 1985 (German; English 1987)
Justice and the Politics of Difference (Mid)
Iris Marion Young · 1990
Difference and Repetition (Différence et Répétition) (Mid)
Gilles Deleuze · 1968
Écrits (Mid)
Jacques Lacan · 1966 (essays 1936-66)
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Late)
Giorgio Agamben · 1995
The Idea of Latin America (Late)
Walter D. Mignolo · 2005
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Late)
Donna J. Haraway · 2003
Critique of Cynical Reason (Kritik der zynischen Vernunft) (Mid)
Peter Sloterdijk · 1983
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Mid)
Marshall McLuhan · 1964
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (Mid)
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
Liquid Modernity (Late)
Zygmunt Bauman · 2000
Gyn/Ecology (Mature)
Mary Daly · 1978 (Beacon Press)
Pure Lust (Late-mature)
Mary Daly · 1984 (Beacon Press)
Science in Action (Mid)
Bruno Latour · 1987
On the Postcolony (Mid)
Achille Mbembe · 2000 (French), 2001 (English)
Critique of Black Reason (Late)
Achille Mbembe · 2013 (French), 2017 (English)
Necropolitics (Mature)
Achille Mbembe · 2003 (essay), 2016 (book — French), 2019 (book — English)
The Raw and the Cooked (Mature)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1964 (French), 1969 (English)
From Honey to Ashes (Mature)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1967 (French), 1973 (English)
The Origin of Table Manners (Mature)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1968 (French), 1978 (English)
The Naked Man (Late)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1971 (French), 1981 (English)
Specters of Marx (Late)
Jacques Derrida · 1993
Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Middle (Kehre))
Martin Heidegger · 1936-38 (published posthumously 1989)
Zhuangzi — Inner Chapters
Zhuang Zhou (with later editorial layers; Inner Chapters most likely by his hand) · c. late 4th century BC
Philosophical Investigations (Late)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · c. 1929–49 (drafted across two decades); 1953 (posthumous publication, ed. Anscombe & Rhees)
Phaedrus (Late)
Plato · c. 370 BC (late-middle dialogue)
Totality and Infinity (Early)
Emmanuel Levinas · 1961
On Certainty (Latest)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · Written 1949–51 (in Wittgenstein's final eighteen months); published posthumously 1969
The Copernican Revolution (Early (Kuhn's first book))
Thomas Kuhn · 1957
Otherwise than Being (Late (the more radical successor to Totality and Infinity, 1961))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1974
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Late (third volume of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1990 (the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1988)
Repetition (Early-mid (the same explosive 1843 as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1843 (published the same day as Fear and Trembling, under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius)
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Early-mid (after the Interpretation of Dreams))
Sigmund Freud · 1905; revised through 1924
Achieving Our Country (Late)
Richard Rorty · 1998
Staying with the Trouble (Late)
Donna Haraway · 2016
Beloved (Mid (the Pulitzer-winning major novel))
Toni Morrison · 1987
Myth, Literature and the African World (Mid)
Wole Soyinka · 1976
The Cancer Journals (Mid)
Audre Lorde · 1980
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Mid)
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer · 1944 (private circulation); 1947 (Amsterdam edition)
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Mid)
Theodor W. Adorno · 1944-47 (composed); 1951 (published)
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Early)
bell hooks · 1984
The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Early (Lévi-Strauss's breakthrough work; the foundation of structural anthropology))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1949
Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color (Mid)
Kimberlé Crenshaw · 1991 (Stanford Law Review)
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Late)
Jacques Lacan · 1964 (seminar); 1973 (book)
Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Mid)
Gloria Anzaldúa · 1987
We Have Never Been Modern (Nous n'avons jamais été modernes) (Mid)
Bruno Latour · 1991
Black Feminist Thought (Mid)
Patricia Hill Collins · 1990 (2nd edn 2000)
Don Quixote (El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha) (Late)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605 (Part I); 1615 (Part II)
Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot) (Mid)
Samuel Beckett · 1948-49 (composed); 1952 (French publication); 1953 (premiere)
The Essential Tension (Late)
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1977
Ulysses (Mid)
James Joyce · 1914-21 (composed); 1922 (published)
The Sublime Object of Ideology (Mid)
Slavoj Žižek · 1989
Cosmopolitics (Late)
Isabelle Stengers · 2003-11 (French in 7 vols; English in 2 vols)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) (Late)
Milan Kundera · 1984
Austerlitz (Late)
W.G. Sebald · 2001
Custer Died for Your Sins (Mature (Deloria's breakthrough book, written at 36))
Vine Deloria Jr. · 1969 (Macmillan)
The American Evasion of Philosophy (Mature (West's major work of intellectual history, written before the Race Matters celebrity))
Cornel West · 1989 (Wisconsin UP)
Three Guineas (Late)
Virginia Woolf · 1938 (Hogarth Press)
Between the Acts (Last)
Virginia Woolf · 1940-41 (Hogarth, posthumous July 1941; Woolf died March 28, 1941)
Othello (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1603-04 (first performed Whitehall, 1 November 1604)
Measure for Measure (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1603-04
Notes of a Native Son (Mid-mature)
James Baldwin · 1955
Giovanni's Room (Mid-mature)
James Baldwin · 1956
A Madman's Diary (Mid-mature)
Lu Xun · 1918
The True Story of Ah Q (Mature)
Lu Xun · 1921-22
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Mid)
Donna Haraway · 1991
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (Late)
Donna Haraway · 1997
Laboratory Life (Early)
Bruno Latour · 1979
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Late)
Bruno Latour · 2013 (French), 2013 (English)
The Way of the Masks (Late)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1975 (French), 1982 (English)
Guerrilla Metaphysics (Early)
Graham Harman · 2005
Being and Time (Early)
Martin Heidegger · 1927 (Jahrbuch für Philosophie publication; only Divisions I and II of the planned three completed)
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 (French two-vol. ed.)
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
Nāgārjuna · c. 150–250 AD (South India)
Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Sextus Empiricus · c. 160–210 AD
The Heart Sutra
Anonymous (Mahāyāna tradition; some scholars argue for a Chinese composition c. 7th century) · c. 600 AD (extant form); verses possibly earlier
The Mystical Theology
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (probably a Syrian Christian theologian, c. 500 AD) · c. 500 AD (probably Syria)
Either/Or (Early)
Søren Kierkegaard (under the editorship of Victor Eremita) · 1843
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Mid-late (after The Human Condition, before The Life of the Mind))
Hannah Arendt · 1963 (New Yorker articles 1962-63, then book)
The Stranger (Early (the breakthrough novel))
Albert Camus · 1942 (alongside The Myth of Sisyphus; published in occupied Paris)
Nausea (Early (Sartre's first novel, before Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1938
No Exit (Mid (alongside Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1944 (first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944)
Lectures on Aesthetics (Late (Berlin lectures))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1820s (delivered as lectures); 1835-38 (compiled and published posthumously by H. G. Hotho)
Time and the Other (Early (the breakthrough early work, before Totality and Infinity))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1946-47 (delivered as four lectures at Collège philosophique); published 1948
Existence and Existents (Early (the first major book, before Time and the Other))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1935-46 (largely composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp); published 1947
Difficult Freedom (Mid (alongside Totality and Infinity))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1963 (collecting essays from the 1950s-60s)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Early (the founding work of psychoanalysis))
Sigmund Freud · 1899 (dated 1900); revised through 1929 (8th edition)
Mrs Dalloway (Mid (the first major modernist novel of Woolf's maturity))
Virginia Woolf · 1925
To the Lighthouse (Mid (Woolf at the height of her powers))
Virginia Woolf · 1927
Hamlet (Mid (mature middle period))
William Shakespeare · c. 1600-01
Tristes Tropiques (Mid (Lévi-Strauss's most widely read book))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1955
The Savage Mind (Mid (the systematic statement of structural anthropology))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1962
Structural Anthropology (Mid (the methodological consolidation))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1958
Reason, Truth and History (Mid (the major mid-career book, the systematic statement of internal realism))
Hilary Putnam · 1981
Tradition and the Individual Talent (Early (Eliot's major early critical statement))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1919 (first published in The Egoist, September-December 1919)
The Lion and the Jewel (Early)
Wole Soyinka · 1959
Negative Dialectics (Late)
Theodor W. Adorno · 1966 (German; English 1973)
One-Dimensional Man (Late)
Herbert Marcuse · 1964
Theses on the Philosophy of History (Late)
Walter Benjamin · 1940 (German; English 1968)
The Wretched of the Earth (Late)
Frantz Fanon · 1961 (French; English 1963)
Black Skin, White Masks (Early)
Frantz Fanon · 1952 (French; English 1967)
A Community of Character (Mid)
Stanley Hauerwas · 1981
Being Given (Late)
Jean-Luc Marion · 1997 (French; English 2002)
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Mid)
Catharine A. MacKinnon · 1989
Philosophy of Liberation (Filosofía de la Liberación) (Mid)
Enrique Dussel · 1977
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Après la finitude) (Late)
Quentin Meillassoux · 2006
The Social Construction of What? (Late)
Ian Hacking · 1999
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Late)
Vine Deloria Jr. · 1973 (2nd edn 1992; 3rd edn 2003)
The Trial (Der Process) (Late)
Franz Kafka · 1914-15 (composed); 1925 (posthumous)
The Sound and the Fury (Mid)
William Faulkner · 1929
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Mid)
Erving Goffman · 1959
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction) (Mid)
Pierre Bourdieu · 1979
The Fall of Public Man (Mid)
Richard Sennett · 1977
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Late)
Naomi Klein · 2007
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Mature (Lanier's short polemical follow-up to Who Owns the Future?, 2013, and Dawn of the New Everything, 2017))
Jaron Lanier · 2018
On Violence (Late (Arendt's most-cited short political essay, written in response to the 1968 student movements))
Hannah Arendt · 1969 (New York Review of Books, Feb 27); 1970 (Harcourt expanded book edition)
Men in Dark Times (Late (collected from essays spanning more than a decade))
Hannah Arendt · 1968 (Harcourt Brace; essays composed 1955-67, several in New Yorker, Merkur, etc.)
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Mature (Kripke's second major book after Naming and Necessity, 1980))
Saul Kripke · 1982 (Harvard UP; based on 1976 Wolfson College lecture, 1977 Princeton seminars)
The Mandarins (Mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1954 (Gallimard; Prix Goncourt 1954)
The Waves (Mature)
Virginia Woolf · 1931 (Hogarth Press)
Antony and Cleopatra (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1606-07
The Black Prince (Mature)
Iris Murdoch · 1973 (Chatto & Windus); James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1973
Brave New World Revisited (Late)
Aldous Huxley · 1958
The Sea of Fertility (Last)
Yukio Mishima · 1965-71 (four-volume tetralogy)
Brutalism (Late)
Achille Mbembe · 2020 (French), 2024 (English)
Personas with Postmodernism as a declared influence
How Postmodernism resolves each dilemma
57 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 19 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Do you really choose?
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it.
69%
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real.
69%
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible.
69%
How much weight do future people deserve?
Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet.
31%
Is regret rational?
The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer.
31%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Past species no longer exist; what we owe is to the present and the future.
31%
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
Time both has and lacks bounds depending on the level you ask at; finitude is conventional.
26%
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
The finitude question is level-dependent; resource ethics happens at the level that constrains us.
26%
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
The owing-and-possibility question is level-dependent; we owe what is appropriate at the level we act on.
26%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people.
On relational views, money is not a substance you have; it is a record of who owes whom what. Debts and credits are real because the relations they track are real — to kin, to community, to ancestors, to land. Money is the form this …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (55%) ·
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
“Money” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people.
On relational views, the nation is the relational fabric — extended kinship, ancestral inheritance, shared ecology, communal practice — that hosts a people across generations. Borders matter less than belonging; lineage and land carry the weight that political structures only ratify.
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (55%) ·
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery. (16%) ·
“Nation” names a family of practices imaginatively held together. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition.
On relational views, identity is not a property a person has alone; it is constituted by the web of recognition the person sits in. What makes someone a man or a woman in any thick sense is the relations of kinship, community, ritual, and recognition …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (55%) ·
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice. (16%) ·
“Male” and “female” are family-resemblance terms — no single essence. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric.
On relational views, what makes someone a person is the web of kinship, ancestry, and community they sit in — not a property the body carries alone. Heritable editing intervenes in exactly this fabric: the lineage that ancestors handed on, the descent that descendants will …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (55%) ·
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other. (16%) ·
'Human nature' is a cluster term without a single essence; the editing question is empirical, not metaphysical. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
Is the world created from nothing?
Creatio ex nihilo is one of the most distinctive Western-theological claims. Whether matter was created from nothing, eternally exists, or is sustained moment-by-moment turns on what kind of thing matter is.
Matter is constituted by relations; the question of 'from what?' presupposes substance.
On this view, matter is not a stuff but a patterning — the standing relations among things, ancestors, processes, and places. The creatio-ex-nihilo question doesn't quite arise, because the ontology has no slot for a free-standing substance to be created or eternal. What persists is …
Roads not taken
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. (56%) ·
Matter is real but emerges from something deeper — neither bedrock nor created-from-nothing. (23%) ·
Matter arises and dissolves through cosmic rounds; neither created from nothing nor eternal. (4%)
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 5% of schools agree
(10/208)
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
Different traditions take fundamentally different things to be the basic moral-political unit.
The class or historical movement is the moral primary.
Persons are constituted by their position in social-historical struggle.
Roads not taken
The discrete person is the moral primary. (38%) ·
The community of persons is the moral primary. (28%) ·
The cosmic-religious order is the moral primary. (16%)
Distinctive · only 8% of schools agree
(17/208)
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
What kind of thing is a true claim, and how does it relate to the standpoint from which it is made?
What counts as truth is constituted by language, practice, history, power.
There is no fact-of-the-matter independent of the constitutive frameworks; truth is constructed.
Roads not taken
Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all. (66%) ·
Truth is real but always known from a perspective. (16%) ·
Truth is real but accessible only from within a tradition. (10%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation.
On relational views, person was never the name of a thing that exists on its own — it is the name of a node in a web of recognition, obligation, kinship, and ecology. The question of when a being becomes a person is the question …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (55%) ·
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop. (16%) ·
The question presupposes a fact of the matter that isn’t there. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
Marriage is constituted by the web of relations it creates.
On relational views, marriage is not a thing in itself but a node in a web — a configuration of obligations to children, extended kin, ancestors, ecology, and community. Its definition is what the network of relations is, and any attempt to specify it apart …
Roads not taken
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. (55%) ·
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
“Marriage” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(30/208)
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world.
On these views, humans were never outside nature, and the question of our 'place in' it is the question of how to live within the relations that already constitute us. Plants, animals, rivers, ancestors, descendants are not resources or stage scenery; they are kin and …
Roads not taken
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. (50%) ·
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world. (15%) ·
Subject to a real natural order we did not make. (12%)
32 mainstream positions
Should we colonize space?
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking.
14%
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genome cuts into the relational fabric; we should be very slow.
14%
What makes someone the same person over time?
There was never a fixed self to either preserve or lose.
14%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
There was no fixed person to lose; care is owed to whoever is here.
14%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
There was no fixed you to either survive or fail to; the question is malformed.
14%
What happens to "you" when you die?
You were always a pattern. The pattern propagates.
18%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History is the gradual unfolding of improvement or liberation.
23%
Could causation work backwards?
Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural.
68%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction.
68%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description.
68%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation.
66%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial.
66%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Entropy is what time is. The moral weight, if any, is the weight of working against the current.
66%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Moral obligation tracks the relations one is in; distance does matter, structurally.
50%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer changes the pray-er, not the prayed-for.
47%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Coincidence is exactly what the math says it is. The pattern is in the noticer.
47%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
The observer is in time; foreknowledge across times raises real freedom problems.
46%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Meditators are bounded observers reporting unusual brain states; the 'timeless' is metaphorical.
46%
Does prayer change God's mind?
If there is an addressee at all, it is in time; prayer is communication, and may genuinely change what comes next.
46%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
Observers are bounded by their own moment, and no further agency makes the dead present.
43%
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
The category does not apply — the school is non-religious.
42%
Is reality fundamentally digital?
No — continuous fields, classical limits, analog deep structure.
36%
Are there indivisible units of experience?
No — continuous Jamesian stream, phenomenological lived time.
36%
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Reconstructed — continuous re-narrating, no fixed engrams.
36%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
An AI’s standing is constituted by the relations it enters.
14%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust the practice, not the practitioner.
13%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
'Revelation' is a category communities construct for what counts as authoritative.
13%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
Whether an LLM 'knows' is the constructive question the practice has to answer.
13%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through historical-critical engagement and the working-out of contradictions.
12%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Talk of 'standing' presupposes fixed selves that animals (and we) don't have.
10%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Asking whether the organoid is 'really' conscious presupposes a category we don't have.
10%
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Liberation is the collective historical work of the oppressed.
4%
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone.
50%
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys.
50%
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible.
50%
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away.
50%
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