
Postmodernism generator - infinity
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ 
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diz
It's easy to make fun of postmodern philosophy, but no philosopher made-up
postmodernism, they are just commenting or labeling phenomena already inherent
in our culture, some of which is even more complex than their method of
expressing it. Their comment might be somewhat cryptic, sometimes even
creative, as they are always trying to cover their asses from, what they
believe is, our loose and unstable language(s), but the overall message of
diversity, multiplicity, the questioning of social constructions (sometimes),
etc. have been essential tools in our society and cultural/social relations in
postmodern culture.

I understand some of the downfalls of postmodernism and I won't defend it, but
I'm not going back to rationalism, which influenced the Nazis, or Platonic or
Christian Essentialism, which has marked humanity in negative ways for too
many centuries, etc.

~~~
trominos
Can you point to any postmodern philosophy papers that are useful?

How about some that merely make non-obvious true points?

Or some that are at least interesting?

It probably seems like I'm bashing postmodern philosophy, but although I
expect this line of thinking to end at the conclusion "postmodern philosophy
is useless," I've never actually followed it myself, and I would honestly be
very happy if you could answer "yes" (with examples) to at least one of the
above questions. It's just that from my vantage point as a relatively
uninformed outsider the field feels vacuous.

And your logic in the last sentence of your post is terrible.

~~~
mustpax
It is much longer than an essay, but I would highly recommend Heidegger’s _The
Question Concerning Technology_.

Now as inspired as the text is, it is not a light read. But not all meaningful
scholarly work needs to be written like a popular science novel. (I mean, ever
try reading Gödel’s famous paper?) I read Heidegger in the context of a
Philosophy seminar and frankly it helps having access to secondary sources for
help.

On a more positive note, Heidegger has only been called postmodernist in
retrospect. At the time he was producing these essays and writings, there was
no postmodernist jargon to lean on. So his writings are pleasantly free of
words that only help to obscure.

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cesare
In case somebody missed it (Richard Dawkins on postmodernism):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645178>

Edit: here's the direct link to the article:
<http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html>

~~~
infinity
Oh, I didn't see that somebody has already posted this as a link in the
comments. No cross-posting was intended.

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Bjoern
This generator reminds me of the Paper generator by some MIT students..

<http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/>

..much more funny and even pdf direct output :D

~~~
ephermata
Yes, this is funny. The existence of random paper generators for a discipline
doesn't say much about the rigor of that discipline. You might be able to make
some kind of argument based on how long it takes for someone trained in the
discipline to detect it as randomly generated.

Of course, you could imagine building a program that creates perfectly
compileable, yet randomly generated programs. These guys actually did it to
test gcc's handling of the volatile keyword:
<http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/emsoft08-preprint.pdf>

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asdlfj2sd33
Ha ha ha, lets all point and laugh at the postmodernists.

Or we could just ignore them.

