In contemporary philosophy, we call ‘postmodern’ those ideas which, from the mid-nineteenth century, were to set about dismantling the humanist creed of modernity, in particular the philosophy of the Enlightenment. In the same way that the latter broke with the grand cosmologies of Antiquity and brought about a new critique of religion, so too postmodernity was to set about demolishing the two strongest convictions of the Moderns from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: the belief that the human individual is at the centre of the world – which came to form the basis of all moral and
...more
