Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. Thanks again to everyone that supports the show on Patreon Patreon.com slash philosophize this.

Thanks also to the people that go through the Amazon banner when they're shopping. Couldn't do this without you either.

Philosophize this dot org. Today's episode is part one in a series on Gildel Luz. I hope you love the show today.

So pretty much since day one on this podcast, we've seen philosophers come along, look at the world around them.

And through intense contemplation and reasoning, holding the world of their version of philosophical scrutiny, they've all come up with their own systems that do their best to define the way the world is.

The assumptions always been that as time goes on, thinkers build off of the work of the thinkers that came before them. Over time, each of these systems becoming a little more unbiased, a little more accurate in terms of understanding the epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics of the world.

But more specifically and more importantly to the conversation that's going on in the mid to late 20th century that we've been talking about, there's been an assumption that we've been heading in the right direction when it comes to the questions of ontology. What is being? What does it mean to be dozens of other questions we've talked about on separate episodes.

But as we've seen in the early 20th century, structuralists come along and show how the views of these individual philosophers are not disinterested, unbiased attempts at trying to answer these questions.

Their views of the way the world is, as really just been given to them by the cultural climate they were born into, and the history that culture has structurally emerged out of.

Little later in the century, we have the post-structure list come along that goes so far as to criticize this entire tradition of trying to rigidly define the way the world is.

The tools we have to conduct philosophy with will never be able to give us access to something that ambitious in their view.

We seem dare to do this on the basis of words. The meanings of words are not as stable and definable as we once thought.

That when it comes to constructing some sort of elaborate ontology as thinkers have done in the past, language itself will always be insufficient when it comes to setting up some sort of ultimate set of parameters for the universe.

We seem to co-reject the tradition on the basis of the categories we used to define what a human being is. The terms we used to define ourselves are recent inventions to him.

Who are any of these philosophers throughout history? Who is Foucault for that matter? To make any sort of grand assertion about the nature of the way the world is or what it is to be a human being?

Now, the first step for these types of thinkers has often been to shine a light on these grand narratives of the past, and then deconstruct or unravel them and show them to be what they really are.

At which point the ideology or dogma associated with them will collapse out of the bottom.

We'll take whatever lessons we can from that process and the goal at that point will be to find a new way we can proceed with philosophy without falling into the same traps we have in the past, if that's even possible at all.

But the question we all need to ask ourselves right here.

Once you begin from the starting point of this postmodernist critique of the grand narratives of the past, do you think deconstruction and fragmentation is the only avenue a postmodernist thinker could possibly take moving forward?

It may seem like an easy question to answer. Like, of course, nothing's ever that reductive.

But it's worth mentioning there's some people out there, almost always people that have a very shallow or nonexistent reading of postmodern thinkers.

...