Abstract

Hicks’s impressive grasp of the history of philosophy over the past few centuries enables him to explain postmodernism by identifying its signposts. He lets sensitive analysis of the memorable episodes of post-modernism speak to the essential issues that drive it. His treatment of the importance of Kant’s skepticism in getting the postmodernist engine going down the track is especially instructive. However, Hicks understates, or perhaps does not see, that the origins of postmodernist skepticism are already in what he calls “modernism.” Postmodernists and historians of postmodernism often overlook this because they want to play on the device that modernism really is different in kind from post-modernism. And certainly the latter differs in its radicalization of modernist assumptions. But modernist assumptions nonetheless—whether one calls them “Enlightened” or not—are the remote reasons for post-modernism. Mortimer Adler made this point some years ago in his book, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, in which he argued that the seeds of radical irrationalism, epistemological relativism, and antihumanist nihilism were planted when Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume disconnected the intellect from real, extramental things and made ideas, states of intramental consciousness, the objects of knowledge. If anti-realism is implicit in modernism, then postmodernism is a working out of modernist assumptions, not a philosophical movement different in kind from modernist philosophies. Postmodernism unmasks modernism, making explicit and radical what is implicit and undeveloped.