Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Philosophical Haiku

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)

by Terence Green

Grand Truth is interred,
Multiplicity sovereign.
Charlatan or sage?

Seeking to rival the incomprehensibility achieved by many twentieth century Anglo-American philosophers through their use of mathematics and formal logic, twentieth century European philosophers adopted the more straightforward approach of simply being incomprehensible. The champion of them all was Jean-François Lyotard, the evangelist of postmodernism. He wrote as if he believed himself to be a divine oracle, and his minions have tended to write in the same impenetrable way ever since.

…