Readings for the topic. You can probably get by reading Wikipedia Entries and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entries, for the purposes of your debate. Start with the Hacking, then the SEP articles then Kuhn, then Feyerbend and any other interesting names that come up.
Thomas Kuhn- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Summary)
I wouldn’t call any of the above postmodernist. Hacking just discusses “The Science Wars” from sort of a pox on both their houses perspective. Postmodernists are on the extreme social constructionist end of the debate but the best arguments don’t come from there. Kuhn is classic and must read.
For general philosophy:
Descarte’s Meditations on First Philosophy. Read, Meditations 1, 2 and 6. Read the middle ones only if you enjoy exercises in futility (you’ll have to give Descartes the existence of God for #6 to make sense though).
David Hume Enquiry Concernign Human Understanding/Treatise of Human Nature Book One. Also, his critique of the Watchmaker argument if you haven’t already heard it from Dawkins.
Kant and Hegel say some smart important things but basically not enough to justify their length and obscurity. If you can find good second hand summaries and descriptions of their views, do that. Hegel does seem to be really crucial for postmodernism.
Thom missed a couple of postmodernist forerunners. Between, Marx and the pomos, there whole Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, Adorno and Horkheimer are still canon I think, especially Dialectic of Enlightenment. And more recently Habermas (who is not close to being a postmodernist and actually is worthwhile if you’re interested in political philosophy).
Postmodernists also take a lot from Freud and especially Lacan, for whom there are decent introduction out there. And then there is Derrida who really is a huge sack of bullshit. You could probably just wikipedia him and get the same out of it.
Contemporary analytic: Armstrong, McTaggart, Putnam, Quine, Frankfurt, Rawls, Nozick, Lewis, Parfit, a bunch more that will come to mind ten minutes after I publish this comment.
Postmodernism’s intellectual founding fathers: Hegel, the least comprehensible philosophy of the modern world, Freud, whose theories either make no predictions of have been falsified with few exceptions and Derrida who basically just did silly things with words.
Readings for the topic. You can probably get by reading Wikipedia Entries and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entries, for the purposes of your debate. Start with the Hacking, then the SEP articles then Kuhn, then Feyerbend and any other interesting names that come up.
Thomas Kuhn- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Summary)
Paul Feyerabend- Against Method (SEP Entry)
Ian Hacking- The Social Construction of What?
Some highly relevant SEP articles:
Social constuction
The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge
Social epistemology
I wouldn’t call any of the above postmodernist. Hacking just discusses “The Science Wars” from sort of a pox on both their houses perspective. Postmodernists are on the extreme social constructionist end of the debate but the best arguments don’t come from there. Kuhn is classic and must read.
For general philosophy:
Descarte’s Meditations on First Philosophy. Read, Meditations 1, 2 and 6. Read the middle ones only if you enjoy exercises in futility (you’ll have to give Descartes the existence of God for #6 to make sense though).
David Hume Enquiry Concernign Human Understanding/Treatise of Human Nature Book One. Also, his critique of the Watchmaker argument if you haven’t already heard it from Dawkins.
Kant and Hegel say some smart important things but basically not enough to justify their length and obscurity. If you can find good second hand summaries and descriptions of their views, do that. Hegel does seem to be really crucial for postmodernism.
Thom missed a couple of postmodernist forerunners. Between, Marx and the pomos, there whole Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, Adorno and Horkheimer are still canon I think, especially Dialectic of Enlightenment. And more recently Habermas (who is not close to being a postmodernist and actually is worthwhile if you’re interested in political philosophy).
Postmodernists also take a lot from Freud and especially Lacan, for whom there are decent introduction out there. And then there is Derrida who really is a huge sack of bullshit. You could probably just wikipedia him and get the same out of it.
Contemporary analytic: Armstrong, McTaggart, Putnam, Quine, Frankfurt, Rawls, Nozick, Lewis, Parfit, a bunch more that will come to mind ten minutes after I publish this comment.
Postmodernism’s intellectual founding fathers: Hegel, the least comprehensible philosophy of the modern world, Freud, whose theories either make no predictions of have been falsified with few exceptions and Derrida who basically just did silly things with words.