This seventh installment of our “Postmodern epistemology series” will quickly summarize the main features the so-called transitional period between modernity and postmodernity.

Summary of Transition Period

In summary, even in the transitional figures we have chosen to survey we can see how highly indebted and concessive they are to Kant’s basic epistemological framework. Either in appropriating it or in trying to overcome it they show themselves to be his disciples, willingly or unwillingly. But in contradistinction to the modern figures we surveyed, we also recognize new developments in the transitional period eventually leading to postmodernism.

For example, there is a renewed interest in Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian historicism seems to have been a commonly shared philosophy of history. According to Hegel (1770-1831), there is no objective way to determine which of many theories and views of truth on any given question is right. What we have is not absolute truth but in any discipline we may find the facts about who has held what “truth” when and why. For Hegel, philosophy is the history of philosophy. This view of truth as historically determined has of course been willingly appropriated by postmodern thinkers. It mainly surfaces in the so-called “New Historicism.”
Kierkegaard’s turn to the subject (subjectivism or existentialism), Nietzsche’s nihilism, aestheticism and relativism (or perspectivism), and Heidegger’s existentialist Dasein (which marked the opposition to abstract being and a renewed antimetaphysical philosophy) are all motifs that we will meet again and again in postmodern thought.