Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 22, 2018

Metaphilosophy

Deborah K. Heikes
Pages 39-43

Philosophy’s Ambivalent Future

Philosophy today is undergoing a transformation away from modernism. The problem is that it is far from clear what this transformation is moving toward. I examine the transition from the premodern to the modern philosophical world and contrast it with our current situation. While the moderns were clear in their rejection of Aristotelian scholasticism and sure of their methods, in our own time we are neither clear about the extent to which we reject modernism nor our methodology moving forward. I argue that the uncertainty of the postmodern philosophical world is, in an important sense, a necessary consequence of the rejection of modernism itself.