This is a book as stated in the title on postmodernism. Postmodernism rejects medieval philosophy based principally on tradition, faith and mysticism (about 300 BCE to 1450 ADE) and modern philosophy represented primarily by enlightenment. Because enlightenment was a resurrection of the Socrates method or classical philosophy based on reason as advanced by the SPA (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) group, postmodernism’s rejection of enlightenment also concurrently rejects classical philosophy. Both classical and medieval philosophies are grouped as premodern philosophies.
According to the author, postmodernism concluded that both medieval philosophy’s faith and modern philosophy’s reason run out of steam and replaces enlightenment’s natural realism with anti-realism; reason and experience with linguistic social subjectivism; individual identity and autonomy with race, sex, and class groupism; the fact that human interests are fundamentally harmonious and tend toward mutually beneficial interaction with conflict and oppression; individualism in markets and politics with communalism, solidarity, and egalitarian restraints; science and technology with suspicion and hostility. The author tells us that postmodern philosophy seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change and postmodernism is an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power.
The enlightenment (resurrection of reason) was the best thing that happened to society after centuries of darkness following faith’s overwhelming triumph over reason. Postmodernism’s attack on enlightenment is therefore untenable and taking society to a situation possibly worse than the age of darkness. During the age of darkness, people were just obedient to authorities, but postmodernism is likely to lead us to age of conspiracies which could both individually and collectively be source of confusion. If religion was the opium of the masses, according to Marx, postmodernism would be more so in many ways.