The last post? Post-postmodernism and the linguistic u-turn

Abstract

This paper adopts an autobiographical tone to review the linguistic turn and its demise at the hands Richard Rorty. Rorty, along with Continental philosophers like Lyotard rescued us from a philosophical delusion that we might achieve a neutral analysis resulting in linguistic and conceptual hygiene. This view became the basis of a highly influential doctrine in philosophy of education during the 1970s under R. S. Peters and the London school. I review the Wittgensteininspired movement and its conceptual affinities with postpositivism, postmodernism and postcoloniality as the dominating motifs of the age we have now passed beyond. © Michael A. Peters.This paper adopts an autobiographical tone to review the linguistic turn and its demise at the hands Richard Rorty. Rorty, along with Continental philosophers like Lyotard rescued us from a philosophical delusion that we might achieve a neutral analysis resulting in linguistic and conceptual hygiene. This view became the basis of a highly influential doctrine in philosophy of education during the 1970s under R. S. Peters and the London school. I review the Wittgenstein inspired movement and its conceptual affinities with postpositivism, postmodernism and postcoloniality as the dominating motifs of the age we have now passed beyond.