A Postmodern Quiz

Answer: Jean Baudrillard - "Simulacra and Simulations" (1985)

All these texts deal with simulations in different ways, but the first two novels never used the term 'simulacrum.' Baudrillard argued that everything has now become copies of a copy with no original copy.

Answer: Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard's "Simulations and Simulacra" was used as one of the main themes in "The Matrix."

Answer: Philip K. Dick

It is from the novel "VALIS" (1982). Philip K. Dick has been heralded as a John the Baptist of the postmodern age because his plot twists involve twists in reality.

Answer: Walter Truett Anderson

Anderson argued that in the global village where we have instant access to innumerable beliefs from around the world, we have come to realize the relativity of what we think.

Answer: Jacques Derrida

Derrida is father of deconstruction which has become popular in literary studies; multiculturalism tends to leave out Derrida's last step.

Answer: Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard wrote "The Postmodern Age" (1979) in which he argued that what characterizes our age is the collapse of the old beliefs in metanarratives.

Answer: Michel Foucault

While Bentham came up with the idea and term 'panopticism,' Foucault used the idea as a schema for viewing the modern age in "Discipline and Punish" (1975).

Answer: Irving Kristol

Against the self-image of its followers, Drury has shown that neo-conservatism is postmodern in that Strauss thought there was no final truth outside of Plato's cave. Kristol argued that religion was important for channeling the behaviour of the masses in predictable ways.

He argued that we could protect society from disintegration through a 'double standard of truth' between the wise who could live with the brutal truth and the foolish who needed to accept their beliefs in order to go on with their work without being interrupted by endless unanswerable questions that undermine their way of life. 'Reality enforcement' is the attempt to use all of the resources at society's disposal to direct consensus reality and eliminate deviance.

Answer: Frederich Nietzsche

Nietzsche went against the philosophical tradition in arguing that impersonal theory was the outcome of personal bias, or moral values.

Answer: Martin Heidegger

Dasein was a projection towards its potential future. Life is completed in death, but death, although inevitable, is usually something that happens in-the-world to someone else. We never see our own death because we don't live beyond it. However, we can still make it real for ourselves on a personal level rather than theoretically, to view our life as a narrative whole with death as our ultimate possibility and end; no one else can die for you and it is final.

Modal logic adds to classical logic the non-truth functional operators necessity and possibility, which Kripke defined in terms of possible worlds. This is compatible with intuitionistic logic that states in order to keep consistency we must accept that some statements may be neither true nor false until proven otherwise, until then they remain an open possibility. While Heidegger agreed that from necessity we could infer existence and from existence we could infer possibility, he denied the validity of a corresponding hierarchy of value to these categories and made possibility important to the existence of Being-in-the-world.