The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity

Does the end of modernism signal the onslaught of some form of anarchistic nihilism, as some today proclaim? Or can the traditional guiding notions of philosophy–in particular, meaning, truth, and reality–be revitalized in a nonfoundational, postmetaphysical, decidedly postmodern way? The figures about whom G.B. Madison writes are active participants in this unfolding debate: Husserl, Gadamer, Hirsch, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Barthes, and Rorty. In a decidedly postmodern fashion, Madison also takes up such central themes as the nature of metaphysical thinking, metaphor, imagination, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the mind/body problem.