“Future generations will struggle to understand how philosophical reactionaries such as Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty and Foucault, working with concepts rummaged from the “basement of bourgeois thought,”27 came to exert such an unwarranted and dangerous influence in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. I would be very pleased if the lectures and essays in this volume that deal with philosophical issues help future scholars understand the political and social pathology of the postmodernist pandemic.”