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Thanks for the ping, KC. I see Hank is firing off these articles, ready and stacked, before I could even finish responding to the first paragraph. This much is good: "Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality." I can go along with that until I ask what exactly is this "assumed certainty" they are reacting against? And then I see them swinging the pendulum: if I can't have all for certain, I'll have nothing for certain. That's obviously a mistake; so much for the postmodernist of that kind. As for Hume, he did understood a particular problem: "The will of God is the sole real foundation for the existence of the world. The divine will is something. The existing world is something quite different. Yet the one is posited by the other [A Treatuse of Human Nature. So Hume was concerned with how the world of ideas related to the world of concrete things. It's mind and matter. And if it's mind and matter, it will be mind over matter, or matter over mind. What he really wanted to say is that what the mind thinks is not what the world is. The connections we make in logical thinking does not translate into the connections occuring in physical reality. Hume, like Descartes before him, is reacting against the doubtful certitudes of metaphysicians and theologians. The result, like Descartes before him, is to split the world in two: a world of the mind and a world of things. It was inevitable: either split it in two, dismiss the one for the other, or proclaim them identical (Protagoras). This reminds me of one of the very first exchanges I had with Hank. The solution--to go miles ahead--is that only in God is essence and existence identical (Aquinas). That means Plato is OK: we hang in the balance, not knowing nothing and not knowing all. I don't think Hume liked that. He hated those English druids who would keep the rules secret and unwritten. Well, I'm having difficulty getting past the first paragraph. I notice Beckett has given the appropriate caveat.