ABSTRACT
It is a relative commonplace, in the political and international theory of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, to talk of the political and philosophical worlds as being ‘post-metaphysical’. While the idea of ‘post-metaphysical thinking’ is most obviously associated with Habermas, 2 other influential contemporary thinkers have also argued that key aspects of the contemporary condition can be best characterized as ‘post-metaphysical’. This would be true, for instance, of most post-structural thought and of the thought of the late Richard Rorty, who described a post-metaphysical culture as one where:
what is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one’s thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one’s time and place – has dried up and blown away. It would be a culture in which people thought of human beings as creating their own life-world, rather than as being responsible to God or ‘the nature of reality,’ which tells them what kind it is. 3
