ABSTRACT
Postmodern scepticism often appears in the guise of an attack on epistemology, the core discipline of modern philosophy. An influential body of opinion has it that nowadays we live in postmodern times and in these postmodern times there is no call for epistemology. According to Rorty, the reason why epistemology came to occupy the central place in modern philosophy is to be understood through appreciation of the foundationalist character of modern philosophy. Epistemology, it is widely supposed, needs to do just one thing to be successful; defeat the arguments which are directed at undermining our confidence in these tools, the arguments of the sceptic. The continuity between epistemology in modernity and in post-modernity should not be surprising if we follow Lyotard, rather than Rorty and Derrida, in understanding postmodernity as being continuous with modernity rattier than seeing it as breaking sharply with modernity.
