ABSTRACT
Forgive my name-dropping but, in 1995, I regularly shared a bus with Paul Ricoeur, he as an eminent keynote presenter and me a forgettable parallel presenter at a Philosophy Conference at Saint Petersburg University. By chance, we were staying in a distant hotel so we had many chances to chat. I asked him once if postmodernism was alive and well in France; his answer was along the lines that it never was: ‘it is a fad!’ I was taken aback! It was after all around the time that any self-respecting philosopher needed to be a postmodernist, or so it seemed in education circles. Ricoeur suggested I should read Habermas on postmodernism, which surprised me because I had accepted the critique that positioned Habermasian structuralism as inherently opposed. Ricoeur was seeing things differently, suggesting that Habermas perhaps understood postmodernism’s history and essence better than most, including many who labelled themselves thus. I subsequently did as instructed.
