ABSTRACT
Jean-Francois Lyotard was born in Versailles and was educated in Paris at the prestigious Lycee Louis le Grand and the University of Paris. After completing his studies, he held a research post with France’s National Center for Scientific Research, which frequently grants research positions to philosophers as well as scientists. He was best known for the 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, a work commissioned by the Province of Quebec on the modest topic “A Report on Knowledge.” Richard Rorty was born in New York City then educated at Berkeley and Yale. Where Lyotard seems to enjoy being a postmodernist, Rorty claims nothing more than that he is a philosopher, explicitly in the modest American tradition of pragmatism. Michel Foucault, near the end of his life, took on a major, four-volume study of the history of sexuality. Published in 1976, the first volume represents an excellent summary of his social theory of power/knowledge in modernity.
