ABSTRACT
A narrative of contemporary continental philosophy from existentialism to postmodernism can usefully begin with the following remarks from Foucault: During the years 1945–65, there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. Existentialism presents us with a world where the individual is an isolated being, 'abandoned' into existence as Sartre puts it, for no apparent reason. Existentialism is a form of philosophy that strongly emphasises individual experience, taking issue with the Cartesian model of the individual human being as a conjunction of mind and body, with mind constituting the essence. One of the generalisations that can reasonably be made about recent continental philosophy is that it is deeply suspicious of essentialism, and that anti-essentialist bias certainly can be seen at work in Sartre. Postmodernism as conceived of by Lyotard is a rejection of universal theories, and the authoritarianism that, for Lyotard, inevitably accompanies them.
