PNEUMA181POST-MORTEM EXISTENCE OF THE
SELF. See LIFE AFTER DEATH.
POSTMODERNITY, POSTMODERN-
ISM. A movement that emerged in the
1950s that went against commonly
accepted standards about the unity and
coherence of artistic and narrative styles.
It is seen as a reaction against naïve confi-
dences in progress as well as mistrust in
objective or scientific truths.
In philosophy, it abandons the modern
or Enlightenment confidence in objective
human knowledge through reliance on
reason in pursuit of realism. Modernity is
understood by postmodernists as offer-
ing a false, alienating, universal philoso-
phy that tries to capture the essence of
human life and value. They describe
such modern projects as offering a “meta-
narrative” that would capture truth from
a “God’s eye point of view.”
Postmodernists express doubt about
the possibility of universal, objective,
“God’s eye point of view” truth; they value
instead irony and the particularity of
language and life. Popular postmodern-
ists include Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard,
Haraway, and Rorty. These philosophers
critique the possibility of pure, disinter-
ested reason and the vision of a universal
foundation and progressive unfolding
of knowledge and morality. The question
postmodernists ask is whether reason can
establish a coherent and whole system of
thought. Postmodernists strive to pro-
mote an active non-forceful receptivity to
“the other,” no matter how different it
may appear.
Critics charge that the postmodernist
embrace of uncertainty, ambiguity, and
even the loss of identity, rationality, and
ideology, in service of their rejection of
the goal of impartial reflection, under-
mines the goal of identifying and protect-
ing human rights across cultures. Critics
have also raised the objection that post-
modernism is self-refuting. If no reasoning
is impartial, why think that postmodern-
ism is reasonable? If postmodernism is not
impartial, might it be simply partial or a
reflection of what might be called a bias
or prejudice?PNEUMA. Greek word meaning “spirit,”
akin to Hebrew ruach and Latin spiritus,
all of which also mean “breath.” In ancient
philosophy, pneuma refers to the breath
that animates a living body, and so not
just the physical breath but also the soul.
Anaximenes and the Pythagoreans
identify this with that which unites not
just the body but the whole cosmos. In
Aristotle, pneuma sometimes refers to
warm air or to heat, and other times it
refers to a substance that provides a link
between the material body and the psyche.
The Stoics took pneuma to be a combina-
tion of elemental air and fire. In all of
these ancient philosophers, there is some
analogy between the pneuma circulating
in the human body and the divine circu-
lating in and animating the cosmos.
The word is sometimes used in the