Although he is most widely known as the founder of postmodern theory, Jean-François Lyotard was an eclectic thinker who possessed a formidable knowledge of Kantian aesthetics, Surrealism, Judaism, paganism, Marxism, Freudianism, science, and...

Lyotard, Jean-FranÇois(1924–1998) Born in Versailles, France, on August 10, 1924, Jean-François Lyotard was educated in Paris. As a child, Lyotard wanted to be a monk, painter, historian, or novelist, but settled a career in...

French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), who was born in Vincennes, France, on August 10, was an originator of what became known as postmodernism. After teaching philosophy in secondary schools in France and Algeria, Lyotard...

The French philosopher Lyotard has become internationally famous for his work on post-modernity. In The Postmodern Condition (1979) he showed how the identification of knowledge with representation, characteristic of modern societies, reduces the...

Jean-François Lyotard (pronounced [ʒɑ̃ fʀɑ̃swa ljɔˈtaʀ]; August 10 1924 – April 21 1998) was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well-known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis...

Jean-François Lyotard's writing on politics conceives of political problems principally as problems of judgment. In his now famous account of the post-modern condition Lyotard identifies the defining feature of our age as the absence of any authoritative, uncontested criterion, out of a multiplicity of...

Humanism as a theme in Western civilization has at least two origins. In Greek philosophy, it was Protagoras who famously proclaimed that "man is the measure of all things." The precise meaning of this claim is still in dispute but it does suggest that...

In the following essay, referring to Freud and Lacan, Tomiche explores Lyotard's psychology of irreconcilables, unrepresentables, and irreducibles.

In the following excerpt, Pefanis traces Lyotard's career from Marxism to Postmodernism with an emphasis of his deconstruction of Marx and his valorization of libidinal intensities in Économie libidinale.

In the following essay, Benhabib traces the history and development of Lyotard's philosophy of language, and argues that it tends to justify a retreat from critical social judgments.