Abstract

In a range of path-breaking publications that shaped his engagement with educational theory Paul Smeyers sympathetically investigated the claims and ‘atmosphere’ of postmodernism. In this chapter I investigate the backlash against postmodernism that holds it responsible for ‘post-truth politics,’ and of promoting a cynical attitude to truth and facts. I argue for an intellectual history of truth in which it is contested, not only in Continental tradition and in what some have called postmodernism, but also in the analytic tradition. I explore these issues through a reading of Wittgenstein’s place and role in the history of analytic philosophy and by investigating how he moves away from a notion of truth grounded in a form foundationalism in the Tractatus to embrace a form of anti-foundationalism in the Investigations and On Certainty.