This is the second volume of a collection of papers written during the 1980s. Volume 1 is made up of papers that discuss themes and figures within analytic philosophy. In contrast, most of this volume is about Heidegger and Derrida. Part I is made up of four papers on Heidegger – the fruits of an abortive, abandoned attempt to write a book about him. Part II contains three papers on Derrida, together with a pendant piece that discusses the uses to which Paul de Man and his followers have put certain Derridean ideas.

Part III is more miscellaneous. Of the four papers in this part, the first and most ambitious is called “Freud and Moral Reflection.” It picks out and plays up certain aspects of Freud's work which fit in with Quine's and Davidson's picture of the self as a centerless web of beliefs and desires – a picture I employed in chapter 2 of my Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. The remaining three papers are discussions of the social theories and political attitudes of various contemporary figures (Habermas, Lyotard, Unger, Castoriadis, Foucault); these papers amplify the sociopolitical views presented in Part III of Volume 1.

In the remainder of this introduction, I shall offer some general remarks about the relation between the post-Nietzschean tradition of Franco-German thought which these essays discuss and the antirepresentationalist, pragmatist tradition within analytic philosophy discussed in Volume 1.

Heidegger and Derrida are often referred to as “postmodern” philosophers. I have sometimes used “postmodern” myself, in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as “distrust of metanarratives.” But I now wish that I had not.