The second part of the book is a critical history of western philosophy that starts with Kant and concludes with postmodern thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. According to Hart, these philosophers have remained confined to an ontology of violence in which Kantian antinomies—such as space and time, freedom and necessity—and Hegelian dialectics—in which reality is a conflict between nature and history—dominate philosophical reflection. Such thinkers have trivialized the concretely beautiful for the abstract sublime, thereby closing themselves off to the Christian narrative of beauty and peace. Hart is particularly skeptical of postmodern claims that we have reached “the end of metaphysics,” for the rhetorical claim of the end of metaphysics is simply the introduction of another sort of violent metaphysics.

Source: Against Postmodernity | The Russell Kirk Center