Invoking ideas drawn from Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty, postmodernists saw philosophy and science merely as activities to be judged in terms of their roles in, or effects on, human societies rather than by some transcendent standard of truth or falsehood.
Fischer, whose radio show claims to be "the home of muscular Christianity," called on his followers to "fight the darkness that we may return this nation to an unapologetic acknowledgement and embrace of the God of the Founders and his transcendent standard for human behavior as enshrined in the Ten Commandments".
Mr. Fish rejects all such transcendent standards.
Of course, Socrates's position brings along a suite of puzzles concerning the nature of these transcendent standards.
Whatever problems one might have making sense of eternal transcendent standards re-emerge when trying to make sense of an eternal transcendent being who might issue commands.
Moreover, if appealing to God is to solve the metaethical puzzle posed by Euthyphro, the account offered must not itself rely on, or presuppose, the sort of transcendent standards we have been attempting to explain.
In Armstrong's case Stephen Mumford summarises the position: no God, no non-spatial minds, no abstract entities beyond space-time, no Platonic forms or realm of universals; an austere ontology without transcendent universals, realm of numbers, transcendent standards of value, timeless propositions, non-existent objects, possibilia, possible worlds, abstract classes.
For him beauty was a preanalytic intuition that based standards for aesthetic judgment on a single, transcendent beauty resembling a "mystical Idea".
Dewey argued that the supposedly external, transcendent criteria for appraising conduct — ideals of the good, principles of right, standards of approval and disapproval — should rather be treated as hypotheses, as tools for uncovering additional data needed to appraise our valuings.
The same is true in "How to Train Your Dragon," a fairly standard child-friendly animated tale about being yourself, following your dreams and tolerating others that is made transcendent by the vertiginous and exhilarating spectacle of dragons on the wing.
