It has often been claimed in the history of philosophy that great thinkers have been badly served by their disciples. Plato’s genuine doctrines don’t resemble the historical construction known as “Platonism”, Aquinas is a more subtle and rigorous thinker than the Thomists, Hume more interesting than the positivists and so on. This claim is cuirendy deployed for certain thinkers who collectively bear the signifier “Postmodern”. It’s held that Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze et al., are more subtle, deep and dialectically agile than their disciples. In particular, those who regard these thinkers as philosophers maintain that the use to which they are put in other disciplines—literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, and so on, fails to convey the depth of the echt thinker.

Be that as it may, it is true that philosophical ideas percolate into other disciplines and have profound general cultural impact, and this is especially true of the so-called postmodern ideas. Theologians in particular have responded with a certain degree of alacrity to the postmodern clarion (probably because modernism proved barren ground for most of them). The kind of views articulated in theology serve also as a model of the way postmodernist views have been used in general in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not unusual for theologians to latch onto the latest philosophical fashion and use it with skill and ingenuity. The medieval theologians of Paris reacted to Aristotle and developed some of the most enduring intellectual works of the western tradition. The Cartesian revolution led to sustained theological reflection—a position still appearing as a bogey for novice theologians to sharpen their dialectical teeth on, or for more senior ones to dramatically unmask in their opponents.