 Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) was a French philosopher whose best known work—often to his chagrin—was his 1979 The Postmodern Condition. Written at the request of the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Quebec on the state of knowledge in the contemporary world, this work brought the term “postmodernism”, already in use in other fields, such as the arts and literature, to the forefront of debates in Western philosophy, especially when published in English in 1984. The book was more prescient than realized at the time, as described below, though soon critics of Continental philosophy used the term “postmodernism” to hold together a variety of thinkers often at odds with one another (Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and so on). These critics argued that postmodernists believed that were no such things as “facts”, only modes of discourse that forever block us from making truth claims about reality, and the term “postmodern” became a pejorative term to deride these thinkers as adhering to epistemological and moral nihilism. While Lyotard was surely interested in the postmodern loss of “metanarratives”—traditional means by which we order world—his works, especially after The Postmodern Condition, considered ways to think of justice after the loss of these metanarratives. In works such as Just Gaming (1979) and especially his masterwork, The Differend (1983), Lyotard offers not an “anything goes” relativism, but rather takes up the historical fact that after the Shoah, there is no longer a belief in the progress of history, à la G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) (and even more so today, when polls all over the West show that many believe the next generation will be worse off than the last) while there is also what Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) called a general “loss of authority” in traditional institutions. Hence both progressive and conservative political views are found flailing in diagnosing the problems of the political, especially when facing the devaluation of all values in consumer culture. The range of Lyotard’s works were not limited to diagnosing the politics of postmodernity, but also made important contributions to aesthetics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language, among other areas.