I have been studying continental philosophy for a few years now, mostly Kant, Hegel, Lacan and Heidegger. I think it's extremely interesting and rewarding and I recommend it to anyone who doesn't feel intellectually challenged. I read a book about Maurice Merleau-Ponty that included excerpts of his writing in both English and French, and I thought that the French was much clearer, even with my limited knowledge of the language, and it made me want to improve my French and learn German so that I can better understand what they're saying.
So foreign language is another barrier to entry that hasn't been mentioned yet. There are English translations, but often they aren't very good. My process for engaging with a philosopher is an iterative, multi-pass process - I start with several introductory texts or a biography before (very slowly) tackling a main text. At that point, I usually have a good idea about where the argument is going, but only a thin grasp of how we got there, so I go through the material once or twice more. This is complicated by the fact that these ideas don't stand on their own, they are part of a tradition, and it's not really possible to take one thinker and find out what he or she thinks, because it's filled with references to others. It's just not possible to pick up a main text and read it in a weekend and expect to get anything out of it - it's more like a lifetime project, something you'd add to a "Things to accomplish before I die" list. If "Learn French or German" is on there too, you have a head start.
One practical benefit is that reading a difficult text is like running with weights on. It feels like you're flying when you read something easier. And if you're looking for critiques or refutations of postmodernism specifically, continental philosophy is much more interesting than this link. Ironically, it's somewhat self-refuting, since in trying to critique the postmodernists, it unknowingly adopts an important (although distorted) postmodern point: the role of discourse in the production of power and authority. Although, of course, the author uses this to assert the superiority of his preferred rationalist, technocratic regime of truth. In other words, the claim is that postmodernism is an imposter, a bullshit pretender to the throne that Engineering should rightfully occupy. Postmodernists, under the influence of Derrida and Foucault, would say that this claim is "logocentric", a code word which ultimately means patriarchal, racist, colonialist, homophobic, etc. The demand that "postmodernism" present itself as a single well-defined and unified idea would also be seen in this light, which is probably why no postmodernists are here to defend themselves. To them, it's boringly obvious that software engineering is philosophically rooted in patriarchy.
So foreign language is another barrier to entry that hasn't been mentioned yet. There are English translations, but often they aren't very good. My process for engaging with a philosopher is an iterative, multi-pass process - I start with several introductory texts or a biography before (very slowly) tackling a main text. At that point, I usually have a good idea about where the argument is going, but only a thin grasp of how we got there, so I go through the material once or twice more. This is complicated by the fact that these ideas don't stand on their own, they are part of a tradition, and it's not really possible to take one thinker and find out what he or she thinks, because it's filled with references to others. It's just not possible to pick up a main text and read it in a weekend and expect to get anything out of it - it's more like a lifetime project, something you'd add to a "Things to accomplish before I die" list. If "Learn French or German" is on there too, you have a head start.
One practical benefit is that reading a difficult text is like running with weights on. It feels like you're flying when you read something easier. And if you're looking for critiques or refutations of postmodernism specifically, continental philosophy is much more interesting than this link. Ironically, it's somewhat self-refuting, since in trying to critique the postmodernists, it unknowingly adopts an important (although distorted) postmodern point: the role of discourse in the production of power and authority. Although, of course, the author uses this to assert the superiority of his preferred rationalist, technocratic regime of truth. In other words, the claim is that postmodernism is an imposter, a bullshit pretender to the throne that Engineering should rightfully occupy. Postmodernists, under the influence of Derrida and Foucault, would say that this claim is "logocentric", a code word which ultimately means patriarchal, racist, colonialist, homophobic, etc. The demand that "postmodernism" present itself as a single well-defined and unified idea would also be seen in this light, which is probably why no postmodernists are here to defend themselves. To them, it's boringly obvious that software engineering is philosophically rooted in patriarchy.