| "This
is an original, clearly argued analysis of crucial issues in the transition
from modernity to postmodernity."-Religious Studies Review
"This is a major contribution containing profound insights that
avoid skepticism and relativism and setting forth the limits and
failures of modern epistemology, particularly involving Descartes
and Kant."-Wilfried Ver Eecke, Georgetown University
Everyone knows that "postmodernism" implies pluralism, anti-foundationalism,
and, generally, a post-normative view of the self and reality. While
many embrace it, few bother to tell us what is wrong with modernity.
What are the problems that brought about its crisis and ultimate
demise as a philosophical and cultural movement? What are the lessons
for the postmodern movement that can be drawn from them?
James Mensch here explains why modernism failed as a viable philosophical
enterprise and how postmodernism must be understood if it is to
serve as a defensible intellectual project in its stead. The heart
of Mensch's argument is a reversal of the modernist view of the
unitary subject as a ground of epistemological and ethical normativity.
He substitutes for modernism a view, beholden to Aristotle but adapted
to fit our present age, that sees subjectivity as temporality in
a world where subject and object are interactive. The result is
a pluralism of forms of subjectivity corresponding to the different
modes of temporality brought about by the world. In a series of
analyses on the nature of knowing, Mensch shows how we can embrace
both the perspectivism of postmodernism while avoiding the skepticism
and relativism that have constantly threatened to undermine its
insights. |
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| James
Richard Mensch is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Francis
Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He is the author of The
Beginning of the Gospel of St. John: Philosophical Perspectives (Peter
Lang, 1992), and, most recently, After Modernity: Husserlian Reflections
on a Philosophical Tradition (SUNY Press, 1996). |
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