The Poverty of Relativism

The Poverty of Relativism PDF Author: Raymond Boudon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The Poverty of Relativism is a timely and critical evaluation of a dominant trend in modern social science, evident in a range of intellectual movements from structuralism to post-modernism and social constructionism. Raymond Boudon shows how the pervasive spread of relativism in social thought threatens intellectual life by corroding the concept of objectivity, leading to a social and political nihilism in which even the knowledge generated by science itself is seen as no more than a belief system. With an incisive analysis that uses a wide range of illustrative examples from the social organisation of science to the question of what constitutes a work of art, Raymond Boudon examines the consequences of relativism across a number of issues that are key to the future of sociology and the social sciences.

The Poverty of Relativism

The Poverty of Relativism PDF Author: Raymond Boudon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Poverty of Relativism is a timely and critical evaluation of a dominant trend in modern social science, evident in a range of intellectual movements from structuralism to post-modernism and social constructionism. Raymond Boudon shows how the pervasive spread of relativism in social thought threatens intellectual life by corroding the concept of objectivity, leading to a social and political nihilism in which even the knowledge generated by science itself is seen as no more than a belief system. With an incisive analysis that uses a wide range of illustrative examples from the social organisation of science to the question of what constitutes a work of art, Raymond Boudon examines the consequences of relativism across a number of issues that are key to the future of sociology and the social sciences.

The Book of Absolutes

The Book of Absolutes PDF Author: William D. Gairdner
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773574697
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
A lively challenge to postmodern opinion that reveals satisfying and reliable certainties.

The Poverty of Multiculturalism

The Poverty of Multiculturalism PDF Author: Patrick West
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
ISBN: 9781903386460
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
The doctrine of multi-culturalism threatens the values of the Enlightenment, such as liberty, colour-blindness and equality of opportunity.

Moral Relativism

Moral Relativism PDF Author: Steven Lukes
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847653200
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Do we as humans have no shared standards by which we can understand each other? Do we truly have divergent views about what constitutes good and evil, harm and welfare, dignity and humiliation, or is there some underlying commonality that wins out? These questions show up everywhere, from the debate over female circumcision to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. They become ever more pressing in an age of mass immigration, religious extremism and the rise of identity politics. So by what right do we judge particular practices as barbaric? Who are the real barbarians? This provocative book takes an enlightening look at what we believe, why we believe it and whether there really is an irreparable moral discord between 'us' and 'them'.

Reclaiming Truth

Reclaiming Truth PDF Author: Christopher Norris
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822318729
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Truth, Christopher Norris reminds us, is very much out of fashion at the moment whether at the hands of politicians, media pundits, or purveyors of postmodern wisdom in cultural and literary studies. Across a range of disciplines the idea has taken hold that truth-talk is either redundant or the product of epistemic might. Questions of truth and falsehood are always internal to some specific language-game; history is just another kind of fiction; philosophy is only a kind of writing; law is a wholly rhetorical practice. In Reclaiming Truth, Norris critiques these fashionable trends of thought and mounts a specific challenge to cultural relativist doctrines in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political theory. Norris presents his case in a series of closely argued chapters that take issue with the relativist position. He attempts to rehabilitate the value of truth in philosophy of science by restoring a lost distinction between concept and metaphor and argues that theoretical discourse, so far from being an inconsequential activity, has very real consequences, particularly in ethics and politics. This debate has become skewed, he suggests, through the widespread and typically postmodern idea that truth-claims must always go along with a presumptive or authoritarian bid to silence opposing views. On the contrary, there is nothing as dogmatic--or as silencing--as a relativism that acknowledges no shared truth conditions for valid or responsible discourse. Norris also offers a timely reassessment of several thinkers--Althusser and Derrida among them--whose reception history has been distorted by the vagaries of short-term intellectual fashion. Reclaiming Truth will be welcomed by readers concerned with the uses and abuses of theory at a time when such questions are in urgent need of sustained and serious debate.

The Poverty of Structuralism

The Poverty of Structuralism PDF Author: Leonard Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317898257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The Poverty of Structuralism is the first in a sequence of volumes which examine in turn the basic ideas of Saussure, Marx and Freud, and analyse the way in which they have been developed and applied to art, culture and modern textual theory. The text offers a critical introduction to the structuralist foundations of modern literary theory. It gives an account of the way such foundations have been developed, twisted and distorted to become part of the language that contemporary literary and cultural theoreticians use. It also addresses some of the fundamental issues about language and society that are presupposed by the often difficult language of modern literary and cultural theory.

The Poverty of Postmodernism

The Poverty of Postmodernism PDF Author: John O'Neill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134817983
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The Poverty of Postmodernism rejects the current celebration of knowledge and value relativism. This is on the grounds that it renders critical reason and commonsense incapable of resisting the superifical ideologies of minoritarianism that leave the hard core of global capitalism unanalyzed. In this book John O'Neill examines the postmodern turn in the social sciences. From a phenomenological standpoint (Husserl, Merleau Ponty, Schutz, Winch), he challenges Lyotard's postrationalist reading of Wittgenstein and Habermas in order to defend commonsense reason and values that are constitutive of the everyday life-world. In addition he argues from the standpoint of Vico and Marx on the civil history of embodied mind that the post-rationalist celebration of the arts of superificiality undermines the recognition of the cultural debt each generation owes to past and post-generations. In a positive way O'Neill develops an account of the historical vocation of reason and of the charitable accountability of science to commonsense that is necessary to sustain the basic institutions of civic democracy.

Cosmic Chastity in an Age of Technocratic Lust: A Song of Three Popes

Cosmic Chastity in an Age of Technocratic Lust: A Song of Three Popes PDF Author: Jeremiah Barker
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666717029
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book arises from the conviction that the ways in which John Paul II and Benedict XVI were confused as allies with American conservativism is as misleading, unclear, and confusing as any misapprehension of Francis's genuine orthodoxy. As the author does not have a stake in reacting against a liberal Catholicism that he sees dying out anyway, the bigger threat, in his view, sociologically, for the North American church, is falling into a right-wing tribalism--and Francis resists precisely that. First Things editor R. R. Reno, highly critical of Francis, has called for a redemption of hints and suggestions of a cogent argument in the Francis message. Jeremiah Barker reappropriates Reno's call as a call to draw out or highlight what he takes to be the underlying rationale of the Francis message. That underlying rationale, he compellingly argues, is strikingly identical to that of the two previous popes. Barker, who has learned much from Reno, is in fact inspired by Francis's call and teaching, and it is the aim of this book to draw out what inspires him and to identify what he hopes Reno and fellow 'John Paul II Catholics' don't miss in the Francis message: the theological, ethical, and spiritual core of his social teaching, which Francis shares with that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Distant Strangers

Distant Strangers PDF Author: Judith Lichtenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521763312
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Lichtenberg argues for a practical and moral approach to reducing poverty, exploring concepts such as altruism, responding to criticisms of the effectiveness of aid, and asking whether and how the world's richer populations should assist. This book is for those interested in ethics, political theory, public policy and development studies.

The Problem of Relativism in the Sociology of (Scientific) Knowledge

The Problem of Relativism in the Sociology of (Scientific) Knowledge PDF Author: Richard Schantz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311032590X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This volume comprises original articles by leading authors – from philosophy as well as sociology – in the debate around relativism in the sociology of (scientific) knowledge. Its aim has been to bring together several threads from the relevant disciplines and to cover the discussion from historical and systematic points of view. Among the contributors are Maria Baghramian, Barry Barnes, Martin Endreß, Hubert Knoblauch, Richard Schantz and Harvey Siegel.