In this text, the philosopher Susan Haack deploys her analytic skills on some of the cultural and social debates of recent years: relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action, pragmatisms old and new, science, literature, the future of the academy and of philosophy itself. The text aims to get beyond fads, fashions, obfuscations and false dichotomies to the central and most essential questions - whether there is such a thing as truth, whether honest inquiry is possible or desirable, whether there is a real difference between knowledge and propaganda. There is, Haack argues; but serious inquiry is difficult and demanding, evidence can be ambiguous or misleading, and what passes for truth is sometimes false. Staking out the reasonable middle ground between fashionable extremes, the text explores how the terms of cultural debate have shifted. How did the sexist stereotypes deplored by old-fashioned feminists come to be celebrated as "women's ways of knowing"? How was the admirable goal of the tolerance of cultural diversity transformed into relativism or tribalism? How did we lose sight of the ways in which science differs from literature, and philosophy from both?
How did it come to be thought naive to care about truth or to value intellectual honesty? And why is pseudo-inquiry so ubiquitous in the present intellectual climate?
- ISBN10 0226311368
- ISBN13 9780226311364
- Publish Date 15 January 1999
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 15 June 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Chicago Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 234
- Language English