ABSTRACT

This comprehensive reader chronicles the western engagement with the nature of knowledge during the past four centuries while providing the historical context for the postmodernist thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty and Hayden White, and the challenges their ideas have posed to our conventional ways of thinking, writing and knowing.

part |113 pages

The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment Thought

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

chapter |2 pages

Francis Bacon

chapter |1 pages

René Descartes

chapter |1 pages

John Locke

chapter |1 pages

Adam Smith

chapter |1 pages

David Hume

chapter |1 pages

Gordon S. Wood

chapter |1 pages

Immanuel Kant

chapter |2 pages

Marquis de Condorcet

chapter |1 pages

Ernst Cassirer

part |121 pages

Nineteenth-Century Social Theory

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

chapter |1 pages

Alexis de Tocqueville

chapter |1 pages

Karl Marx

chapter |9 pages

Karl Marx (1847): The German Ideology

chapter |2 pages

Friedrich Nietzsche

chapter |2 pages

Max Weber

chapter |1 pages

Norman Birnbaum

part |125 pages

Challenges to Nineteenth-Century Theory

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

chapter |1 pages

John Dewey

chapter |2 pages

Ruth Benedict

chapter |15 pages

Ruth Benedict (1934): Patterns of Culture

chapter |2 pages

Claude Lévi-Strauss

chapter |1 pages

Clifford Geertz

chapter |2 pages

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

chapter |2 pages

Thomas Kuhn

chapter |1 pages

Alasdair Maclntyre

chapter |1 pages

Paul Ricoeur

part |104 pages

Postmodernist Thought

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

chapter |2 pages

Hayden White

chapter |2 pages

Michel Foucault

chapter |2 pages

Jacques Derrida

chapter |1 pages

Richard Rorty

chapter |1 pages

Cornel West

part |68 pages

Responding to Postmodernism

chapter |4 pages

Introduction

chapter |1 pages

David Harvey

chapter |1 pages

Jürgen Habermas

chapter |1 pages

Craig Calhoun

chapter |1 pages

Seyla Benhabib