Discusses Derrida's writings on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud.

In this detailed study, Christopher Norris defends the kinds of arguments advanced by the early realist, Hilary Putnam. Norris makes a point of placing Putnam's work in a wider philosophical context, and relating it to various current debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. Much like Putnam, Norris is willing to take full account of opposed viewpoints while maintaining a vigorously argued commitment to the values of debate and enquiry.

This book offers a vigorous and constructive challenge to relativism by examining a wide range of anti-realist theories, and in response offering a variety of arguments amounting to a strong defence of critical realism in the natural and social sciences.

This book was written with a view to sorting our some of the muddles and misreadings - especially misreadings of Kant - that have charaterized recent postmodernist and post-structuralist thought. For these issues have a relevance, as Norris argues, far beyond the academic enclaves of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism. Thus he makes large claims for the importance of getting Kant right on the relation between epistemology, ethics and aesthetics; for pursuing the Kantian question 'What is Enlightenment?' as (...) raised in Foucault's late essays; or again, for recalling William Empson's spirited attempt to reassert the values of reason and truth against the orthodox 'lit crit' wisdom of his time. These are specialized concerns. But for better or worse it has been largely in the context of 'theory'- that capacious though ill-defined genre- that such issues have received their most scrutiny over the past two decades. As its title suggests, The Truth About Postmodernism disputes a good deal of what currently passes for advance theoretical wisdom. Above all it mounts a challenge to those fashionable doctrines - variants of the 'end-of-ideology' theme - that assimilate truth to some existing range of language-games, discourses, or in-place consensus beliefs. Norris's book will be welcomed for its clarity of style, its depth of philosophical engagement, and its refusal to endorse the more facile varieties of present-day textualist thought. It will also serve as a timely reminder that the 'politics of theory' cannot be practised in safe isolation from the politics of activist social concern. (shrink)

In What's Wrong with Postmodernism Norris critiques the "postmodern-pragmatist malaise" of Baudrillard, Fish, Rorty, and Lyotard. In contrast he finds a continuing critical impulse--an "enlightened or emancipatory interest"--in thinkers like Derrida, de Man, Bhaskar, and Habermas. Offering a provocative reassessment of Derrida's influence on modern thinking, Norris attempts to sever the tie between deconstruction and American literary critics who, he argues, favor endless, playful, polysemic interpretation at the expense of systematic argument. As he explores leftist attempts to arrive (...) at an accommodation with postmodernism, Norris addresses the politics of deconstruction, the issue of men in feminism, Habermas' quarrel with Derrida, narrative theory as a hermeneutic paradigm, musical aesthetics in relation to literary theory, and various aspects of postmodern debate. A chapter on Stanley Fish brings several of these topics together and offers a generalized statement on the function of current criticism. (shrink)

'Uncritical Theory' is a timely challenge to much of what passes for radical thinking in an age of postmdern commodity culture.

Taking his cue from Wallace Steven's claim that poetry now replaces religion as “life's redemption” and Heidegger's insistence that “the distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘poetical’ cannot be applied to philosophical texts”, Richard Rorty celebrated the poetic potential of philosophy. In this prologue, Christopher Norris pays Rorty the compliment of taking his views on the nature and importance of poetry seriously enough to offer an engaging commentary on Rorty's work in poetic form.

This essay presents a long, detailed, in many ways critical but also appreciative account, of David Bloor’s recent book The Enigma of the Aerofoil. I take that work as the crowning statement of ideas and principles developed over the past four decades by Bloor and other exponents of the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of scientific knowledge. It therefore offers both a test-case of that approach and a welcome opportunity to review, clarify and extend some of the arguments brought against (...) it by critical realists. This purpose is particularly well served by Bloor’s having here assembled such a wealth of scientific, historical, political and socio-cultural data concerning one specific, very crucial period of research into theories of aerodynamic lift. His book thus provides an exceptionally useful point of engagement for anyone seeking to adjudicate these issues from a critically angled but engaged and constructive standpoint. (shrink)

Presents a novel interpretation of Schelling's philosophy by way of his reading and critique of Spinoza.

This book is concerned chiefly with issues in epistemology, philosophical semantics and philosophy of science. It defends a causal-realist approach to theories and explanations in the natural sciences and a truth-based propositional semantics for natural language derived from various sources, among them unusually in this context the work of William Empson. It argues against various forms of anti-realist doctrine with regard to both the truth-claims of science and the construal of intentions, meanings and beliefs in the process of linguistic understanding. (...) His book will be welcomed for its vigorous arguments and notable clarity of style. It will be of particular interest to teachers and students in philosophy, critical theory, science studies and the history of ideas. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate Larry Alan Busk’s critique of contemporary democratic theorists and contemporary “democratic” politics in Democracy in Spite of the Demos in the context of Carl Schmitt’s critique of modern democracy. I argue that Busk shares Schmitt’s general conception of democracy and of the dangers attending any appeal to it. Though Busk presents Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as alternatives to the current crop of democratic theorists, I demonstrate that Marcuse fell prey to the most significant of (...) the paradoxes and ambivalences that Schmitt prognosticated. Adorno, I argue, is less unsteady an ally, but one that stays further back from politics than Busk evidently wishes. In the end, Busk’s Schmittian critique of democracy and democratic theory extends further than he himself suggests and reveals, not to a solution to our problems, but a new way of understanding them and their severity. (shrink)

: In the Aristotelian tradition, politics is a matter of public deliberation over questions of justice and injustice. The Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been uniformly hostile to this notion, and it has instead promoted a jingoistic politics of self‐assertion by an America largely identified with the executive branch of its government. This is doubly disturbing, as the executive branch has sought to free itself from international law, multinational commitments, and domestic judicial regulation, (...) even as it has sought to validate itself by demonizing its enemies. This essay draws out the disturbing echoes here of Carl Schmitt's work of the 1920s, in particular of Schmitt's conception of the sovereign as the ungrounded ground of the law and the political as the site of mortal conflict between friend and enemy. The essay argues that Schmitt's position in the twenties, for all of its evident problems, is superior to that of Bush, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft in at least two senses: Schmitt condemns the idea of waging war for profit and recognizes that such wars will often be disguised as moral crusades waged against the “inhuman”; and he acknowledges that claiming to fight a war for humanity denies one's enemies their humanity, leaving them open to torture and even extermination. (shrink)

S B Brooke-Norris; Is School Enough? A Critique of Langford’s Idea of Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 227–.

This paper addresses the question of whether all that unites the main parts of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—the liberty principle, the defense of free discussion, the promotion of individuality, and the claims concerning individual competence about one’s own good—is a general concern with individual liberty, or whether we can say something more concrete about how they are related. I attempt to show that the arguments of On Liberty exemplify Mill’s institutional design approach set out in Considerations of Representative Government (...) and related works. Mill’s approach reflects both his debt to Bentham and his own progressive development of the utilitarian tradition. The paper proceeds by setting out the elements of Mill’s institutional designs and then showing that On Liberty neatly applies them, thereby clarifying the structure of the arguments of On Liberty. (shrink)

William Norris Clarke, S.J., one of the leading Thomist scholars in the United States, came to the Philippines recently and delivered a series of lectures in the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Santo Tomas on various philosophical topics inspired by the thought of St. Thomas. Fr. Clarke is now a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy in Fordham University. He was co-founder and editor (l961-85) of the International Philosophical Quarterly and is the author of some 60 articles, plus (...) the following books: The Philosophical Approach to God, The Universe as Journey, Person and Being, Explorations in Metaphysics: Being—God—Person, and The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Fall, 2000).He continues to fulfill his mission of propagating the thoughts of St. Thomas—-the “creative retrieval of St. Thomas,” as he puts it—-in and out of the U.S.An brief excerpt from this interview was originally published in Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture1/3, 1997. (shrink)

In the Aristotelian tradition, politics is a matter of public deliberation over questions of justice and injustice. The Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been uniformly hostile to this notion, and it has instead promoted a jingoistic politics of self‐assertion by an America largely identified with the executive branch of its government. This is doubly disturbing, as the executive branch has sought to free itself from international law, multinational commitments, and domestic judicial regulation, even (...) as it has sought to validate itself by demonizing its enemies. This essay draws out the disturbing echoes here of Carl Schmitt's work of the 1920s, in particular of Schmitt's conception of the sovereign as the ungrounded ground of the law and the political as the site of mortal conflict between friend and enemy. The essay argues that Schmitt's position in the twenties, for all of its evident problems, is superior to that of Bush, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft in at least two senses: Schmitt condemns the idea of waging war for profit and recognizes that such wars will often be disguised as moral crusades waged against the “inhuman”; and he acknowledges that claiming to fight a war for humanity denies one's enemies their humanity, leaving them open to torture and even extermination. (shrink)

This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedagogical and experiential learning models as well as provocative new paradigms of their own to help prepare leaders and reinforce leadership effectiveness.

Metaphysicians go on busily doing metaphysical thinking all over the world, and apparently with a modicum of self-assurance that they are not talking nonsense or pursuing an illusory will-of-the-wisp. Yet other philosophers of empirical, analytical, phenomenological, or other turns of mind seem to have more and more difficulty in understanding just how metaphysicians give meaning and positive content to the vast abstract concepts by which they seek to describe and explain the entire spectrum of reality extending far beyond present or (...) perhaps even possible human experience. Since there is no way of gaining direct insight into dimensions of reality beyond human experience, and since in order to be applied to the whole range of reality these concepts must abstract from purely human experience, it is hard for them to see—and it is a serious problem in itself—how these all-embracing terms can be anything more than empty, formal, verbal symbols or conceptual constructions, with no positive existential content describing reality itself across its whole spectrum. Even the metaphysician himself, though when left alone he may have a sure sense of how to do metaphysical thinking fruitfully, when questioned to explain and justify what he is doing, and is convinced is worth doing, can feel embarrassed and struck dumb as to how to articulate and justify the principles behind the procedures he is following. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett once invited us to consider super-Martians who were highly advanced scientifically yet lacked all intentional concepts. They spoke the language of austere physics and were capable of perceiving and describing the world at the micro-level. If such beings could accurately report happenings in their environment, make predictions, and generally live out their lives wholly within the scientific image, what would they be missing, Dennett wondered, by virtue of lacking intentional concepts? Dennett’s answer was that they would miss out (...) on various higher level patterns describable by way of mentalistic and semantic vocabulary. (shrink)

Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on the (...) computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input. (shrink)

This article addresses the long-standing problem of how to understand Mill’s famous harm principle in light of his failure to specify what counts as “harm” in On Liberty. I argue that standard accounts restricting “harm” to only certain negative consequences fail to do justice to the text, and that this fact forces us to rethink Mill’s defense of individual liberty. I then offer a new account of that defense in which “harm” is understood in an expansive sense, despite apparent problems (...) for such a view. (shrink)

Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on the (...) computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input. (shrink)

We show in this paper that some expressions indicating source of evidence are part of propositional content and are best analyzed as special kind of epistemic modal. Our evidence comes from the Japanese evidential system. We consider six evidentials in Japanese, showing that they can be embedded in conditionals and under modals and that their properties with respect to modal subordination are similar to those of ordinary modals. We show that these facts are difficult for existing theories of evidentials, which (...) assign evidentials necessarily widest scope, to explain. We then provide an analysis using a logical system designed to account for evidential reasoning; this logic is the first developed system of probabilistic dynamic predicate logic. This analysis is shown to account for the data we provide that is problematic for other theories. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to push back against the tendency to emphasize Mill’s break from Bentham rather than his debt to him. Mill made important advances on Bentham’s views, but I believe there remains a shared core to their thinking—over and above their commitment to the principle of utility itself—that has been underappreciated. Essentially, I believe that the structure of Mill’s utilitarian thought owes a great debt to Bentham even if he filled in that structure with a richer (...) conception of human nature and developed it in more liberal directions. This commonality is revealed, in particular, in Mill’s own institutional designs and practical reform proposals in Considerations on Representative Government and related writings. If this is right, then the tendency of interpreters to highlight their differences rather than their similarities has been to the detriment of both Mill and Bentham scholarship, and so to our understanding of the rise of liberal utilitarianism. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview Alan Norrie discusses how he became involved with Critical Realism, his work on Dialectical Critical Realism, and responses to it amongst the Critical Realist communi...

A comprehensive draft overview of John Stuart Mill's public life and philosophy, including discussion of: 1. A System of Logic. – 2. The Greatest Happiness Principle. – 3. Progress, Liberty, and Democracy. – 4. Equality. – 5. India and Empire. – 6. Distribution, Socialism, and Sustainability.

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

We invited five Cavell scholars to write on this topic. What follows is a vibrant exchange among Paola Marrati, Andrew Norris, Jörg Volbers, Cary Wolfe and Thomas Dumm addressing the question whether, in the contemporary political context, Cavell’s skepticism and his Emersonian perfectionism amount to a politics at all.

Our commentary summarises the current understanding of how testosterone can be used as a mechanism to link quality to external traits potentially used in sexual signalling, particularly female choice. Testosterone-dependent traits may reveal male's status to rivals and immunocompetence to females. We highlight some interesting unanswered questions and suggest that cross-disciplinary collaboration would help solve them.

It is common to hear that deep ecology “has reached its logical conclusion and exhausted itself” in a vacuous anthropomorphism and absurd nonanthropocentrism. These conclusions should be rejected. Properly understood, neither objection poses a serious problem for deep ecology so much as for the ethic of “ecological holism” which some philosophers—wrongly—have taken to arise from deep ecology. Deep ecology is not such an ethic, but is best understood as an aesthetically articulated conception of what, following Robinson Jeffers, may be called (...) “Wild Mind,” and such a Wild Mind is characterized—not criticized and condemned—by just that anthropomorphism and nonanthropocentrism critics focus on when they attack the ethic of ecological holism. (shrink)