Abstract

Aryeh Botwinick has made an ambitious attempt at a synthesis of postmodernist views. His study ranges widely among philosophical thinkers, among them Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Maimonides, Wittgenstein, Hobbes, Rawls, Nozick, and Michael Polanyi. Botwinick addresses political subjects as well, especially James Madison's thoughts on faction and Antonio Gramsci's on the operation of ruling class hegemony. At the heart of his work is the search for a postmodernist solution to a postmodernist problem: Botwinick is looking for a usable concept of community predicated on egalitarian assumptions but also insists on a subjective understanding of language and belief. He does not arrive at skepticism as an act of faith. Indeed, he relentlessly picks away at the arguments of other postmodernists identified with skeptical positions. Yet he himself never moves beyond a solipsistic world until he turns to the theory of tacit knowledge in the Hungarian scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. Botwinick uses Polanyi and, to a lesser extent, Wittgenstein, to create a "consistent" version of skepticism, one that does not assume foundations that go unrecognized and allows for the necessarily subjective character of knowing.