Search results for ""Author Christopher Norris""

In this latest collection of poems and verse-essays, Christopher Norris revisits many of the topics for which he is best known as a philosopher, literary theorist, and writer on music. Among them are the many-worlds metaphysics of Leibniz, the nature of subjective time-experience, the issue of poetic truth, the function of rhyme in poetry, the theory wars in literary studies, the augmented-fourth interval (or tritone), also known as the devil in music, and musical minimalism approached from a critical or cultural-diagnostic standpoint. There are also some shorter, more occasional pieces including an epithalamion (wedding-poem) for the poet's daughter, a semi-fictive double sestina about police infiltration of activist groups, a savagely bawdy polemic imagined as addressed by the ancient Greek satirist Archilochus to his ex-fiancee Neobule, and a number of shrewdly angled political poems with reference to events from the 1980s to the present. These pieces have the hallmark qualities of intellectual range, perceptive wit, and formal inventiveness that characterise Norris's verse-essays. They make a strong case for poetry as a vehicle for argument, dialogue, and open debate.

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We live in a world where questions of truth and of falsehood are left increasingly unattended. Such questions are often replaced by a relativism which allows any group the right to assert their values with impunity. Should, however, stories from an event such as the Holocaust be given equal truth status to neo-Nazi claims that it never happened? This book is a polemical warning against a too easy rejection of the standards of truth and value in the modern world, and is a further sortie in Christopher Norris's prolonged battle with the wilder side of postmodernism. Christopher Norris makes a timely reassessment of the cultural theorist Louis Althusser, and also makes a political case for Jacques Derrida whose "deconstruction" techniques are described as a useful tool when up against the rhetorical gestures of those theorists, such as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, who are trapped in the postmodern playpen. The book should be of interest to any student of contemporary philosophy, critical theory and politics, and should be a contribution to the debate that is currently dominated by conservative thinkers. Christopher Norris is the author of "The Deconstructive Turn", Jacques Derrida", "What's Wrong with Postmodernism" and "Uncritical Theory: Intellectuals, Politics and the Gulf War".

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This book offers a detailed account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of Spinoza's texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid-1960s to its latest "postmodern", neopragmatist or anti-theoretical phase. He examines the thought of Althusser, Macherey and Deleuze as well as others (including the new historicists) who have registered the impact of his pioneering work without any overt acknowledgement. On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the need for a riorous distinction between science (or "theoretical practice") and ideology (or the realm of lived experience subject to various forms of imaginary error of misrecognition). On the other, Deleuze makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories of whatever kind - Kantian, Marxist, Freudian, post structuralist - which always end up by imposing some abstract order of concepts and categories on the libidinal flux of "desiring production", or the "body-without-organs" of anarchic instinctual drives.

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Truth Matters is the first full-length introduction to response-dependence, a topic that has become a main focus of interest for philosophers across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas. The response-dependence claim, in brief, is to provide a 'third way' between the realist (or objectivist) conception of truth as always potentially transcending the limits of human ascertainment and the anti-realist (or verificationist) case that truth cannot possibly transcend those limits since then we could never acquire or manifest a knowledge of it. While setting out the issues clearly and concisely, Norris also provides some relevant background history to this current debate, including discussion of its sources and analogues in Plato, Locke, Kant and Wittgenstein. His book offers invaluable guidance for student readers in search of a reliable introductory survey of the field. Among those with a more specialist interest it may sometimes provoke disagreement, as when Norris argues that the response-dependence approach often goes along with a disguised anti-realist bias and hence fails to make good on its 'third-way' promise. However, its combination of wide-ranging coverage with clarity of focus and depth of philosophical treatment will be welcomed. Key Features: *Clear, accessible account of some complex philosophical issues; *First book-length study of the response-dependence debate; *Informative discussion of its pre-history in philosophers from Plato to Hume, Locke and Kant; *Aimed at readers seeking a reliable, well-informed introductory account while relevant to those with a more specialist knowledge of the topic.

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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.

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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 (and ethics) of activist social concern.

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This is a sustained critique of present-day academic philosophy combined with a practical agenda for change. Christopher Norris raises some basic questions about the way that analytic philosophy has been conducted over the past 25 years. In doing so, he offers an alternative to what he sees as an over-specialisation of a lot of recent academic work. Arguing that analytic philosophy has led to a narrowing of sights to the point where other approaches that might be more productive are blocked from view, he goes against the grain to claim that Continental philosophy holds the resources for a creative renewal of analytic thought. It draws on a wide range of examples to shine light on one topic: philosophy's current condition and how we can move beyond it. It addresses issues of interest to students and teachers of philosophy in both the analytic and the Continental traditions: speculative realism, the 'extended mind' hypothesis, experimental philosophy, the ontology of political song, linguistic philosophy, anti-realism and epistemological scepticism. It interrogates the analytical zeitgeist through a vigorous critique of the prevailing modes of thought.

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What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This collection, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates. Engaging with Spinoza’s insistence on the centrality of the passions as the site of the creative and productive forces shaping society, this collection critiques the impulse to transcendence and regimes of mastery, exposing universal values as illusory. Spinoza Now pursues Spinoza’s challenge to abandon the temptation to think through the prism of death in order to arrive at a truly liberatory notion of freedom. In this bold endeavor, the essays gathered here extend the Spinozan project beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy to encompass all forms of life-affirming activity, including the arts and literature. The essays, taken together, suggest that “Spinoza now” is not so much a statement about a “truth” that Spinoza’s writings can reveal to us in our present situation. It is, rather, the injunction to adhere to the attitude that affirms both necessity and impossibility. Contributors: Alain Badou, École Normale Supérieure; Mieke Bal, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis; Cesare Casarino, U of Minnesota; Justin Clemens, U of Melbourne; Simon Duffy, U of Sydney; Sebastian Egenhofer, U of Basel; Alexander García Düttmann, Goldsmiths, U of London; Arthur Jacobson, Yeshiva U; A. Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College; Michael Mack, U of Nottingham; Warren Montag, Occidental College; Antonio Negri; Christopher Norris, U of Cardiff, Wales; Anthony Uhlmann, U of Western Sydney.

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