Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective1996

Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective offers answers to the questions, what is postmodernism? and what exactly are the characteristics of the modernism that postmodernism supercedes? This 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. From the science of things to the science of human beings to the grand social theorizing associated with Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx and Max Weber, Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective presents readings from the succession...