Christopher Norris

Alain Badiou's Being and Event is the most original and significant work of French philosophy to have appeared in recent decades. It is the magnum opus of a thinker who is widely considered to have re-shaped the character and set new terms for the future development of philosophy in France and elsewhere. This book has been written very much with a view to clarifying Badiou's complex and demanding work for non-specialist readers. It offers guidance on philosophical and intellectual context, key themes, reading the text, reception and influence; and further reading

"What is a musical work? What are its identity-conditions and the standards (if any) that it sets for a competent, intelligent, and musically perceptive act of performance or audition? Can works be thought of as possessing certain attributes, structural features, or intrinsically valuable qualities that might always elude even the sharpest-eared listener?" "These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology and debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the case for a 'qualified Platonist' approach that would respect the relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement whilst leaving room for the 'listener's share' - or the phenomenology of musical experience - in so far as those works necessarily depend for their realization from one hearing to the next upon certain humanly salient modes of perceptual and cognitive response."--BOOK JACKET.

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"Christopher Norris challenges the view that there is no room for productive engagement between mainstream analytic philosophers and thinkers in the post-Kantian continental line of descent. On the contrary, he argues, this view is simply the product of a limiting perspective that accompanied the rise of logical positivism." "Norris reveals the various shared concerns that have often been obscured by parochial interests or the desire to stake out separate philosophical territory. He examines the problems that emerged within the analytic tradition as a result of its turn against Husserlian phenomenology and its outright rejection of what came to be seen as a merely "psychologistic" approach to issues of meaning, knowledge, and truth."--BOOK JACKET.

"Deconstruction has been widely and damagingly misunderstood. In this provocative new book, Christopher Norris challenges the prevalent idea that deconstruction is merely a more specialized philosophical offshoot of these various trends and cultural fashions grouped under the label of 'postmodernism'."--Bloomsbury Publishing Deconstrution has been widely and damagingly misunderstood. In this provocative new book, Christopher Norris challenges the prevalent idea that deconstruction is merely a more specialized philosophical offshoot of these various trends and cultural fashions grouped under the label of 'postmoderism'

Discusses the application of deconstructionist theories and criticism to the visual arts, and considers its relation to Western metaphysics.

Truth, Christopher Norris reminds us, is very much out of fashion at the moment - whether at the hands of politicians, media pundits, or purveyors of postmodern wisdom in cultural and literary studies. Across a range of disciplines the idea has taken hold that truth-talk is either redundant or the product of epistemic might. Questions of truth and falsehood are always internal to some specific language-game; history is just another kind of fiction; philosophy is only a kind of writing; law is a wholly rhetorical practice. In Reclaiming Truth, Norris critiques these fashionable trends of thought and mounts a specific challenge to cultural relativist doctrines in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political theory.

This book was written with a view to sorting out some of the muddles and misreadings - especially misreadings of Kant - that have characterized recent post-modernist 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 intensive scrutiny over the past two decades. As its title suggests, The Truth About Postmodernism disputes a good deal of what currently passes for advanced 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.

"Shortly after the cessation of hostilities, Jean Baudrillard published an article entitled "The Gulf War Has Not Taken Place," arguing that the conflict had been a "hyperreal" event, a product of superinduced media illusion and saturation TV coverage. Moreover, there was something like a duty to abandon any belief in its real-world occurrence, since in Baudrillard's view "the true belligerents are those who thrive on the ideology of the truth of this war."". "It is in response to Baudrillard and other proponents of the so-called postmodern condition that Christopher Norris has written this extended essay. He argues that their stance is both politically disabling and philosophically confused; that it rests on a wholly unwarranted skepticism with regard to the claims of enlightened critique; that there exist more cogent alternative theories of truth, language, ideology, and representation; and that postmodernism is best understood as a symptom of the deep cultural malaise that marked many responses to the Gulf War.". "Norris's book combines a vigorous critique of these ideas with a strong counterargument grounded in the values of reasoned inquiry and open exchange. He offers incisive commentary on the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault, and other influential French theorists and on the American neopragmatist school represented by Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. While careful to remark the differences between them, Norris finds many of these thinkers adopting an "end-of-ideology" rhetoric that has also been revived by Francis Fukuyama and other celebrants of United States hegemony in the guise of a "New World Order."". "Aligning himself most closely with Habermas, Chomsky, Eagleton, and the tradition of enlightened dissident critique, Norris here offers an impassioned defense of the modern intellectual's continuing role as critic of real-world politics and government. Uncritical Theory is a timely challenge to much of what passes for radical thinking in an age of postmodern commodity culture."--BOOK JACKET.