Fordham University Press
Sometimes Always True
About this book
Sometimes Always True aims to resolve three connected problems. First, we need an undogmatic pluralist standpoint in political theory, metaphysics, and epistemology. But genuine pluralism suffers from the contradiction that making room for fundamental differences in outlook means making room for outlooks that exclude pluralism.
Second, philosophy involves reflecting on the world and meaning as a whole, yet this means adopting a vantage point in some way outside of meaning.
Third, our lived experience of the sense of our lives similarly undermines its own sense, as it involves having a vantage point in some way wholly outside ourselves.
In detailed engagement with, among others, Davidson, Rorty, Heidegger, Foucault, Wilde, and gender and sexuality theory, the book argues that these contradictions are so thoroughgoing that, like the liar’s paradox, they cancel the bases of their own meaning. Consequently, it argues, they resolve themselves and do so in a way that produces a vantage point on these issues that is not dogmatically circular because it is, workably, both within and outside these issues’ sense. The solution to a genuinely undogmatic pluralism, then, is to enter into these contradictions and the process of their self-resolution.
Author / Editor information
JEREMY BARRIS is Professor of Philosophy at Marshall University and author, most recently, of The Crane’s Walk: Plato, Pluralism, and the Inconstancy of Truth (Fordham).
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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Preface
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction: Sometimes Always True
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1. Comparing Different Cultural or Theoretical Frameworks: Davidson, Rorty, and the Nature of Truth
32 -
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2. An Internal Connection between Logic and Rhetoric, between Frameworks, and a Legitimate Foundation for Knowledge
54 -
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3. Pluralism, Legitimate Self- Contradiction, and a Proposed Solution to Some Shared Fundamental Problems of Political and Mainstream Epistemology
78 -
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4. The Logic of Genuine Political Pluralism and Oscar Wilde’s Artificiality of Wit and Style
102 -
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5. Foucault’s Pluralism and the Possibility of Truth and of Ideology Critique
129 -
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6. How to Be Properly Unnatural: The Metaphysics of Heterosexual Normativity and the Importance of the Concepts of Essence and Nature for Pluralism
150 -
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7. The Necessary Inconclusiveness of Heideggerian Interpretation of Metaphysics and the Undecided Nature of Essential or Logical Connection
179 -
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8. The Formal Structure of Metaphysics and The Importance of Being Earnest
202 -
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9. The Logical Structure of Dreams and Their Relation to Reality
231 -
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Coda: Overviews
259 -
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References
281 -
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Index
293
