Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective

An anthology of 31 essays by the philosophically gifted selected by the editors as historically significant to the "post" in postmodernism, exhibiting the shift away from documentation and interpretation to an exploration of significance. The collection begins with Francis Bacon and RenT Descartes, traveling into 19th century social theory with Marx and Nietzsche, the challenges to those theories presented by Dewey and Kuhn, and the deconstruction of modernity with Foucault, Derrida, and Cornel West. In the final section, Habermas and Benhabib (among others) respond to postmodernism, taking us into the post postmodern contexts of the future. Lacks an index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Joyce Appleby, Elizabeth Covington, David Hoyt, Michael Latham and Allison Sneider are all in the History department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Joyce Appleby's most recent publications include Telling the Truth about History (1994) and Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination.