The Truth about the Truth: De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World (New Consciousness Reader) - Softcover

Anderson, Walt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874778018 ISBN 13: 9780874778014

Publisher: Tarcher, 1995

Synopsis

Includes essays and excerpts from the works of prominent modern thinkers such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, and Isaiah Berlin among others.

About this title

About the Author

Walt Truett Anderson's previous books included Reality Isn't What it Used to Be, To Govern Evolution, Rethinking Liberalism, The Upstart Spring and Open Secrets. A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he is a fellow of the Meridian Institute, an international network of Scholars and practitioners concerned with issues of governance, earning, leadership and the future. He writes regularly for the Pacific News Service and currently serves as president of the American division of the World Academy of Art and Science.

Reviews

There is no longer one ``truth about the truth,'' observes freelance journalist Anderson (Reality Isn't What It Used to Be), who has compiled 33 previously published short pieces by postmodern pundits grappling with problems of belief, identity and society. In an engagingly skeptical, aphoristic voice (``look at the post modern world as a kind of jailbreak from the Grand Hotel''), Anderson provides continuity between sections as diverse as ``Symbols at Work and Play'' (which includes a relatively lucid passage from Jacques Derrida on ``the dubious relationship between a word and its referent'' and Stephen Katz's spoof on ``How to Speak and Write Postmodern'') and ``Science Without Scientism,'' featuring passages from Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend on the instability of scientific principles. Final chapters from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Vaclav Havel about necessary links between politics and faith suggest where Anderson's real sympathies lie. That Anderson has chosen some of the most accessible writings on postmodernism available is both a strength and a weakness. Academics may view this work as a remedial postmodern primer, while the larger audience for whom the volume seems intended may still be put off by considerable vocabulary barriers: a problem of readership that points up the continuing chasm between what's on the minds of academics versus those of more regular folk.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tarcher
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874778018
• ISBN 13: 9780874778014
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272