Preface

Summary

This project attempts to address the problem of the foundations of knowledge and meaning, an issue that has recently received much attention. The list of authors discussed in the following chapters shows the interdisciplinary nature of the problem and its relevance for a host of debates being conducted in different disciplinary terms. Yet, while the problem of foundations will be familiar to the veterans of these debates, the strategy of this book is perhaps less obvious than appears on the surface, in which case some prefatory remarks are in order.

This volume is part of a larger project which links epistemology, hermeneutics, and critical social theory. Whereas I hope to provide separate treatments of epistemology and critical theory in subsequent volumes, the current focus stresses the linkage between the most basic assumptions of foundational discourse and the politics of the modern/postmodern debates. Thus this approach runs the risk of being both insufficiently theoretical for the more abstract concerns of epistemology, and insufficiently wide for the complexity of social theory. I believe, however, that my intermediary strategy is justified by my central argument about the issue of foundations. In its simplest form, the argument holds that the much politicized debate between modern and postmodern perspectives rests on a deeper, even more pervasive misunderstanding of the issue of foundations. For diagnostic purposes, however, both the political and foundational aspects of the problem are important: the foundational question because it highlights the starting points for understanding and argument; the political implications because they reveal the problems that follow from misleading assumptions about foundations.