Allan Megill

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida

Prophets of Extremity

Although "objectivity" is a term used widely in many areas of public discourse, from discussions concerning the media and politics to debates over political correctness and cultural literacy, the question "What is objectivity?" is often ignored, as if the answer were obvious. In this volume, Allan Megill has gathered essays from fourteen leading scholars in a variety of fields--history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history of science, sociology of science, feminist studies, literary studies, and accounting--to gain critical understanding of the idea of objectivity as it functions in today's world. In diverse essays the authors provide fascinating studies of objectivity in such areas as anthropological research, corporate and governmental bureaucracies, legal discourse, photography, and the study and practice of the natural sciences. Taken together, Megill argues, this volume calls for developing a notion of "objectivities." The absolute sense of objectivity--that is, objectivity as a "God's eye view"--must be supplemented, and in part supplanted, by disciplinary, procedural, and dialectical senses of objectivity. This book will be of great interest to a broad range of scholars as it presents current thinking on a topic of fundamental concern across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Contributors. Barry Barnes, Dagmar Barnouw, Lorraine Code, Lorraine Daston, Johannes Fabian, Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary E. Hawkesworth, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Evelyn Fox Keller, George Levine, Allan Megill, Peter Miller, Andy Pickering, Theodore M. Porter

Rethinking Objectivity

Deirdre N. McCloskey

John S. Nelson

Opening with an overview of the renewal of interest in rhetoric for inquiries of all kinds, this volume addresses rhetoric in individual disciplines—mathematics, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science, and history. Two essays draw from recent literary theory to suggest the contribution of the humanities to the rhetoric of inquiry, and several essays explore communications beyond the academy, particularly in women's issues, religion, and law. The final essays speak from the field of communication studies, where the study of rhetoric usually makes its home.

Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs

The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences

In the past thirty years, historians have broadened the scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to the histories of non-Western peoples and to the troubled relations between “the West” and the rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of the past. In Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, Megill dispels some of the confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting the art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along the way, he offers succinct accounts of the epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.

A Contemporary Guide to Practice

Historical Knowledge, Historical Error

Why did Karl Marx want to exclude politics and the market from his vision of a future socialism? Allan Megill begins with this question. In answering it, he forces the reader to rethink Marx's entire intellectual project. Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason has important implications for how we think about the usability of Marx's work today. It will be of interest both to those who wish to reflect on the fate of Marxism during the era of Soviet Communism, and to those who wish to discern what is adequate and what requires replacement or supplementation in the work of a figure who, in spite of everything, remains one of the greatest philosophers and social scientists of the modern world.

Allan Megill

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