Includes bibliographical references and index

On the discrimination of discourse theories: the "linguistic turn" in philosophical perspective -- Raising the tone: Derrida, Kierkegaard, and the rhetoric of transcendence -- Spinoza, Marx, Althusser: "structural Marxism" twenty years on -- Truth, science and the growth of knowledge: on the limits of cultural relativism -- Marxism against postmodernism, or the Eighteenth Brumaire revisited -- Of an apoplectic tone recently adopted in philosophy

Truth, Christopher Norris reminds us, is very much out of fashion at the moment - whether at the hands of politicians, media pundits, or purveyors of postmodern wisdom in cultural and literary studies. Across a range of disciplines the idea has taken hold that truth-talk is either redundant or the product of epistemic might. Questions of truth and falsehood are always internal to some specific language-game; history is just another kind of fiction; philosophy is only a kind of writing; law is a wholly rhetorical practice. In Reclaiming Truth, Norris critiques these fashionable trends of thought and mounts a specific challenge to cultural relativist doctrines in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political theory