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20After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (review)Philosophy and Literature 1 (1): 107-117. 1976.
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19Deconstruction: Theory and PracticeRoutledge. 2002._Deconstruction: Theory and Practice_ has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative guide to this topic. Without oversimplifying or glossing over the challenges, Norris makes deconstruction more accessible to the reader. The volume focuses on the works of Jacques Derrida which caused this seismic shift in critical thought, as well as the work of North American critics Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom. In this third, revised edition, Nor…Read more
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19This book offers a vigorous and constructive challenge to relativism by examining a wide range of anti-realist theories, and in response offering a variety of arguments amounting to a strong defence of critical realism in the natural and social sciences.
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19Two Poems on ColourItinera - Rivista di Filosofia E di Teoria Delle Arti 19. 2020.Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. He worked on literary criticism, on the question of realism and antirealism in philosophy, on Derrida and deconstructionism and on the philosophy of science. In the past few years he has also authored several philosophical poems. In this issue we present two poems he wrote that are dedicated to color.
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18Doubting Castle or the Slough of Despond: Davidson and Schiffer on the Limits of AnalysisReview of Metaphysics 50 (2). 1996.To Rorty this seemed just one more example of the kinds of dilemma that philosophers typically got into by supposing that there must be a right way of doing things and that theirs was the method by which best to do it. His own work up to this point had been largely analytical in character, or addressed to problems within and around that first line of descent. However, thereafter--that is to say, in his writings subsequent to The Linguistic Turn--he swung right across to a pragmatist view which l…Read more
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17The Blank and the Die: Some Dilemmas of Post‐EmpiricismInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (2). 2006.This article examines various dilemmas (or, as I suggest, pseudo-dilemmas) that have dogged epistemology and philosophy of language since the 1940s heyday of logical empiricism. These have to do chiefly with the problem those thinkers faced in overcoming the various dichotomies imposed by their Humean insistence on maintaining a sharp distinction between logical 'truths of reason' and empirical 'matters of fact'. I trace this problem back to Kant's failure to offer any plausible, explanatorily a…Read more
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15Treading Water in Neurath's Ship: Quine, Davidson, RortyPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 2 (2). 1998.This article examines what I take to be some of the wrong turns and false dilemmas that analytic philosophy has run into since Quine's well-known attack on the two 'last dogmas' of old-style Logical Empiricism. In particular it traces the consequences of Quine's argument for a thoroughly naturalized epistemology, one that would view philosophy of science as 'all the philosophy we need', and that defines 'philosophy of science' in narrowly physicalist terms. I contend that this amounts to a third…Read more
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14Phenomenology, Structuralism, and Philosophy of Music: A Qualified Platonist ApproachJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38 (2): 128-147. 2007.
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14What's wrong with postmodernism: critical theory and the ends of philosophyJohns Hopkins University Press. 1990.In What's Wrong with Postmodernism Norris critiques the "postmodern-pragmatist malaise" of Baudrillard, Fish, Rorty, and Lyotard. In contrast he finds a continuing critical impulse--an "enlightened or emancipatory interest"--in thinkers like Derrida, de Man, Bhaskar, and Habermas. Offering a provocative reassessment of Derrida's influence on modern thinking, Norris attempts to sever the tie between deconstruction and American literary critics who, he argues, favor endless, playful, polysemic int…Read more
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12Beyond Metaphysics: the hermeneutic circle in contemporary continental philosophyPhilosophical Books 27 (4): 225-229. 1986.
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11Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (review)Philosophy and History 9 (2): 178-182. 1976.
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11Alain Badiou: Truth, Ethics and the Formal ImperativeRevista Portuguesa de Filosofia 65 (1). 2009.
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11Truth in DerridaIn Zeynep Direk & Leonard Lawlor (eds.), A Companion to Derrida, Wiley. 2014.At one time, and not so long ago, anybody writing on the topic “Derrida and Truth” would most likely have felt obliged to begin by asserting that it didn't amount to a downright absurd, indeed a near‐oxymoronic coupling of name and noun. According to Derrida, this is the sole mode of thought that is able not only to respect the validity‐conditions for determinately true or false statements but also, by its holding fast to those conditions for as long as possible, to take due stock of the particu…Read more
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11Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-Realism and Response-DependenceEdinburgh University Press. 2019.Truth Matters is the first full-length introduction to response-dependence, a topic that has become a main focus of interest for philosophers across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas.The response-dependence claim, in brief, is to provide a 'third way' between the realist (or objectivist) conception of truth as always potentially transcending the limits of human ascertainment and the anti-realist (or verificationist) case that truth cannot possibly transcend those limits since then we…Read more
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10William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary CriticismPhilosophical Quarterly 29 (117): 380. 1979.
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10Derrida At Yale: The "Deconstructive Moment" in Modernist PoeticsPhilosophy and Literature 4 (2): 242-256. 1980.Christopher Norris DERRIDA AT YALE: THE "DECONSTRUCTIVE MOMENT" IN MODERNIST POETICS IN seven types of ambiguity, William Empson breezily remarked of his critical method that it was "either all nonsense or all very startling and new." The reactions went very much as Empson predicted, with a whole new school of criticism eagerly latching on to the idea of multiple meanings in poetry, while the sober-sided scholars indignantly attacked his wayward "misreadings" and flagrant anachronisms. At presen…Read more
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10Home Thoughts from Abroad: Derrida, Austin, and the Oxford ConnectionPhilosophy and Literature 10 (1): 1-25. 1986.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christopher Norris HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD: DERRIDA, AUSTIN, AND THE OXFORD CONNECTION THERE IS NO philosophical school or tradition that does not carry along with it a background narrative linking up present and past concerns. Most often this selective prehistory entails not only an approving account of ideas that fit in with the current picture but also an effort to repress or marginalize anytíiing that fails so to fit. Bertrand …Read more
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9Resources of realism: prospects for 'post-analytic' philosophySt. Martin's Press. 1997.This book is concerned chiefly with issues in epistemology, philosophical semantics and philosophy of science. It defends a causal-realist approach to theories and explanations in the natural sciences and a truth-based propositional semantics for natural language derived from various sources, among them unusually in this context the work of William Empson. It argues against various forms of anti-realist doctrine with regard to both the truth-claims of science and the construal of intentions, mea…Read more
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9New Idols of the Cave: On the Limits of Anti-realismSt. Martin's Press. 1997.This book offers a broad-based critical survey of recent anti-realist arguments in the philosophy of science, cultural theory, hermeneutics, the sociology of knowledge and the interpretation of quantum-mechanics.
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9Image and Parable: Readings of Walter BenjaminPhilosophy and Literature 7 (1): 15-31. 1983.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christopher Norris IMAGE AND PARABLE: READINGS OF WALTER BENJAMIN Marxist literary criticism is a house with many mansions, most of diem claiming a privileged access to the great central chamber of history and truth. Only the most blinkered polemicist could nowadays attack "Marxist criticism" as if it presented a uniform front or even a clearly delineated target. Differences of oudook have developed to a point where debates within Ma…Read more
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9Can Realism Be Naturalized?Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 4 (1). 2000.Hilary Putnam has famously undergone some radical changes of mind with regard to the issue of scientific realism and its wider epistemological bearings. In this paper I defend the arguments put forward by early Putnam in his essays on the causal theory of reference as applied to natural-kind terms, despite his own later view that those arguments amounted to a form of 'metaphysical' realism which could not be sustained against various lines of sceptical attack. I discuss some of the reasons for P…Read more
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9Poetry, Philosophy, and Smart AISubstance 53 (1): 60-76. 2024.Abstract:Here I look at sundry aspects of the current controversy about Generative AI and, in particular, the implications of this new and rapidly evolving technology for poetry, the arts, and human creativity in general. My essay looks at earlier episodes in the history of thought, from Descartes on, that I take to have prefigured this latest debate around 'the human' in relation to its various physical, 'artificial,' or (presumptively) prosthetic means of extension and refinement. I also discu…Read more
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7Paul de Man : Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic IdeologyRoutledge. 1988.Paul de Man - literary critic, literary philosopher, "American deconstructionist" - changed the landscape of criticism through his rigorous theories and writings. Upon its original publication in 1988, Christopher Norris' book was the first full-length introduction to de Man, a reading that offers a much-needed corrective to the pattern of extreme antithetical response which marked the initial reception to de Man's writings. Norris addresses de Man's relationship to philosophical thinking in the…Read more
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7ChatGPT: a psychomachiaSubstance 53 (1): 77-84. 2024.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ChatGPT:a psychomachiaChristopher Norris (bio)The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seek…Read more
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7Philosophy as Verse-Performance: five poems and a formalist prospectusPerformance Philosophy 2 (2): 342-361. 2017.This article consists of five poems and an introductory essay. The poems are intended on the one hand to make a case for the currently underrated virtues of poetic formalism, i.e., for the revival of rhyme and meter as aspects of poetic practice. On the other they argue for a distinctly philosophical mode of poetry that embraces the values of conceptual or rational discourse as against a romantic-modernist conception premised on the intrinsic superiority of lyric, metaphor, symbol, analogy, and …Read more