In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative question: How do poems end? To answer it, Smith examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. First published in 1968, Smith's book remains essential reading in poetic theory.
"Ranging from Elizabethan lyric through free and syllabic verse and concrete poetry, Poetic Closure is a learned, witty, and richly illustrated study of the behavior of...
In Poetic Closure, distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative question: How do poems end? To answer it...
Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.
Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these...
Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and id...
Charges of abandoned standards issue from government offices; laments for the loss of the best that has been thought and said resound through university corridors. While revisionists are perplexed by questions of value, critical theory--haunted by the heresy of relativism--remains captive to classical formulas. Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book confronts the conceptual problems and sociopolitical conflicts at the heart of these issues and raises their discussion to a new level of sophistication.
Polemical without being rancorous, Contingencies of Value mounts a powerful critique...
Charges of abandoned standards issue from government offices; laments for the loss of the best that has been thought and said resound through unive...
M. Norton Wise Barbara Herrnstein Smith E. Roy Weintraub
This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some understanding of how elementary objects get built up, or "grown up," into complex, objects whose
This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some u...
Philip Mirowski Barbara Herrnstein Smith E. Roy Weintraub
A leading scholar of the history and philosophy of economic thought, Philip Mirowski argues that there has been a top-to-bottom transformation in how scientific research is organized and funded in Western countries over the past two decades and that these changes necessitate a reexamination of the ways that science and economics interact. Mirowski insists on the need to bring together the insights of economics, science studies, and the philosophy of science in order to understand how and why particular research programs get stabilized through interdisciplinary appropriation, controlled...
A leading scholar of the history and philosophy of economic thought, Philip Mirowski argues that there has been a top-to-bottom transformation in how ...
For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components--nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on--but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward "growing explanations" from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy--based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of...
For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components--nuclei into protons and neu...
This book explores the radical reconceptions of knowledge and science emerging from constructivist epistemology, social studies of science, and contemporary cognitive science. Smith reviews the key issues involved in the twentieth-century critiques of traditional views of human knowledge and scientific truth and gives an extensively informed explanation of the alternative accounts developed by Fleck, Kuhn, Foucault, Latour, and others. She also addresses the various anxieties (e.g., over 'relativism') and 'wars' occasioned by these developments, placing them in their historical contexts and...
This book explores the radical reconceptions of knowledge and science emerging from constructivist epistemology, social studies of science, and contem...
In this important and original book, eminent scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes, assesses, and reflects upon a set of contemporary intellectual projects involving science, religion, and human cognition. One, which Smith calls "the New Naturalism," is the effort to explain religion on the basis of cognitive science. Another, which she calls "the New Natural Theology," is the attempt to reconcile natural-scientific accounts of the world with traditional religious belief. These two projects, she suggests, are in many ways mirror images--or "natural reflections"--of each other. ...
In this important and original book, eminent scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes, assesses, and reflects upon a set of contemporary intellectua...
