Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic "disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.

This book was written with a view to sorting our some of the muddles and misreadings -- especially misreadings of Kant -- that have charaterized recent postmodernist and post--structuralist thought. For these issues have a relevance, as Norris argues, far beyond the academic enclaves of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism. Thus he makes large claims for the importance of getting Kant right on the relation between epistemology, ethics and aesthetics; for pursuing the Kantian question a What is Enlightenment?a as raised in Foucaulta s late essays; or again, for recalling William Empsona s spirited attempt to reassert the values of reason and truth against the orthodox a lit crita wisdom of his time. These are specialized concerns. But for better or worse it has been largely in the context of a theorya -- that capacious though ill--defined genre-- that such issues have received their most scrutiny over the past two decades. As its title suggests, The Truth About Postmodernism disputes a good deal of what currently passes for advance theoretical wisdom. Above all it mounts a challenge to those fashionable doctrines -- variants of the a end--of--ideologya theme -- that assimilate truth to some existing range of language--games, discourses, or in--place consensus beliefs. Norrisa s book will be welcomed for its clarity of style, its depth of philosophical engagement, and its refusal to endorse the more facile varieties of present--day textualist thought. It will also serve as a timely reminder that the a politics of theorya cannot be practised in safe isolation from the politics (and ethics) of activist social concern.

This book offers a detailed account of Spinozaa s influence on various schools of present--day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of Spinozaa s texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid--1960s to its latest "postmodern", neopragmatist or anti--theoretical phase. He examines the thought of Althusser, Macherey and Deleuze as well as others (including the new historicists) who have registered the impact of his pioneering work without any overt acknowledgement. On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the need for a riorous distinction between science (or "theoretical practice") and ideology (or the realm of lived experience subject to various forms of imaginary error of misrecognition). On the other, Deleuze makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories of whatever kind -- Kantian, Marxist, Freudian, post structuralist -- which always end up by imposing some abstract order of concepts and categories on the libidinal flux of "desiring production", or the "body--without--organs" of anarchic instinctual drives.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2013, held in Valencia, Spain, in June 2013.

The 44 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 162 submissions. The contributions have been grouped into the following topical sections: services; awareness; business process execution; products; business process modelling; modelling languages and meta models; requirements engineering 1; enterprise architecture; information systems evolution; mining and predicting; data warehouses and business intelligence; requirements engineering 2; knowledge and know-how; information systems quality; and human factors.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2001, held in Interlaken, Switzerland in June 2001. The 27 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers, three experience reports, and a panel summary were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 97 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on requirements engineering, agent-based approaches, workflow managment, data models and design, reuse and method engineering, XML and information systems integration, evolution, and conceptual modeling.

Increasingly, formal specification is being used by database researchers to describe and understand the systems they are designing and implementing. Similarly, those working on formal specification techniques have recognised that the database field provides a rich context for developing their ideas. However, as experts in one field often have a relatively limited knowledge of the other, there is a growing need for discussion about the relationship between these two fields and how they can be usefully combined. This volume contains the 16 papers which were presented at the International Workshop on Specification on Database Systems, held in Glasgow, 3-5 July 1991. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together these fields and to examine, through a series of invited talks, presentations and working groups, the role that formal specification can play in developing database systems. The papers describe current research into topics such as the formal specification of data models, query languages and transaction handling and the use of formal specification techniques to understand problems which arise in database systems. The working groups, which are summarised at the end of the volume, covered a variety of issues including the role of graphical notations in database specification, the use of specification techniques in enabling "open" or extensible database systems and the education of the database community in specification techniques. This volume will be invaluable to the increasing number of researchers who are using both database systems and formal specification techniques in their work, and who wish to gain a more detailed knowledge of these two fields and the issues which affect them.

Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic 'disciplines' as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.

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Jacques Derrida (born 1930) is undoubtedly the single most influential figure in current Anglo-American literary theory. Yet many scholars and students, not to mention general readers, would be hard put to give an account of Derrida's own writings. In this admirably clear and intelligent introduction, Christopher Norris demonstrates that Derrida's texts should be understood as belonging more to philosophy than to literature. Norris explains the significance of Derrida's writing on texts in the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato to Kant, liegel, and tiusserl, placing him squarely within that tradition. He also discusses some of the reasons for the massive institutional resistance that has so far prevented philosophers from engaging seriously with Derrida's work. This book will be welcomed by readers in search of an introduction to Derrida's work that neither underrates its difficulties nor invests his ideas with a kind of protective mystique.