Open access monographs

[Sigi Jottkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>]

Dear friends,

We're delighted to announce the publication of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene (Critical Climate Change), and Adam Wickberg's Pellucid Paper (Technographies).

Like all OHP books, these are available for free download at http://openhumanitiespress.org/

and for sale as reasonably priced paperbacks from online distributors such as Barnes and Noble.

Happy reading!

Sigi, David, Gary
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In Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene, Barbara Herrnstein Smith addresses a set of contemporary issues involving knowledge and science from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled “relativism.” Practicing that relativism, she argues, does not mean refusing judgment or asserting absurdities but being conscious of the existence and significance of contingency, complexity, and multiplicity.

Rejecting classic and neorealist views of knowledge and human cognition, Smith describes important alternative accounts in cognitive theory, science studies, and contemporary philosophy of mind. The “relativism” commonly associated with these alternative accounts, she maintains, is a chimera—part straw man, part red herring. Objections to the position so named typically involve crucially improper paraphrase of empirical observations of variability and contingency or dismaying inferences improperly drawn from such observations.

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Adam Wickberg's Pellucid Paper offers a new history of the materiality of Early Modern poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject constitution. The book explores the broad media practices in which some of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of cultural techniques.

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