Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586401 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barbara Herrnstein Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barbara Herrnstein |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH B H |
| AFFILIATIONS | North-West State Technical University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2544-4508 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1369 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Introduction: Richard Rorty, Pragmatic Provocateur
This essay introduces a running symposium on the work of Richard Rorty and its legacy fifteen years after his passing. The arc of Rorty's thought defines a trajectory through American pragmatism, tracing a variation unimagined until he expressed it. His work raised Anglophone philosophers' interest in American pragmatism as never before and also focused the interest of the whole world on American pragmatism as never before, even though the result…
Antirepresentationalism Before and After Rorty
Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between "minds" and "nature," along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium "Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?" considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent r…
The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism
Relativism, most philosophers seem to agree, is an elusive and frustrating doctrine, difficult to define and, despite the efforts of the best philosophical minds for over two thousand years, evidently impossible to eradicate. Perhaps, as with other elusive entities, like the Loch Ness Monster or extraterrestrials, attention would be more fruitfully turned on its alleged sightings. Where and when is it observed? By whom? With what discernible prov…
Unloading the Self-Refutation Charge
This essay is a critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato's Theaetetus as leveled by Socrates against Protagoras's "Man is the measure . . ," the essay considers various aspects of the charge, including its parad…
Scientizing the Humanities
Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations-historical, concep…
Anthropotheology: Latour Speaking Religiously
While Bruno Latour is commonly identified with science studies, he has also written extensively on religion and especially on its relation to the modern Western sciences. His writings on the subject include the relatively early essays, “On the Cult of the Factish Gods” and “‘Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame’ or, How Not to Misunderstand the Science-Religion Debate”, and the book, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. Religion also figures ce…
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
Book Review| August 01 2014 An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns Latour, Bruno, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Porter, Catherine. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 520 pp. Barbara Herrnstein Smith Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2014) 20 (3): 491–493. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-273282…
Clearing Up After the Science Wars: A Response to Emily A. Schultz
The Entwinement of Religion and Economics: Comments on Bradley Bateman's “In a Space of Questions”
Introduction: Contexts for a Comparative Relativism
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Chinese Comparisons and Questionable Acts
In this response to comments on "The Chimera of Relativism," her article in the same Common Knowledge issue, by cognitive neuroscientist Andreas Roepstorff, classicist G. E. R. Lloyd, and anthropologist Martin Holbraad, Smith begins by describing her experiences visiting China in 1983 as a scholar of comparative literature. This account is meant to illustrate and reinforce Lloyd's cautions regarding the hazards of intercultural-here, Chinese-West…
The Chimera of Relativism
In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Comparative Relativisim," Smith argues that relativism is a chimera, half straw man, half red herring. Over the past century, she shows, objections to the supposed position so named have typically involved either crucially improper paraphrases of general observations of the variability and contingency of human perceptions, interpretations, and judgments or dismaying inferences gratuitously d…
Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture
Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory
The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming
In The Mangle of Practice (1995), the renowned sociologist of science Andrew Pickering argued for a reconceptualization of research practice as a “mangle,” an open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay of human and non-human agency. While Pickering’s ideas originated in science and technology studies, this collection aims to extend the mangle’s reach by exploring its application across a wide range of fields including history, philosoph…
Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives
Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects-such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes-or, as they are known in biology, …
Relativism, Today and Yesterday
Research Article| August 01 2007 Relativism, Today and Yesterday Barbara Herrnstein Smith Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2007) 13 (2-3): 227-249. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2007-006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Relativism, Today and Yesterday. Common Knowledge 1 August 2007; 13…
Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism
Genes in Development: Re-Reading the Molecular Paradigm
Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human
Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science
Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations
barbara herrnstein smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University,and Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University. Her recent publications include Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard University Press, 1997) and"Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rh…
Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience
Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices
Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis
As a traditional healing art that has established a contemporary global presence, Chinese medicine defies categories and raises many interesting questions. If Chinese medicine is "traditional," why has it not disappeared with the rest of traditional Chinese society? If, as some claim, it is a science, what does that imply about what we call science? What is the secret of Chinese medicine's remarkable adaptability that has allowed it to prosper fo…
The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice
In The Body Multiple, Annemarie Mol argues that the body is not a singular entity but rather a multiplicity of experiences and interpretations shaped by medical practices. Through an ethnographic study of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital, Mol explores how different medical specialties, from vascular surgery to clinical chemistry, construct distinct versions of the disease and the affected body. She demonstrates how these multiple bodies coexis…
Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories
Contingencies of Value
It is a curious feature of literary studies in America that one of the most venerable, central, theoretically significant, and pragmatically inescapable set of problems relating to literature has not been a subject of serious inquiry for the past fifty years. I refer here to the fact not merely that the study of literary evaluation has been, as we might say, neglected, but that the entire problematic of value and evaluation has been evaded and ex…
The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming
In The Mangle of Practice (1995), the renowned sociologist of science Andrew Pickering argued for a reconceptualization of research practice as a “mangle,” an open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay of human and non-human agency. While Pickering’s ideas originated in science and technology studies, this collection aims to extend the mangle’s reach by exploring its application across a wide range of fields including history, philosoph…
Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives
Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects-such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes-or, as they are known in biology, …
Introduction: Contexts for a Comparative Relativism
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations
barbara herrnstein smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University,and Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University. Her recent publications include Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard University Press, 1997) and"Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rh…
On the Margins of Discourse
Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account
Scientizing the Humanities
Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations-historical, concep…
Anthropotheology: Latour Speaking Religiously
While Bruno Latour is commonly identified with science studies, he has also written extensively on religion and especially on its relation to the modern Western sciences. His writings on the subject include the relatively early essays, “On the Cult of the Factish Gods” and “‘Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame’ or, How Not to Misunderstand the Science-Religion Debate”, and the book, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. Religion also figures ce…
Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology
We can derive some sense of the way intellectual life is experienced in an era from the recurrence of certain metaphors used to describe its conduct-for example, the frequency with which, in our own time, intellectual projects and achievements are described in terms of navigational finesse: the charting of passages between extremes, the steering of middle courses, the avoidance of the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis. Thus an advertisement for…
Poetry as Fiction
p RADOXES make intriguing titles, but I am not otherwise fond of them and intend, by the end of this article, to dissolve the one that entitles it. I mean to do this by elaborating the proposition that fictiveness is the characteristic quality of what we call when we use the term in the broad sense bequeathed by Aristotle, i.e., to refer to the general class of verbal artworks. My primary concern will be to develop a conception of poetry that all…
The Chimera of Relativism
In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Comparative Relativisim," Smith argues that relativism is a chimera, half straw man, half red herring. Over the past century, she shows, objections to the supposed position so named have typically involved either crucially improper paraphrases of general observations of the variability and contingency of human perceptions, interpretations, and judgments or dismaying inferences gratuitously d…
Relativism, Today and Yesterday
Research Article| August 01 2007 Relativism, Today and Yesterday Barbara Herrnstein Smith Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2007) 13 (2-3): 227-249. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2007-006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Relativism, Today and Yesterday. Common Knowledge 1 August 2007; 13…
Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human
Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable
Research Article| April 01 1995 Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arkady Plotnitsky Arkady Plotnitsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-371 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn…
Introduction: Richard Rorty, Pragmatic Provocateur
This essay introduces a running symposium on the work of Richard Rorty and its legacy fifteen years after his passing. The arc of Rorty's thought defines a trajectory through American pragmatism, tracing a variation unimagined until he expressed it. His work raised Anglophone philosophers' interest in American pragmatism as never before and also focused the interest of the whole world on American pragmatism as never before, even though the result…
Antirepresentationalism Before and After Rorty
Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between "minds" and "nature," along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium "Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?" considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent r…
The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism
Relativism, most philosophers seem to agree, is an elusive and frustrating doctrine, difficult to define and, despite the efforts of the best philosophical minds for over two thousand years, evidently impossible to eradicate. Perhaps, as with other elusive entities, like the Loch Ness Monster or extraterrestrials, attention would be more fruitfully turned on its alleged sightings. Where and when is it observed? By whom? With what discernible prov…
Unloading the Self-Refutation Charge
This essay is a critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato's Theaetetus as leveled by Socrates against Protagoras's "Man is the measure . . ," the essay considers various aspects of the charge, including its parad…
Reply to an Analytic Philosopher
Boghossian stages his commentary on ''Cutting-Edge Equivocation'' (CE) as an encounter between, on one side, himself as representative of analytic philosophy and defender of classical epistemology and, on the other side, Smith as representative of ''vast numbers of scholars in the humanities and social sciences'' and defender of a set of claims that ''amount to some species of relativism, a view about knowledge that we [philosophers] believe to h…
Poetry as Fiction
p RADOXES make intriguing titles, but I am not otherwise fond of them and intend, by the end of this article, to dissolve the one that entitles it. I mean to do this by elaborating the proposition that fictiveness is the characteristic quality of what we call when we use the term in the broad sense bequeathed by Aristotle, i.e., to refer to the general class of verbal artworks. My primary concern will be to develop a conception of poetry that all…
Women Artists: Some Muted Notes
Journal Article Women Artists: Some Muted Notes Get access Barbara Herrnstein Smith Barbara Herrnstein Smith 1Barbara Herrnstein Smith is on the literature faculty of Bennington College, and is the author of an edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, of the prizewinning Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, and other works Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 24, Issue 2, June 197…
On the Margins of Discourse
Fixed Marks and Variable Constancies: A Parable of Literary Value
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Fixed Marks and Variable Constancies: A Parable of Literary Value, Poetics Today, Vol. 1, No. 1/2, Special Issue: Literature, Interpretation, Communication (Autumn, 1979), pp. 7-22
Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories
On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language
On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language
Contingencies of Value
It is a curious feature of literary studies in America that one of the most venerable, central, theoretically significant, and pragmatically inescapable set of problems relating to literature has not been a subject of serious inquiry for the past fifty years. I refer here to the fact not merely that the study of literary evaluation has been, as we might say, neglected, but that the entire problematic of value and evaluation has been evaded and ex…
Value/Evaluation
Research Article| October 01 1987 Value/Evaluation Barbara Herrnstein Smith Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1987) 86 (4): 445–455. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-86-4-445 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Value/Evaluation. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 1987; 86 (4): 445–455.…
Politics of Liberal Education
Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory
Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account
The Politics of Liberal Education
Controversy over what role “the great books” should play in college curricula and questions about who defines “the literary canon” are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here—themselves distinguished scholars and educators—share the belief that American schools, c…
The New (International) Party of Order? Coalition Politics in the (Literary) Academy
Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable
Research Article| April 01 1995 Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Barbara Herrnstein Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Arkady Plotnitsky Arkady Plotnitsky Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-371 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn…
Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory
Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory is a unique collection of essays dealing with the intersections between science and mathematics and the radical reconceptions of knowledge, language, proof, truth, and reality currently emerging from poststructuralist literary theory, constructivist history and sociology of science, and related work in contemporary philosophy. Featuring a distinguished group of international contributors, this volume…
On the Origin of Objects. Brian Cantwell Smith
Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience
Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices
Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis
As a traditional healing art that has established a contemporary global presence, Chinese medicine defies categories and raises many interesting questions. If Chinese medicine is "traditional," why has it not disappeared with the rest of traditional Chinese society? If, as some claim, it is a science, what does that imply about what we call science? What is the secret of Chinese medicine's remarkable adaptability that has allowed it to prosper fo…
Reply to an Analytic Philosopher
Boghossian stages his commentary on ''Cutting-Edge Equivocation'' (CE) as an encounter between, on one side, himself as representative of analytic philosophy and defender of classical epistemology and, on the other side, Smith as representative of ''vast numbers of scholars in the humanities and social sciences'' and defender of a set of claims that ''amount to some species of relativism, a view about knowledge that we [philosophers] believe to h…
Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology
We can derive some sense of the way intellectual life is experienced in an era from the recurrence of certain metaphors used to describe its conduct-for example, the frequency with which, in our own time, intellectual projects and achievements are described in terms of navigational finesse: the charting of passages between extremes, the steering of middle courses, the avoidance of the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis. Thus an advertisement for…
The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice
In The Body Multiple, Annemarie Mol argues that the body is not a singular entity but rather a multiplicity of experiences and interpretations shaped by medical practices. Through an ethnographic study of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital, Mol explores how different medical specialties, from vascular surgery to clinical chemistry, construct distinct versions of the disease and the affected body. She demonstrates how these multiple bodies coexis…
Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science
Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations
barbara herrnstein smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University,and Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University. Her recent publications include Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard University Press, 1997) and"Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rh…
Philosophy (21 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Art (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Law (9 works) · History (8 works)