Harré, Rom - Michael Krausz : Varieties of Relativism

This clear and comprehensive account of the relativist debate will be invaluable for students as an instructive introduction to the topic. For professional philosophers it will be a useful reference to the continuing discussion. The latest round in the age-old debate between relativists and their opponents has continued unresolved for the last twenty years. Relativism has increasingly become the unconscious theoretical underpinning for a host of theories of ideologies and is beginning to be treated as a simplistic belief that the truth is grounded in the value systems of a culture.

Rom Harré and Michael Krausz map the current landscape of relativism and present the whole subject as a complex pattern of inconclusive controversies, to be made sense of only by paying attention to the question of which species of absolutism each variety of relativism opposes.

Rom Harré is a Fellow of Linacre College, University of Oxford, and Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University. He is also adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Binghampton University. His publications include Great Scientific Experiments, Varieties of Realism, Social Being, The Discursive Mind (with Grant Gillett), Philosophies of Science and The Explanation of Social Behaviour (with Paul Secord).
Michael Krausz is the Milton C. Nahm Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. His publications include Rightness and Reasons: Interpretation in Cultural Practices (1993), in addition to contributions on relativism, rationality, interpretation, metaphysics of culture, cultural identity, creativity, interpretation of music and the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood.