Review

Roger P. Mourad, Jr., Postmodern Philosophical Critique and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Higher Education (a volume in Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series). Bergin & Garvey, Westport, CT, 1997.

To appear in Philosophy in Review

The title might suggest a survey of postmodernist criticisms of knowledge and the disciplines, and a discussion of their implications for the overall organization of universities. The series in which it appears promises guidelines for radical and democratic education. The author claims he will develop an account of inquiry informed by the insights offered by postmodernist thought.

Mourad acknowledges in his introduction that it is not easy to give a brief characterization of postmodernism. To identify it with the rejection of absolute or objective "foundations", or with crude cognitive relativism fails to capture what is distinctive of postmodernism. That is rather the thought that inquiry is not a progressive disclosure of an independent reality, guided by aims enunciated in the past, but a spontaneous conversation, as Rorty intimates.

Mourad devotes his second chapter to the modernist position that has been found wanting. Here he describes inquiry as intimately tied to truth, in the thought of R.M. Hutchins, to science, in Whitehead, to democracy, in A.B. Giametti, and to a globally responsive humanism, in Pelikan's re-examination of Cardinal Newman.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore themes in the work of Lyotard, Rorty, Calvin Schrag, Foucault, and Derrida. The final two chapters discuss and reject the view that inquiry requires the assumption of a pre-existing reality, claim that this assumption unnecessarily constrains us, and urge a conception of inquiry as the pursuit of "intellectually compelling ideas," irrespective of their apparent relation to reality, an inquirer-based conception in contrast to the object-based one typical of ordinary modernist thought.

What does it all add up to? The opacity and high level of abstraction and generality of Mourad's discussion doesn't make it easy to answer this question, but it seems we can keep what we have (though perhaps without endorsing each discipline's misconstruction of its aim) and add some "postdisciplinary research programs" - "two or more scholars from disparate disciplines who choose to affiliate with the aim of pursuing an intellectually compelling idea or ideas that are not about preexisting reality" (p. 104). Qualitative research and complexity theory can be seen as anticipations of a postmodernist, postdisciplinary future, and we should give due regard to Barthes' view of "the reader as an active creator of texts" (p. 106). Not much hope here for radicalism or democracy, nor for responsible responsiveness to what happens around us.

Mourad notices that we have "pure" and "applied" disciplines, and that thriving subjects are sites of contestation, but it appears that we can, after the postmodernist critique, keep all and any of our current subjects. That critique gives us no ground for thinking that, say, psychoanalysis or theology deserve no more place in the sun than witchcraft, or that the study of literature or policy analysis is a very different intellectual activity from history or sociology. Mourad quotes Searle on the obscurity and mystery-mongering of self-confessed postmodernists (p. 76) but his own contribution does not advance their cause or give the lie to such criticisms.

E.P. Brandon, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados

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