Sometimes Always True
Undogmatic Pluralism in Politics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology
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Sometimes Always True aims to resolve three connected problems. First, we need an undogmatic pluralist standpoint in political theory, metaphysics, and epistemology. But genuine pluralism suffers from the contradiction that making room for fundamental differences in outlook means making room for outlooks that exclude pluralism.
Second, philosophy involves reflecting on the world and meaning as a whole, yet this means adopting a vantage point in some way outside of meaning.
Third, our lived experience of the sense of our lives similarly undermines its own sense, as it involves having a vantage point in some way wholly outside ourselves.
In detailed engagement with, among others, Davidson, Rorty, Heidegger, Foucault, Wilde, and gender and sexuality theory, the book argues that these contradictions are so thoroughgoing that, like the liar’s paradox, they cancel the bases of their own meaning. Consequently, it argues, they resolve themselves and do so in a way that produces a vantage point on these issues that is not dogmatically circular because it is, workably, both within and outside these issues’ sense. The solution to a genuinely undogmatic pluralism, then, is to enter into these contradictions and the process of their self-resolution.
A remarkably ambitious, challenging and thoroughly engaging book. Barris’s mastery of a great variety of writings, including literary texts, takes the reader on a fascinating journey through metaphysics, humor, dreams, politics and epistemology. Although he deals with these themes on the highest level, the read never turns into a rough ride. Arguing with stunning clarity, Barris stays solidly at the wheel and brings his readers along in a fearless and cogent narrative, rife with innovative and original thought.
“Jeremy Barris analyzes the philosophical paradoxes of commitment and belief with a view to extracting their general structure and offering real ideas about how to live with them, as we must in order to live together successfully in contemporary societies. This is a topical and timely analysis that moves beyond considering the philosophical problems of pluralism and relativism in the abstract to show how we might begin to deal with them here and now.”
“Students of philosophy and its history have long wondered how any useful knowledge can be obtained in a field where there is little but disagreement and discord. Jeremy Barris’s Sometimes Always True proposes a novel, insightful, and widely informed response to this conundrum.”
Sometimes Always Never is an exceptionally well-written and clear argument about why logical contradictions can be both permissible and unavoidable, and about how experiencing such a contradiction can help us simultaneously reaffirm the rightness of our beliefs while also recognizing that there may be other beliefs with an equally good claim to being right. Barris persuasively argues that this is neither nonsense nor merely playing with words, and shows how this experience of recognizing the relative correctness of one's views is both very common and extremely important.