Political Correctness: For and Against

Front Cover
Rowman & Littlefield, 1995 - Social Science - 153 pages
Two prominent philosophers here engage in a forthright debate over some of the centrally disputed topics in the political correctness controversy now taking place on college campuses across the nation, including feminism, campus speech codes, the western canon, and the nature of truth. Friedman and Narveson conclude the volume with direct replies to each other's positions.
 

What people are saying - Write a review

We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.

Contents

II
1
III
47
IV
107
V
133
VI
149
VII
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 3 - These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or 'fighting' words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
Page 43 - Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
Page 39 - Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), and ED Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Page 74 - ... which expressions in those utterances can refer. Metaphysical realism is thus not a thesis or a theory; it is rather the condition of having theses or theories or even of denying theses or theories.
Page 43 - Feminist Philosophers Are Oddly Unsympathetic to the Women They Claim to Represent," Chronicle of Higher Education (October 11, 1989): B2-B3.
Page 42 - See, for example, definition #3 of "family" in the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of the English Language, International Edition (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Inc., 1965), p. 457. I have added "enduringness" to the dictionary definition in order to exclude transitory cohabitation arrangements.
Page 27 - The traditional family is a nuclear family consisting of a legally married heterosexual couple and their children, in which the man is the principal breadwinner and head of the household and the woman is responsible for all, or nearly all, the domestic work and child care. As early as 1977, however, this family form comprised only 16 percent of all US households, according to the US Census Bureau/'5 The traditional family, it seems, is no longer the family or the family as we know it...
Page 27 - Feminism, with its solemn Carry Nation repressiveness, does not see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.
Page 74 - I am arguing, rather, is that those practices themselves presuppose metaphysical realism. So one cannot within those practices intelligibly deny metaphysical realism, because the meaningfulness of our public utterances already presupposes an independently existing reality to which expressions in those utterances can refer. Metaphysical realism is thus not a thesis or...
Page 19 - The distinctive features of women's situation in a gender-stratified society are being used as resources in the new feminist research. It is these distinctive resources, which are not used by conventional researchers, that enable feminism to produce empirically more accurate descriptions and theoretically richer explanations than does conventional research.

About the author (1995)

Marilyn Friedman is associate professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.

Jan Narveson is professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo.