Sometimes Always True ─ Undogmatic Pluralism in Politics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology

Sometimes Always True aims to resolve three connected problems central to philosophical thought. First, we need and do not yet have a genuine, undogmatic pluralist standpoint in political theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. In all these contexts, pluralism suffers from the contradiction that making room for fundamental difference of outlook means making room for outlooks that exclude the legitimacy of this pluralist aim itself. More, the idea of incompatible but legitimate interpretations of truth presents a problem for a coherent understanding of the nature of truth.

Second, philosophy ultimately involves reflecting on the world and meaning as a whole, and this means adopting a vantage point in some way outside of meaning itself. As a result, philosophy ultimately renders itself meaningless.

Third, our lived experience of the question of the sense and appropriate conduct of our lives as a whole also undermines its own sense, as it involves having a vantage point in some way wholly outside ourselves.
The book argues that while this kind of contradiction is inescapable, it is so thoroughgoing that, like the Liar's Paradox, it cancels its own meaning. In canceling its meaning, it eliminates the contradiction. But in the case of pluralism, because the now-canceled contradiction begins with incompatible but legitimate meanings, it makes non-preferential room for truly different structures of meaning. And in the case of metaphysical and life orienting thought, because it begins both within and outside sense in general, it allows a non-circular vantage point on meaning, the world, and our lives each as a whole. The solution to a genuinely undogmatic pluralism and meaningfully grounded metaphysical and life orienting thought, then, is to enter into the contradiction and its process of self-resolution.

The essays argue in detail for the necessity, logical legitimacy, and workability of this self-canceling contradiction, engaging in detail with, among others, Davidson, Rorty, Heidegger, Foucault, and Wilde, and with the analytic and continental literature in metaphysics, epistemology, and gender and sexuality politics.

Jeremy Barris is Professor of Philosophy at Marshall University and author ofParadox and the Possibility of Knowledge: The Example of Psychoanalysis and of The Crane's Walk: Plato, Pluralism, and the Inconstancy of Truth(Fordham).