Books by Christopher Norris

Hedgehogs is an extended sequence of poems and verse-essays about Jacques Derrida by a well-known philosopher, literary theorist, and commentator on his writings. Their topics range widely across the full span of Derrida's work, treated here in formal (rhyming and metrical) verse of a variously witty, ironic, reflective, discursive, and narrative character. Norris's aim is partly to provide a way into that work for readers with a chief interest in poetry and partly to offer fresh points of engagement for philosophers and literary critics, including those who have so far been resistant to it. But his object is also to explore the possibility of playing off formal verse structures against Derrida's very different, broadly symbolist-modernist idea of what poetry can and should be in the wake of practitioners like Mallarmé and Paul Celan. By so doing Norris makes a case - contra the advocates of free verse - for the exploratory-creative rather than restrictive or expression-cramping role of rhyme and meter. These serve at best as formal constraints that liberate thought into semantic, conceptual and imaginative regions beyond anything that might be envisaged by writers of straightforward expository prose, or indeed free verse. Thus they are highly suited to philosophical poetry, especially where it intersects with a mode of thought - like Derrida's - that lives very much in and through its singular resources of linguistic inventiveness. Altogether these poems make a notable contribution to the currently fast-growing field of creative criticism.

A radical reappraisal of post modernity and a guide to the future of critical theory, this text presents a re-anlysis of the leading theorists: Derrida, Foucault, de Man, and Levinas.

In this book Christopher Norris develops the case for scientific realism by tackling various adversary arguments from a range of anti-realist positions.

"e;Christopher Norris raises some basic questions about the way that analytic philosophy has been conducted over the past 25 years. In doing so, he offers an alternative to what he sees as an over-specialisation of a lot of recent academic work. Arguing that analytic philosophy has led to a narrowing of sights to the point where other approaches that might be more productive are blocked from view, he goes against the grain to claim that Continental philosophy holds the resources for a creative renewal of analytic thought."e;

What might be the outcome for philosophy if its texts were subjected to the powerful techniques of rhetorical close-reading developed by current deconstructionist literary critics? This title explores such questions in the context of modern analytic and linguistic philosophy.

Pays attention to the bearing of literary theory on questions of truth, meaning and reference. Suiatble for philosophers and critics, this title offers a clear-headed statement of the impact of deconstruction.

A critical introduction to the long-standing debate concerning the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, and the problems the field has posed for physicists and philosophers from Einstein to the present.

While in no way oversimplifying its complexity or glossing over the challenges it presents, Norris's book sets out to make deconstruction more accessible to the open-minded reader.