The Material of Knowledge

Book excerpt: Susan Hekman believes we are witnessing an intellectual sea change. The main features of this change are found in dichotomies between language and reality, discourse and materiality. Hekman proposes that it is possible to find a more intimate connection between these pairs, one that does not privilege one over the other. By grounding her work in feminist thought and employing analytic philosophy, scientific theory, and linguistic theory, Hekman shows how language and reality can be understood as an indissoluble unit. In this broadly synthetic work, she offers a new interpretation of questions of science, modernism, postmodernism, and feminism so as to build knowledge of reality and extend how we deal with nature and our increasingly diverse experiences of it.