Description: Explores the connection between epistemological and moral "lying," interspersing a phenomenology of deceit with a continuing dialogue between the phenomenologist and one of her students.
Brief description: Alison Leigh Brown is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Women's Studies Department at Northern Arizona State University. She is the author of Fear, Truth, and Writing: From Paper Village to Electronic Community, also published by SUNY Press.
Review Quotes:
"I like this book's 'performativity, ' the way that the author demonstrates and enacts through the mixing of philosophical and literary genres the arguments regarding lying and deception. Professor Brown's methodology is itself a deep insight regarding the subjects of deceit and lying and readers will be charmed by her approach. She deals with a range of authors from Hegel to Gilles Deleuze to Judith Butler in a way that is way off what, by now, has become too much of a beaten track. Her approach is completely fresh and deserves wide recognition. The book is at the center of a whole series of debates in feminism, continental philosophy, Hegel, social theory, and what has lately been called 'performance studies.'" -- Bill Martin, DePaul University at Chicago
"The great strength of this book is its willingness to investigate--not just at a theoretical level, but in its very style of writing--the metaphysical canon that postmodernism has taught us to put into question. To put metaphysics into question does not mean to do away with it entirely, but rather to expose the dimensions on which metaphysics rests. There is a real postmodern flavor about this entire project--its conception, execution, contents, and style. And that will put some readers off. But it has to be admitted that it is a new, audacious, and humorous intervention into the debate over postmodernism, which succeeds in posing fresh questions about old dilemmas in a way that is startling, unsettling, and original." -- Tina Chanter, University of Memphis