This comprehensive reader chronicles the Western engagement with the nature of knowledge during the past four centuries, including works from such philosophers as Hayden White, Rene Descartes, Emmanuel White, Theodor Adorno, Adam Smith.

This comprehensive reader chronicles the western engagement with the nature of knowledge during the past four centuries while providing the historical context for the postmodernist thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty and Hayden White, and the challenges their ideas have posed to our conventional ways of thinking, writing and knowing.