Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Diversity is both an inevitable aspect of twenty-first-century living and a powerful challenge to older philosophical traditions that still assume as normatively universal a set of values, ways of thinking, institutions, and habits of living that emerged within earlier eras of more homogeneous cultures, less developed technologies, and more accepted forms of linguistic, legal, religious, economic, political, and military domination. In recent years, new styles of philosophical discourse, including deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory, have persuasively challenged these universalist assumptions. In doing so, they have revealed the important human differences that these universalist assumptions have marginalized and the silences that they have imposed both on individual dissenters and on whole cultural life-worlds whose languages they refuse to hear and whose experience they discount. Because these new discourses spring from long-denied, newly empowered dimensions of diversity in human experience that express loyalties to the past as well as fears and hopes for the future, some of their proponents have resisted projects involving collaboration across differences as dangerous to their newly won recognition and to the distinctive characteristics of the voices for whom they seek to secure hearings.