"This tightly integrated collection of essays introduces newcomers to the shape, scope, texture, and quality of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's thought, and, for readers familiar with Smith's many books and articles, it pulls into focus the unity of her diverse achievements and the timeliness--indeed, the urgency--of this unified practice for our times. By her own example, Smith calls the question on the whirligig of postures, polemics, interventions, and speculations that make up much of academic life today. She sets us several levels above the fray (e.g., close v. distant reading debates; constructivist v. realist debates; neutrality v. commitment debates; humanities v. science debates) so that we can see it, as she does, in genuinely critical terms. Her beautifully lucid, self-accounting intellectual conduct (and combat) reminds us that critical doesn't mean dismissive; it means grasping the truthfulness of the illusions that we live and work by, and in Smith's case, it means patiently and clearly explaining the origins, motivation, and above all, the consequences of those illusions, giving us the freedom to choose maintaining or abandoning them. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is at once (and has always been) the sharpest knife in the block and the most supple, subtle, and capacious of thinkers. Her work sets an ideal for critical study today; we can't match it but knowing it's there and measuring our work against it--against its intelligence, good sense, worldliness, humor, and intellectual largeness and largesse--is a good in itself." -- Marjorie Levinson, F.L. Huetwell Professor of English, University of Michigan.
"It is a sheer pleasure to read along with Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and this collection of recent essays brings her to readers in an especially unvarnished and accessible form. Never dismissive or petty, Smith in these conversational excursions invites us to enjoy the contemporary sciences and letters - especially versions of psychology - in her bracing company. She insists always on more rigorous argument and at the same time shows how writing of many different kinds serves and disserves the human sciences and our hopes for a larger understanding. Her criticism of important thinkers is as often warmly appreciative as it is demanding. Smith treats us to delicious turns of phrase - like the "straw herrings" thrown up by relativism's critics, and like scientists burrowing for literary discoveries "in the bosom of reality" (their words, not hers!). Along the way she delivers politically canny lessons in how to think. There's an urgency in these commentaries: We'd better start making sense soon, here in the Anthropocene, as our predictable confusions and all-too-familiar nonsense have become very pernicious. Smith's writing is an intellectual tonic. Deeply sensible, realistic in the best sense of the term, essays like these give one courage in dark times." -- Judith Farquhar, Max Palevsky Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
"Practicing Relativism is an admirably short, elegant and enjoyable introduction to the breadth of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's thought, and will recharge the antifoundationalist batteries of her fans. Coming from science and technology studies, I found her engagements with scientism in the humanities and with Bruno Latour in chapters on religion and the Anthropocene especially thought-provoking." -- Andrew Pickering, Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter
