Relativism-Relativity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on a Modern Concept is a revisionary and historicist approach to an issue which cuts across the disciplinary borders of science, philosophy, ethics and art. Sceptical of stereotypes, including those of the totalising fictions of the Enlightenment, supposedly steeped in absolutism and substantialism, the authors endeavour to bring to light an alternative mode of cognitive mapping which runs from the seventeenth century to the age of complexity. Current notions of fractal geometry, rhizomatic linking of open structures, hypertextuality, the superposition of symbolic systems and nonlinear reality, of chance and determinism, are traced back to the work of Leibniz, Laurence Sterne and D'Alembert. Similarly to Helene Vedrine, who documented the dark side of the Renaissance in Les Philosophies de la Renaissance (1971), the essayists here see the issue of the absolutism/relativism polarity as the focal point in the construction of a new eighteenth century, whose ground-breaking ideas, first launched in the tentative form of the essay, acquired a quasi-canonical status in the French Encyclopaedia, and referenced other disciplinary fields (psychology, ethics, social science), entering into fertile negotiations with discursive and formal innovations in literature.
About the Author: Professor Maria-Ana Tupan is affiliated with the English Department of Bucharest University, where she teaches courses in the history of British literature and in applied literary theory. She also taught at Penn State University as a Senior Fulbright Grantee in 19945. She is a member of the Romanian Writers Union and of several academic societies (EFACIS, Gesellschaft fur Fantastikforschung, Flann OBrien Society) and has received awards from the Writers Union and Romanian literary reviews. She has also published various books, book chapters and articles, in both English and in Romanian, in the fields of literary history and theory, comparative literature, genre theory, discourse analysis, and cultural studies. Dr. Marin Cilea is a Senior Lecturer at the Physics Department of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. He has specialized in lasers and applications, and in the digital investigation of semiconductor devices. His recent concern in the philosophy of science has materialised in interdisciplinary studies in the epistemology of literary works, published jointly with Maria-Ana Tupan.