André Gellner

Background

Gellner, André was born on December 9, 1925 in Paris.

Education

Manuscripts and Archives, Balliol College, Oxford. PhD, London. Weber and Russell.

Career

London School of Economics, 1949 84. Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 1984-1992. Fellow of King’s College.

University of Central Europe.

Views

Gellner has written extensively on the social anthropology of the Islamic world. Within academic philosophy, his Words and Thing (1959) created a violent controversy by applying a sociological analysis to the style of what he called linguistic philosophy. The book contains a good deal of telling argument that might have been more appreciated in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s. Gellner has been a vigorously polemical opponent of psychoanalysis. His own positive philosophical writings have addressed issues of rationality, relativism and conceptual legitimation, as well as problems of mtercultural understanding in social anthropology. His Plough, Sword and Book (1988) contains a case for ‘philosophic history’ on Weberian lines. He characterizes his position as ‘Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalist’ in terms of a denial °f relativism: a commitment to the view that ‘there 's external, objective, culture-transcending knowledge’. ‘Truth is independent of the social order..’. On the other hand, his Position ‘does not allow any culture to validate a Part of itself with final authority, to decree some substantive affirmation to be privileged and exempt from scrutiny’. Gellner,s a prolific and independent-minded writer with an enormous range of reference. Many current Philosophical fashions appear to him as the statements of problems rather than as solutions. His philosophizing about the cultural dominance of Western rationality has been more thorough than that of almost any other tecent thinker.

Interests

• Social anthropology; sociology. Theory of knowledge.