Author Description

"The publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses has given rise to wide-ranging and often bitter debate about the extent and limits of toleration in a modern multicultural society. This book calmly and carefully explores several features of that debate, and also places it in a wider context of philosophical concern about the proper relationship between liberalism, multiculturalism and toleration under modern conditions. The essays focus primarily on theoretical questions but they are always alert to the practical significance and implications of these questions. A wide variety of points of view is represented and, though the book raises issues of concern to everyone, it should be of particular value to those with a professional or academic interest in the problems presented by a multicultural society and to all those who have been challenged or confused by the frequently intemperate arguments which have surrounded the publication of Rushdie's novel. -- Book jacket.