This volume attempts, from many points of view, to investigate what has now become a cliché: has the relativist culture, some would also say nihilist, truly assumed general philosophical importance? What if the relativist culture of our times, which claims to be an insuperable truth and by no means relative, hid a far more complex and ambiguous reality?
Certainly, contemporary epistemology is reorienting itself; but does this reorientation express a 'relativism'? We doubt it. More precisely, the collection of texts presented in this book attempts to give account of a system that is more complex than is commonly thought, offering the reader a vast overview of the modern-day sensibilities in the field of epistemology, that are not reduced to a relativism.

Patrick Nerhot is a full professor of Philosophy of Law at the Law Faculty, Turin University, Italy. A selection of his publications: Legal Knowledge and Analogy. Fragments of Legal Epistemology, Hermeneutics and Linguistics (ed.), Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1991; Law Writing, Meaning: an Essay in legal Hermeneutics, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1992; L'ipotesi perduta della legge, Cedam, Padova, 1994; La fenomenologia della filosofia analitica del linguaggio ordinario, Cedam, Padova, 1998; Questions phénoménologiques suivies de lectures freudiennes, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2002; La métaphore du passage. Le concept de temps chez Saint Augustin, fondement d'une nouvelle éthique, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2008.