This book began as a series of essays on the way knowledge is constructed by different groups of people: masons, Polynesian navigators, malariologists, turbulence engineers and cartographers. Now the book is finished it seems to be a reflection on modernity and the problems we have in understanding it. This slightly odd effect of an unplanned outcome may be the common authorial sensation of the book having a voice of its own. But I suspect it illustrates the illusory nature of one of the core tenets of modernity—that the technoscientific knowledge, upon which the concept of modernity is based, epitomises planning, rationality and order. This book is in large part a reexamination of the supposed planned and rational character of technoscientific knowledge. Rather than being governed by logic and method, modernity’s drive for order conceals its messy, contingent, unplanned and arational character. If we wish to rethink the way we produce knowledge and the forms of knowledge we value, we need to recognise, even celebrate, its unplanned and messy nature. The book assumes that there is not just one universal form of knowledge (Western science), but a variety of knowledges. Moreover, a cross-cultural, comparative form of analysis is required to understand our own knowledge traditions. For this reason I consider examples from a variety of periods and cultures in order to explore the ways in which we are constituted as knowng subjects through the very processes of knowing that we construct. At the same time I think it is incumbent on me to examine the nature of the sociological stance that provides for such an analysis. In that reflexive sense my position could be characterised as postmodern, but I aim to break with the limitations of both the postmodern and the modern and argue for the transmodern—a way station at which some kind of synthesis of the two can be achieved, without the excesses of either.

Эта книга - авторизованный перевод работы известного философа, востоковеда и писателя, профессора Школы востоковедения Лондонского университета Александра Пятигорского "Who's Afraid of Freemasons? Phenomenon of Freemasonry", вышедшей в 1997 году. В ней читатель найдет очерк истории британского и американского масонства, а также феноменологический анализ этого явления и структуралистский разбор масонского ритуала. Книга Александра Пятигорского не является ни апологетической, ни критической к объекту описания; это даже не столько история "вольных каменщиков", сколько анализ рефлексии как самих масонов, так и исторического изменения отношения к Братству.