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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > General
Contemporary society very often asks of individuals and/or
corporate entities that they perform actions connected in some way
with the im moral actions of other individuals or entities.
Typically, in the attempt to determine what would be unacceptable
cooperation with such immoral actions, Christian scholars and
authorities refer to the distinction, which appears in the writings
of Alphonsus Liguori, between material and for mal cooperation, the
latter being connected in some way with the coop erator's intention
in so acting. While expressing agreement with most of Alphonsus's
determinations in these regards, Cooperation with Evil also argues
that the philosophical background to these determinations often
lacks coherence, especially when compared to related passages in
the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Having compared the philosophical
approaches of these two great moralists, Cooperation with Evil then
describes a number of ideas in Thomas's writings that might serve
as more effective tools for the anal ysis of cases of possible
immoral cooperation. The book also includes, as appendixes,
translations of relevant passages in both Alphonsus and Thomas.
It is unfashionable to talk about artistic truth. Yet the issues
traditionally addressed under that term have not disappeared.
Indeed, questions concerning the role of the artist in society, the
relationship between art and knowledge, and the validity of
cultural interpretation have intensified. Lambert Zuidervaart
challenges current intellectual fashions by proposing a new
hermeneutic theory of artistic truth that engages with both
analytic and continental philosophies and illuminates the
contemporary cultural scene. People turn to the arts as a way of
finding orientation in their lives, communities and institutions.
However, as the author shows, philosophers, hamstrung by their own
theories of truth, have been unsuccessful in accounting for this
common feature in our lives. This book portrays artistic truth as a
process of imaginative disclosure in which expectations of
authenticity, significance and integrity prevail. Understood in
this way, truth becomes central to the aesthetic and social value
of the arts.
Personality has emerged as a key factor when trying to understand
why people think, feel, and behave the way they do at work. Recent
research has linked personality to important aspects of work such
as job performance, employee attitudes, leadership, teamwork,
stress, and turnover. This handbook brings together into a single
volume the diverse areas of work psychology where personality
constructs have been applied and investigated, providing expert
review and analysis based on the latest advances in the field.
The image of Robert Boyle owes much to a series of evaluations of
him written shortly after his death by men who had known him well,
such as John Evelyn, Gilbert Burnet and Sir Peter Pett. This book
includes a selection of these previously unpublished texts.
'This is brilliant. A book about women in philosophy by women in
philosophy - love it!' Elif Shafak Where are the women
philosophers? The answer is right here. The history of philosophy
has not done women justice: you've probably heard the names Plato,
Kant, Nietzsche and Locke - but what about Hypatia, Arendt, Oluwole
and Young? The Philosopher Queens is a long-awaited book about the
lives and works of women in philosophy by women in philosophy. This
collection brings to centre stage twenty prominent women whose
ideas have had a profound - but for the most part uncredited -
impact on the world. You'll learn about Ban Zhao, the first woman
historian in ancient Chinese history; Angela Davis, perhaps the
most iconic symbol of the American Black Power Movement; Azizah Y.
al-Hibri, known for examining the intersection of Islamic law and
gender equality; and many more. For anyone who has wondered where
the women philosophers are, or anyone curious about the history of
ideas - it's time to meet the philosopher queens.
This book introduces readers to the writing of the French
philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, and discusses the uptake of his work
in education. Written from a personal perspective, the book tells
the story of the author's engagement with Ranciere's writing as an
educational researcher. The first part of the book introduces
Ranciere's interventions on democracy and politics, art and
aesthetics, emancipation, and education. The second part of the
book analyses how Ranciere's writing has been taken up in
considerations of emancipatory, democratic, and political
education, art(s) education, and innovative work in educational
research. The final part of the book appraises the significance of
Ranciere's writing for education and considers the difficult task
of applying his insights to educational scholarship.
David Lewis (1941-2001) was a celebrated and influential figure in
analytic philosophy. When Lewis died, he left behind a large body
of unpublished notes, manuscripts, and letters. This volume
contains two longer manuscripts which Lewis had originally intended
to turn into books, and thirty-one shorter items. The longer
manuscripts are 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel', his David Gavin
Young Lectures at the University of Adelaide, and 'Confirmation
Theory', which is based on a graduate course on probability and
logic that he gave at UCLA. Lewis's described his purposes in 'The
Paradoxes of Time Travel' as being, `(1) to solve a philosophical
problem hitherto largely ignored or casually mis-solved by
philosophers […]; (2) to introduce the layman to various topics
in metaphysics, since our problem turns out to connect with many
more familiar ones; and (3) to show of several of my favorite
doctrines and methods in metaphysics'. By contrast, 'Confirmation
Theory' is a technical work in which Lewis aimed to present in a
unified fashion what he considered to be the best from competing
theories of confirmation. Lewis described the work as
'Mathematically self-contained, with proofs for the major theorems;
but the mathematics is kept down to hairy high-school algebra'. The
thirty-one shorter items cover such topics as causation, freedom of
the will, probability, counterparts, reference, logic, value, and
divine evil. They are included here both for their intrinsic
philosophical interest and their historical value. This volume also
contains an intellectual biography of the young David Lewis by the
editors.
Hume's Science of Human Nature is an investigation of the
philosophical commitments underlying Hume's methodology in pursuing
what he calls 'the science of human nature'. It argues that Hume
understands scientific explanation as aiming at explaining the
inductively-established universal regularities discovered in
experience via an appeal to the nature of the substance underlying
manifest phenomena. For years, scholars have taken Hume to employ a
deliberately shallow and demonstrably untenable notion of
scientific explanation. By contrast, Hume's Science of Human Nature
sets out to update our understanding of Hume's methodology by using
a more sophisticated picture of science as a model.
Theology and Existentialism in Aeschylus revivifies the complex
question of fate and freedom in the tragedies of the famous Greek
playwright. Starting with Sartre's insights about radical
existential freedom, this book shows that Aeschylus is concerned
with the ethical ramifications of surrendering our lives to
fatalism (gods, curses, inherited guilt) and thoroughly
interrogates the plays for their complex insights into theology and
human motivation. But can we reconcile the radical freedom of
existentialism and the seemingly fatal world of tragedy, where gods
and curses and necessities wreak havoc on individual autonomy? If
forces beyond our control or comprehension are influencing our
lives, what happens to choice? How are we to conceive of ethics in
a world studiously indifferent to our choices? In this book, author
Ric Rader demonstrates that few understood the importance of these
questions better than the tragedians, whose literature dealt with a
central theological concern: What is a god? And how does god
affect, impinge upon, or even enable human freedom? Perhaps more
importantly: If god is dead, is everything possible, or nothing?
Tragedy holds the preeminent position with regard to these
questions, and Aeschylus, our earliest surviving tragedian, is the
best witness to these complex theological issues.
Alexander Crombie (1762-1840) was born in Aberdeen and originally
trained for the ministry, before running a private school and
writing on such diverse topics as philosophy, education and Latin
grammar. In his first published work, "An Essay on Philosophical
Necessity (1793), he defends the determinism of Priestley and Hume
and attacks the libertarian views of Price, Reid and James Gregory.
He returns to this theme in "Letters from Dr. James Gregory...with
Replies (1819), also published by Thoemmes Press.
Deepening divisions separate today's philosophers, first, from the
culture at large; then, from each other; and finally, from
philosophy itself. Though these divisions tend to coalesce publicly
as debates over the Enlightenment, their roots lie much deeper.
Overcoming them thus requires a confrontation with the whole of
Western philosophy. Only when we uncover the strange heritage of
Aristotle's metaphysics, as reworked, for example, by Descartes and
Kant, can we understand contemporary philosophy's inability to
dialogue with women, people of color, LGBTs, and other minority
groups. Only when we have understood that inability can we see how
the thought of Hegel and Heidegger contains the seeds of a remedy.
And only when armed with such a remedy can philosophy rise to the
challenges posed by thinkers such as David Foster Wallace and
Abraham Lincoln. The book's interpretations of these figures and
others past and present are as scrupulous as its conclusions will
be controversial. The result contributes to the most important
question confronting us today: does reason itself have a future?
The Hegel Lectures Series Series Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's
lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he
himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated
only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the
last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials
from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and
logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a
selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and
manuscripts. The original lecture series are reconstructed so that
the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume
presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial
introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the
identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. Lectures on
the Philosophy of Spirit 1827-8 Robert Williams provides the first
full view of Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in his
translation of this recently discovered manuscript. Hegel's
lectures of 1827 go far beyond the previously published
Encyclopedia outline, and provide a new introduction to the
Philosophy of Spirit. Since they come from a single source, they
are not editorial constructions like the previously published
supplemental materials (Zusaetze). The new material provides the
only explicit grounding of the concept of right presupposed by the
Philosophy of Right, grounds Hegel's account of the virtues in love
and mutual recognition, gives further insight into Hegel's theory
of madness/dementia, and elaborates Hegel's difficult account of
the role of mechanical memory in transcendental deduction of
objectivity. The edition should stimulate and open up interest in
Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, a neglected area in Hegel
scholarship, but one to which Hegel himself attached special
importance and significance.
Includes such contents as: Preface; Introduction; Early American
Philosophy - The Puritans; The Impact of Science; Jonathan Edwards;
Philosophy in Academia Revisited - Mainly Princeton; Philosophy in
the Middle Atlantic and Southern States - Metaphysics & Morals;
Philosophy in New England - Logic; Transcendentalism; and, Index.
What does the idea of taking 'the point of view of the universe'
tell us about ethics? The great nineteenth-century utilitarian
Henry Sidgwick used this metaphor to present what he took to be a
self-evident moral truth: the good of one individual is of no more
importance than the good of any other. Ethical judgments, he held,
are objective truths that we can know by reason. The ethical axioms
he took to be self-evident provide a foundation for utilitarianism.
He supplements this foundation with an argument that nothing except
states of consciousness have ultimate value, which led him to hold
that pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically good. Are
these claims defensible? Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer
test them against a variety of views held by contemporary writers
in ethics, and conclude that they are. This book is therefore a
defence of objectivism in ethics, and of hedonistic utilitarianism.
The authors also explore, and in most cases support, Sidgwick's
views on many other key questions in ethics: how to justify an
ethical theory, the significance of an evolutionary explanation of
our moral judgments, the choice between preference-utilitarianism
and hedonistic utilitarianism, the conflict between self-interest
and universal benevolence, whether something that it would be wrong
to do openly can be right if kept secret, how demanding
utilitarianism is, whether we should discount the future, or favor
those who are worse off, the moral status of animals, and what is
an optimum population.
- Historical Materialism Series - This original and comprehensive
study explores the formation, development and later 20th century
enrichments on Marx's historical materialism theories. It
innovatively interprets its formation period between 1835-1845
which has always been the object of heated discussions. The author
gives special attention on the thoughts Marx and Engels had
similarities and even agreement with their contemporaries
especially Feuerbach and followers of Hegel. Naturally each
philosopher has his own specific formation which applies for Marx,
and his unique differences with his contemporaries at the certain
point of time rapidly led him to establish the materialist concept
of history. Recently we see a revival of interest in the nature and
utility of this discovery by Marx. Debate amongst historians and
philosophers on Marx's assertions on the role of man as the subject
of history also the relations between Marx's practice view and
historical materialism is an important focus of the book which has
an impressive record three editions within ten years. Chen Xianda
passionately argues, "Social science can fully become as accurate
as natural science. To do this, the first thing is to determine its
nature accurately, that is, to have a scientific understanding of
the macroscopic laws of history. Different from living organisms,
the social organism has its unique laws. The various systems in
society with their special structures and functions are
interrelated and constitute an indivisible whole. It is impossible
to understand society without grasping the laws of social
development and without analyzing the nature and complex causality
in social phenomena. However, human understanding of society cannot
rest on the qualitative analysis, and quantitative analysis should
be conducted wherever it is possible. With the emergence of
world-wide technological revolutions, the spread of the system
theories, control/simulation theory, information theory and even
mathematical methods being applied into social sciences provides
conditions for the accurate grasp of the quantitative determination
of social phenomena. The mutual permeation between natural science
and social science is a progressive tendency, and Marxist
philosophy researchers should face the world and the contemporary
era, and summarize the new achievements in those technological
revolutions. The achievements in natural science enrich and affirm
instead of reducing the scientific character of the materialist
conception of history. No methods offered by natural science can
replace the materialist conception of history, and history has
proved that the methods of positivism and empiricism were
unsuitable." The author is among the leading researchers of history
and theories of Marxism in China, who greatly influenced several
important debates in the Chinese academia in the last three
decades, including those on Marxist humanism, the role of
superstructure, ontology and practical materialism. The generous
appendix part of the book with six of his famous articles, contains
author's important direct contributions to these debates, including
his ideas on the present issues of Marxist philosophy in China and
the world.
The essays in this volume gather together Gellner's thinking on the
connection between philosophy and life and they approach the topic
from a number of directions: philosophy of morals, history of
ideas, a discussion of individuals including R. G. Collingwood,
Noam Chomsky, Piaget and Eysenck and discussions on the setting of
philosophy in the general culture of England and America.
Giordano Bruno's visit to Elizabethan England in the 1580s left its
imprint on many fields of contemporary culture, ranging from the
newly-developing science, the philosophy of knowledge and language,
to the extraordinary flowering of Elizabethan poetry and drama.
This book explores Bruno's influence on English figures as
different as the ninth Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Harriot,
Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Originally published
in 1989, it is of interest to students and teachers of history of
ideas, cultural history, European drama and renaissance England.
Bruno's work had particular power and emphasis in the modern world
due to his response to the cultural crisis which had developed -
his impulse towards a new 'faculty of knowing' had a disruptive
effect on existing orthodoxies - religious, scientific,
philosophical, and political.
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