Concept auditing is based on an innovative premise for philosophers: when they address an everyday life conception on the order of knowledge, truth, justice, fairness, beauty, or the like and purport to be dealing with what it involves, then they must honor the existing meanings of these terms. And insofar as the prevailing meaning is being contravened, they must explain how and justify why this is being done. They must, in sum, explain how their treatment of a topic relates to our established pre-systematic understanding of the issues involved and relate their deliberations to the prevailing conception of the matter they are proposing to discuss. The aim of a concept audit is to consider to what extent a given philosophical discussion honors this communicative obligation. Concept Audits sets out not only to explain and defend this procedure, but also to consider a host of applications and exemplifications of these ideas. Nicholas Rescher shows how this method of conceptual auditing can function to elucidate and evaluate philosophical theses and doctrine across a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from logic to ethics and metaphysics. Accordingly, he explains and illustrates an instructive innovation in philosophical method. This new study of philosophical methodology presents its method in a clear and convincing way and shows the method at work with respect to a wide spectrum of important philosophical issues.

Humans have been chasing immortality since the beginning of history, seeking answers to sickness and aging, death and the afterlife, and questioning the human condition. Analyzing ideas from ancient Sumer, Egypt, Greece and India, as well as the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this study explores how early religious models influenced later beliefs about immortality, the afterlife, the human soul, resurrection, and reward and punishment. The author highlights shared teachings among the most influential religions and philosophies, concluding that humankind has not substantially changed its conceptions of immortality in 6,000 years. This continuity of belief may be due to chromosomal memory and cultural inheritance, or may represent a fundamental way of conceptualizing the afterlife to cope with mortality.

This book demonstrates that classical sociology is essential to cutting-edge debates in the contemporary social sciences. It has become fashionable to play down the importance of the classic text in sociology and critique the ideas of Weber, Marx and Durkheim as ideologically outdated. The author mounts a strong challenge to this view, criticising such notions as de-traditionalization, structuration and postmodernism, emphasizing instead the relevance of habit, re-traditionalization, and social integration across time. Arguing that sociology has eliminated the importance of the past, history, and tradition in favour of the transience of the present, he revisits the Habermas-Gadamer debate to argue that tradition is the ground of the classic, and the classic something that must prove itself anew in subsequent situations. He uses the work of Durkheim, Simmel and Weber to illustrate this process. Making a distinction between 'classic' and 'canon' which parallels that between 'agency' and 'structure', he allows the reader to appreciate the separate value of both. This major contribution to the field is essential reading for scholars and students of sociology and social theory.

In this study Dr. Gregory examines how Diderot borrowed from Lucretius, Buffon, Maupertuis, and probability theory, and combined ideas from these sources in an innovative fashion to hypothesize that species are mutable and that all life arose randomly from a single prototype.

Contents:
Introduction 1.Good Teaching 2.Truth and Liberal Education Liberal Education and Vocational Preparation 3.Paul Hirst's Structure, or The Uses and Abuses of an Overworked Concept The Curriculum: The Timeless and the Timebound Curriculum and the Mirror of Knowledge 4.Moral and Religious Education: Hirst's Perception of Their Scope and Relationship 5.Wittgenstein's Speculative Aesthetics in its Ethical Context The Arts, Well-being and Education 6.Education, Knowledge and Practices

What does heredity mean for identity? What role does the individual have in shaping a personal or a human history? What is the ethical status of seemingly biologically determined behaviours? What does individual death mean in the light of species extinction? Autobiologies explores the importance of such questions in Victorian life writing. Analysing memoirs, diaries, letters, and natural histories Alexis Harley demonstrates how theories of natural selection shaped nineteenth-century autobiographical practices and refashioned the human subject-and also how the lived experience of the individual theorist simultaneously impacted their biological formulations.

Organized as a companion volume to Karl Rahner's master work, "Foundations of Christian Faith", this book, now again available, also provides the most useful introduction to his theology as a whole. Each chapter presents a broad commentary on the corresponding chapter of Foundations, beginning with Rahner's method and anthropology and concluding with his theology of the church and eschatology. It includes a separate chapter on Rahner's moral thought. Valuable for classroom or individual use, this volume provides questions for discussion, suggestions for further reading, and an extensive glossary of specialized terminology.

Western dualism is an illusion. Reality is a dialectical unity of incarnate love through the condition of the possibilities of divine and human, spirit and matter, Self and Other. The historical development to this metaphysical view is investigated in depth. Incarnation is a "legitimate pantheism." Similarities to the Aum, the Tao, Rastafari and the "New Physics" are also provided. Incarnation offers an understanding of the Self with ethical and cultural applications which are presented in the material-supernatural existential of music and dance found in the Riddim of Creation.

Arguing that we ought to look to psychedelic aesthetics of the 1960s in relation to current crises in liberal democracy, this book emphasizes the intersection of European thought and the psychedelic. The first half of the book focuses on philosophical influences of Herbert Marcuse and Antonin Artaud, while the second half shifts toward literary and theoretical influences of Aldous Huxley on psychedelic aesthetics. Framed within an emergent discourse of political theology, it suggests that taking a postsecular approach to psychedelic aesthetics helps us understand deeper connections between aesthetics and politics.

The core of what we refer to as 'the project of modernity' is the idea that human beings have the power to bring the world under their control, and hence it is based on a 'kinetic utopia' the movement of the world as a whole reflects the implementation of our plans for it. But as soon as the kinetic utopia of modernity is exposed, its seemingly stable foundation cracks open and new problems appear: things don't happen according to plan because as we actualize our plans, we set in motion other things that we didn't want as unintended side-effects. We watch with mounting unease as the self-perpetuating side-effects of modern progress overshadow our plans, as a foreign movement breaks off from the very core of the modern project supposedly guided by reason and slips away from us, spinning out of control. What looked like a steady march towards freedom turns out to be a slide into an uncontrollable and catastrophic syndrome of perpetual mobilization. And precisely because so much comes about through our actions, these developments turn out to have explosive consequences for our self-understanding, as we begin to realize that, so far from bringing the world under our control, we are instead the agents of our own destruction. In this brilliant and insightful book Sloterdijk lays out the elements of a new critical theory of modernity understood as a critique of political kinetics, shifting the focus of critical theory from production to mobilization and shedding new light on a world facing the growing risk of humanly induced catastrophe.

Poststructuralism--as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing--has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre KojEve's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George CanguilheM's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially Andre Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers.

This volume is dedicated to the life and work of Ernest Nagel (1901-1985) counted among the influential twentieth-century philosophers of science. Forgotten by the history of philosophy of science community in recent years, this volume introduces Nagel's philosophy to a new generation of readers and highlights the merits and originality of his works. Best known in the history of philosophy as a major American representative of logical empiricism with some pragmatist and naturalist leanings, Nagel's interests and activities went beyond these limits. His career was marked with a strong and determined intention of harmonizing the European scientific worldview of logical empiricism and American naturalism/pragmatism. His most famous and systematic treatise on, The Structure of Science, appeared just one year before Thomas Kuhn's even more renowned, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a reflection of Nagel's interdisciplinary work, the contributing authors' articles are connected both historically and systematically. The volume will appeal to students mainly at the graduate level and academic scholars. Since the volume treats historical, philosophical, physical, social and general scientific questions, it will be of interest to historians and philosophers of science, epistemologists, social scientists, and anyone interested in the history of analytic philosophy and twentieth-century intellectual history.

This book explores the presence of Galen of Pergamon (129 - c. 216 AD) in early modern philosophy, science, and medicine. After a short revival due to the humanistic rediscovery of his works, the influence of the great ancient physician on Western thought seemed to decline rapidly as new discoveries made his anatomy, physiology, and therapeutics more and more obsolete. In fact, even though Galenism was gradually dismissed as a system, several of his ideas spread through the modern world and left their mark on natural philosophy, rational theology, teleology, physiology, biology, botany, and the philosophy of medicine. Without Galen, none of these modern disciplines would have been the same. Linking Renaissance with the Enlightenment, the eleven chapters of this book offer a unique and detailed survey of both scientific and philosophical Galenisms from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Figures discussed include Julius Caesar Scaliger, Giambattista Da Monte, Hyeronimus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Andrea Cesalpino, Thomas Browne, Kenelm Digby, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Guillaume Lamy, Jean-Baptiste Verduc, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, and Kurt Sprengel.

As a phenomenologist Lacoste is concerned with investigating the human aptitude for experience; as a theologian Lacoste is interested in humanity's potential for a relationship with the divine, what he terms the 'liturgical relationship'. Beginning from the proposition that prayer is a theme that occurs throughout Lacoste's writing, and using this proposition as a heuristic through which to view, interpret and critique his thought, this book examines Lacoste's place amid both the recent 'theological turn' in French thought and the post-war emergence of la nouvelle theologie. Drawing upon unpublished and out of print material previously only available in French, Romanian or German, the book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, phenomenology and theology.

Originally published in 1931, Muirhead's study aims to challenge the view that Locke's empiricism is the main philosophical thought to come out of England, suggesting that the Platonic tradition is much more prominent. These views are explored in detail in this text as well as touching on its development in the nineteenth century from Coleridge to Bradley and discussions on Transcendentalism in the United States. This title will be of interest to students of Philosophy.

Myths and metaphors share not only an ability to call our attention to aspects of our world of which we were previously unaware, but also a propensity toward symbolic meanings and interpretations. In Existential Philosophy and the Promise of Education: Learning from Myths and Metaphors, Professor Gordon draws on some well-known myths and metaphors of various Existentialist thinkers and writers as a lens and an interpretative framework with which to explore a variety of issues in philosophy of education. His book argues that symbolic or metaphorical interpretations can offer us representations of problems in education that go beyond what we can gain when we consider them only in their literal sense. Existential Philosophy and the Promise of Education is an excellent classroom text for a variety of foundations courses, including the Philosophy of Education.

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Philosophical Skepticism" provides a selection of texts drawn from the skeptical tradition of Western philosophy as well as texts written by opponents of skepticism. Taken together with the historical introduction by Landesman and Meeks, these texts clearly illustrate the profound influence that skeptical stances have had on the nature of philosophical inquiry.
Draws a selection of texts from the skeptical tradition of Western philosophy as well as texts written by opponents of skepticism.
Spans centuries of skeptical and anti-skeptical arguments, from Socrates to Rorty.
Includes essays by Plato, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Russell, Quine, Nagel, and many others.
Provides a solid foundation for further study.

Fuery explores the relationship between post-structuralism and absence. In order to understand the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan (and Freud), the deconstructionalist methodology of Derrida, Foucault's studies of systems of thought, and Kristeva's socio-cultural and psychoanalytic interests, Fuery believes it is necessary to take into consideration the function and operation of absence. He shows how post-structuralist theory can be seen as a system of studies of subjectivity in terms of absence, and how desire is based almost entirely on the precondition of absence. The study is divided into sections on subjectivity. desire, and meaning, with the final section working toward a hermeneutics and semiotics of absence.

Myths and metaphors share not only an ability to call our attention to aspects of our world of which we were previously unaware, but also a propensity toward symbolic meanings and interpretations. In Existential Philosophy and the Promise of Education: Learning from Myths and Metaphors, Professor Gordon draws on some well-known myths and metaphors of various Existentialist thinkers and writers as a lens and an interpretative framework with which to explore a variety of issues in philosophy of education. His book argues that symbolic or metaphorical interpretations can offer us representations of problems in education that go beyond what we can gain when we consider them only in their literal sense. Existential Philosophy and the Promise of Education is an excellent classroom text for a variety of foundations courses, including the Philosophy of Education.

Few philosophers have been as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. His detractors and followers alike have often fundamentally misinterpreted him, distorting his views and intentions and criticizing or celebrating him for reasons removed from the views he actually held. Now Nietzsche assesses his place in European thought, concentrating upon his writings in the last decade of his productive life.

This book represents a selected collection of the writings, from 1950 to 1960, of members of the Human Relations Research Group (HRRG), from UCLA. The writings are followed by independent comments and appraisal from different viewpoints, prepared by distinguished experts in management theory, group psycho-therapy and psychology and sociology.

This book aims to provide a detailed introduction to the whole body of Foucault's work, with a particular emphasis on his literary theory. The author examines Foucault's early studies of "transgressive" writing from Sade and Artaud, to the French "new novelists" of the 1960s, and his later concern with the genealogy of the author/intellectual, writing and theorizing within specific, historical mechanisms of social control and production. "Foucault and Literature" offers a critique both of Foucault and of the literary studies that have been influenced by him, and goes on to develop new methods of post-Foucauldian literary/cultural analysis. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of literary theory, literary criticism and cultural studies.