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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > General
Thomas White, in the quatercentenary of his birth, is due for
historical rehabilitation. English Catholic priest, philosopher,
theologian, and scientist, he was a renowned and notorious figure
in his own day; and, though long forgot ten, his work exemplifies
aspects of major current concern to historians of ideas: in
particular, the significance of the newly-revived sceptical
philosophy; the complexity ofthe transition from scholasticism to
the new philosophy; and the whole role of"minor," non-canonical
figures in the historyofthought. White's writings embrace theology,
politics, and natural philosophy, or science'; and in all these
three areas, his work, after centuries of comparative neglect, has
slowly been resurfacing. His theological significance received
intermittent recognition through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
early-twentieth centuries; but more recently his great importance
as leader of a whole "Blackloist" faction of English Catholics has
become increasingly clear. Condemned by co-religionists in his own
time as a dangerous heretic, he has been assessed by modem scholars
as an anticipator of twentieth-century trends in Catholic theology,
and even as "probably, after John Henry Newman, the most original
thinker as yet producedby modem English Catholicism."2 Blackloism
implied not only a theological, but also a political position; and
that position was clarified and publicised by White in his single
political treatise, The Grounds of Obedience and Government,
published in the mid 1650s. His provocative stance was widely
misunderstood and misinterpreted, and was soon anyway rendered
untenable by the restoration of the monarchy."
This work presents a rethinking of critical philosophy through the
recovery of a larger sense of aesthetics in Kant. It provides a
unitary reading of the "Critique of Judgement". This is situated in
relation to Kant's attempt to think ends in general. The question
of how to think ends is argued to guide Kant both in his treatment
of aesthetics and teleology and to provide the rationale for
critique itself.
Stephen Neale presents a powerful, original examination of a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of reality, that accurate or true representations are those that correspond to the facts. Facing Facts will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of mind and language, and will have profound implications far beyond.
In this important and engaging new book, Alastair Morgan offers a
detailed examination of the concept of life in Adorno's philosophy.
He relates Adorno's thought in this context to a number of key
thinkers in the history of Continental philosophy, including Marx,
Hegel, Heidegger and Agamben, and provides an argument for the
relevance and importance of Adorno's critical philosophy of life at
the beginning of the 21st century. Crucially, Morgan offers a new
framework for understanding the relation between concepts of life
and a critical philosophy. The concept of life has previously
received little attention in Adorno scholarship. However, the
concept of life is a constant theme and problem running throughout
Adorno's work, from his early critiques of life-philosophies to his
late philosophy of metaphysical experience as the possibility of
life. The idea that Adorno's philosophy is in need of or lacking in
a fundamental ontology has been the subject of a great deal of
critical attention, but this has rarely been examined through an
analysis of the concept of life. Furthermore, philosophies of life
have seen a resurgence in recent years (particularly with a renewed
interest in Bergson's philosophy via the critical reception of
Deleuze's philosophy). "Adorno's Concept of Life" is therefore a
necessary and timely study that offers a distinctive interpretation
of Adorno's philosophy, and will be of central interest to everyone
working on Adorno. Furthermore, it provides a powerful
interpretation of the critical force of Adorno's philosophy, that
will contribute to the renewed interest in the concept of life
within contemporary philosophy.
This is the first English translation of Condillac's most
influential works: the Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge
(1746) and Course for Study of Instruction of the Prince of Parma
(1772). The Essays lay the foundation for Condillac's theory of
mind. He argues that all mental operations are, in fact, sensory
processes and nothing more. An outgrowth of Locke's empirical
account of ideas and sensations as a source of knowledge,
Condillac's theory goes beyond Locke's foundations, introducing his
universal method for understanding any complex entity: the
reduction of all matters to their origins and then to their
simplest forms. The Course, originally written to teach Prince
Ferdinand of Parma to think and to develop good habits of mind
following the principle of association of ideas, covers grammar,
writing, reasoning, thinking, and ancient and modern history.
Philip writes in the introduction: "[the] mind is moldable to
reason and to 'nature' which gave it a model and provides the
ultimate authority for all it can know or do."
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Ethics
(Paperback, New edition)
Benedict Spinoza; Translated by W.H. White, A. K. Stirling; Introduction by Don Garrett; Series edited by Tom Griffith
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R151
Discovery Miles 1 510
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Translated by W.H.White and A.K.Stirling. With an Introduction by
Don Garrett. Benedict de Spinoza lived a life of blameless
simplicity as a lens-grinder in Holland. And yet in his lifetime he
was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam as a heretic,
and after his death his works were first banned by the Christian
authorities as atheistic, then hailed by humanists as the gospel of
Pantheism. His Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order shows us
the reality behind this enigmatic figure. First published by his
friends after his premature death at the age of forty-four, the
Ethics uses the methods of Euclid to describe a single entity,
properly called both 'God' and 'Nature', of which mind and matter
are two manifestations. From this follow, in ways that are
strikingly modern, the identity of mind and body, the necessary
causation of events and actions, and the illusory nature of free
will.
Hans Kelsen's efforts in the areas of legal philosophy and legal
theory are considered by many scholars of law to be the most
influential thinking of this century. This volume makes available
some of the best work extant on Kelsen's theory, including papers
newly translated into English. The book covers such topics as
competing philosophical positions on the nature of law, legal
validity, legal powers, and the unity of municipal and
international law. It also throws much light on Kelsen's
intellectual milieu--as well as his intellectual debts.
• A self-reflection on boundaries, compassion, and love , the
place they each have in therapy, and how this transfers to our
understand of life • Existential therapy and trauma, and
existential and transgenerational trauma or both topics with
increasing demand and general relevance. • Laura Barnett’s
writing is also well-known, and this book offers unique vignettes,
dialogues, and personal reflections that are enjoyable to read and
challenge the reader to think differently
This accessible and jargon-free book features readings of over 20
key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including
Homer, Plato, Beowulf , Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau.
Simon Haines presents a thought-provoking and theoretically aware
account of Western literature and philosophy, arguing that the
history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different
conceptions of the self: the 'romantic' (or dualist) vs the
'realist' or ('extended').
According to George Berkeley (1685-1753), there is fundamentally
nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. Ideas are
understood as pure phenomenal 'feels' which are momentarily had by
a single perceiver, then vanish. Surprisingly, Berkeley tries to
sell this idealistic philosophical system as a defense of
common-sense and an aid to science. However, both common-sense and
Newtonian science take the perceived world to be highly structured
in a way that Berkeley's system does not appear to allow. Kenneth
L. Pearce argues that Berkeley's solution to this problem lies in
his innovative philosophy of language. The solution works at two
levels. At the first level, it is by means of our conventions for
the use of physical object talk that we impose structure on the
world. At a deeper level, the orderliness of the world is explained
by the fact that, according to Berkeley, the world itself is a
discourse 'spoken' by God - the world is literally an object of
linguistic interpretation. The structure that our physical object
talk - in common-sense and in Newtonian physics - aims to capture
is the grammatical structure of this divine discourse. This
approach yields surprising consequences for some of the most
discussed issues in Berkeley's metaphysics. Most notably, it is
argued that, in Berkeley's view, physical objects are neither ideas
nor collections of ideas. Rather, physical objects, like forces,
are mere quasi-entities brought into being by our linguistic
practices.
In recent years, Niccolo Machiavelli's works have been viewed
primarily with historical interest as analyses of the tactics used
by immoral political officials. The author in this text, argues
that Machiavelli should be reconsidered as a major philosopher
whose thought makes the wisdom of antiquity accessible to the
modern (and post-modern) condition, and whose understanding of
human nature is superior to that of such moderns as Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, Marx or Mill. Central to this claim is the author's
discovery that Machiavelli knew and worked with Leonardo da Vinci
between 1502-1507. After introducing historical evidence of the
circumstances in which da Vinci and Machiavelli probably met, the
author reinterprets "The Prince" in the light of what came to be
modern science. He presents an account of Machiavelli's teaching as
a scientific approach to human nature and politics. In this
reading, the "lion, fox, and wolves" symbolise principles studied
in contemporary biology, whereas the "dikes and dams" controlling
the river of "fortune" describe Machiavelli's experience of
diverting the Arno river, apparently aided by Leonardo's expertise,
in hopes of winning a war with Pisa. Masters relates Machiaveli's
views to the history of centralised governments, to models in
rational choice or game theory, and to neo-Darwinian evolutionary
theory. This approach shows how Machiavelli's view of leadership
clarifies the role of television in industrialised societies and
the profound transformations in contemporary politics.
In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public
activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human
dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically
signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to
all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century
that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this,
dignity was instead a concept associated with social status.
Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery
in existing scholarship. Exactly when and why did "dignity" change
its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we
lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that "dignity"
now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of
disciplines attempt to answer such questions by clarifying the
presently murky history of "dignity," from classical Greek thought
through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day.
The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy: After Kant provides a
comprehensive introduction to the predominantly European
("Continental") interpretive tradition of philosophy after Kant in
one volume, and to the now predominantly Anglo-American analytic
tradition in the other. It features the extensive editorial
apparatus for which Norton Anthologies have been known and trusted
by professors and students alike for more than 50 years. Ideal for
courses at all levels in the history of philosophy after Kant,
these volumes belong on every philosopher's (and philosophy
student's) bookshelf.
This text offers an assessment of Jean-Paul Sartre as an exemplary
figure in the evolving political and cultural landscape of
post-1945 France. Sartre's originality is located in the tense
relationship that he maintained between deeply held revolutionary
political beliefs and a residual yet critical attachment to
traditional forms of cultural expression. A series of case studies
centred on Gaullism, communism, Maoism (Part 1), the theatre, art
criticism and the media (Part 2), illustrate the continuing
relevance and appeal of Sartre to the contemporary world.
Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection presents
the first general theory that links poetry in environmental thought
to poetry as an environment. James Sherry accomplishes this task
with a network model of connectivity that scales from the
individual to social to environmental practices. Selfie
demonstrates how parts of speech, metaphor, and syntax extend
bidirectionally from the writer to the world and from the writer
inward to identities that promote sustainable practices. Selfie
shows how connections in the biosphere scale up from operating
within the body, to social structures, to the networks that science
has identified for all life. The book urges readers to construct
plural identifications rather than essential claims of identity in
support of environmental diversity.
Since the early 1980s, there has been renewed scholarly interest in
the concept of Christian Humanism. A number of official Catholic
documents have stressed the importance of 'Christian humanism', as
a vehicle of Christian social teaching and, indeed, as a Christian
philosophy of culture. Fundamentally, humanism aims to explore what
it means to be human and what the grounds are for human
flourishing. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned
Christian authors from a variety of disciplines in the humanities,
Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism recovers a Christian humanist
ethos for our time. The volume offers a chronological overview
(from patristic humanism to the Reformation and beyond) and
individual examples (Jewell, Calvin) of past Christian humanisms.
The chapters are connected through the theme of Christian paideia
as the foundation for liberal arts education.
This volume is based to a large extent on the understanding of
biosemiotic literary criticism as a semiotic-model-making
enterprise. For Jurij Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, "nature writing
is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and
nature" (Timo Maran); biosemiotic literary criticism, itself a form
of nature writing and thus itself an ecological-niche-making
enterprise, will be considered to be a model of modeling, a model
of nature naturing. Modes and models of analysis drawn from Thomas
A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi's Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems
Theory and Semiotic Analysis as well as from Timo Maran's work on
"modeling the environment in literature," Edwina Taborsky's writing
on Peircean semiosis, and, of course, Jesper Hoffmeyer's formative
work in biosemiotics are among the most important organizing
elements for this volume.
This book presents Latin American Perspectives on women
philosophers, comprising selected articles from the First
International Conference of Women in Modern Philosophy that took
place in Rio de Janeiro City, Brazil, Latin America, in June of
2019. The conference brought together over twenty national,
transnational, and international philosophers from seven countries,
whose work combines historical and analytical insight to recover
the philosophical legacy of women philosophers. Historical and
analytical work on women's philosophical thought constitute efforts
to re-conceptualize what counts as philosophical knowledge and
re-appraise the epistemic relevance of written material that women
thinkers produced for most of history. This collection and the
conference that gave origin to it are testimony to the enduring
power of multinational and multicultural philosophical
collaboration.
In this book, Touko Vaahtera explores how "bodies of latent
potential," a cultural attachment to the idea of body as
potentiality, carries with it hierarchizing hopes about better
bodies. Vaahtera combines disability studies, cultural studies,
feminist science studies, transgender studies, post-colonial
studies, and Foucauldian genealogy to offer a provocative approach
that interrogates capacities and capabilities as obvious frameworks
for thinking about the body. Vaahtera explores how swimming skills
emerged as a specific biopolitical question in Finland, a country
that has been described as the "Land of a Thousand Lakes." Through
a profound cultural analysis focusing both on Finnish cultural
texts on swimming as well as manifold more globalized texts,
Vaahtera considers how the legacy of eugenics and colonialism, the
hopes of civilization, and homogenizing assumptions about bodies
frame how we think about human capacity.
This book analyzes the implication of secular/liberal values in
Western and human rights law and its impact on Muslim women. It
offers an innovative reading of the tension between the religious
and secular spheres. The author does not view the two as binary
opposites. Rather, she believes they are twin categories that
define specific forms of lives as well as a specific notion of
womanhood. This divergence from the usual dichotomy opens the doors
for a reinterpretation of secularism in contemporary Europe. This
method also helps readers to view the study of religion vs.
secularism in a new light. It allows for a better understanding of
the challenges that contemporary Europe now faces regarding the
accommodation of different religious identities. For instance, one
entire section of the book concerns the practice of veiling and
explores the contentious headscarf debate. It features case studies
from Germany, France, and the UK. In addition, the analysis
combines a wide range of disciplines and employs an integrated,
comparative, and inter-disciplinary approach. The author
successfully brings together arguments from different fields with a
comparative legal and political analysis of Western and Islamic law
and politics. This innovative study appeals to students and
researchers while offering an important contribution to the debate
over the role of religion in contemporary secular Europe and its
impact on women's rights and gender equality.
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