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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > General
This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations. It addresses questions such as: what enabled cultural communication across very divergent geographical, temporal, locational contexts and among different cultural formations of India over millennia? What is this shareable impulse that pulsates across the domains of dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, dharma, music, medicine, the lore of rivers and the epics? It explains how modern Indian languages and especially their creative and reflective nodes are unthinkable without the intricately woven textures of these interfaces and their responsive receptions. This book is of interest to philosophers, humanities students, researchers and professors as well as people interested in exploring alternatives to European traditions of thought without an alibi.
Across his relatively short and eccentric authorial career, Soren Kierkegaard develops a unique, and provocative, account of what it is to become, to be, and to lose a self, backed up by a rich phenomenology of self-experience. Yet Kierkegaard has been almost totally absent from the burgeoning analytic philosophical literature on self-constitution and personal identity. How, then, does Kierkegaard's work appear when viewed in light of current debates about self and identity-and what does Kierkegaard have to teach philosophers grappling with these problems today? The Naked Self explores Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, affective alienation from our past and future, psychological continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living and recent philosophers of identity (such as Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, Bernard Williams, J. David Velleman, Marya Schechtman, Mark Johnston, and others), Stokes reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant-if challenging-contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity.
This book traces the historical postcolonial journey of four generations of Jamaican psychiatrists challenging the European colonial 'civilizing mission' of psychiatric care. It details the process of deinstitutionizing patients with chronic mental illness using psychohistoriographic cultural therapy, by engaging them in creating sociodrama and poetry writing, not only to express and reverse the stigma contributing to their marginalized status, but also to reconnect them to a centuries-long history of oppression. The author thereby demonstrates that psychological decolonization requires a seminal understanding of the complex mental inter-relationship between slaves and slaveowners. Further, it is shown how the model analyzes the antipodal dialectic history of descendants of Africans enslaved in the New World by brutish British Imperialists suffering from the European psychosis of white supremacy. Drawing together a detailed description of the sociopoem Madnificent Irations, with an examination of Jamaica's political and social history, and the author's personal experience, this compelling work marks an important contribution to decolonial literature. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of postcolonial studies, critical race theory, the history of psychology and community psychology.
With few exceptions, the field of Eastern Christian studies has primarily been concerned with historical-critical analysis, hermeneutics, and sociology. For the most part it has not attempted to bring Eastern Christian philosophy into serious engagement with contemporary thought. This volume seeks to redress the matter by bringing the Eastern Christian tradition into a meaningful dialogue with contemporary philosophy. It boasts a diverse group of scholars-specialists in ancient philosophy, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophy-who engage with a wide range of pressing issues. Among other things, it addresses such topics as contemporary atheism, the metaphysics of action, religious epistemology, the philosophy of language, bioethics, the philosophy of race, and human rights. In so doing, it aims to introduce contemporary readers to unique perspectives and novel arguments often overlooked by mainstream anglophone philosophy.
ways of doing it, but it is wrong to project it far into the past: it did not exist at the turn of the century and only became clearly apparent after the Second World War. I recently taught at an American university on the his tory of philosophy from Balzano to Husserl. The course title had to come from a fixed pool and gave trouble. Was it philosophical logic, the nine teenth century, or phenomenology? A logic title would connote over this period Frege, Russell, Carnap, perhaps a mention of Boole: not continental enough. The nineteenth century? The century of Kant's successors: Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuer bach, Marx, Nietzsche? What have they to do with Balzano, Lotze, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl and Twardowski? Even tually 'Phenomenology' was chosen, misdescribing more than half of the course. That illustrates the problems one faces in trying to work against the picture of the period which is ingrained in minds and syllabuses. This book arises from my efforts to combat that picture. I backed into writing about the history of recent philosophy rather than setting out to do so. The beginning was chance. In Manchester in the early seventies, at a time when most English philosophy departments breathed re cycled Oxford air, the intellectual atmosphere derived from Cambridge and Warsaw, spiced with a breath of Freiburg and Paris."
This book is a fully updated and expanded new edition of An Introduction to Continental Philosophy, first published in 1996. It provides a clear, concise and readable introduction to philosophy in the continental tradition. It is a wide-ranging and reliable guide to the work of such major figures as Nietzsche, Habermas, Heidegger, Arendt, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida and i ek. At the same time, it situates their thought within a coherent overall account of the development of continental philosophy since the Enlightenment. Individual chapters consider the character of modernity, the Enlightenment and its continental critics; the ideas of Marxism, the Frankfurt School and Habermas; hermeneutics and phenomenology; existentialism; structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism. In addition to the thinkers already mentioned, there is extended discussion of the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, Husserl, Gadamer, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir and Lyotard. The new edition includes an additional, full-length chapter on continental philosophy in the twenty-first century focusing on Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Slavoj i ek. Continental Philosophy: An Introduction is an invaluable introductory text for courses on continental philosophy as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences dealing with major figures or influential approaches within that tradition.
For the first time in English, this anthology offers a comprehensive selection of primary sources in the history of philosophy of language. Beginning with a detailed introduction contextualizing the subject, the editors draw out recurring themes, including the origin of language, the role of nature and convention in fixing form and meaning, language acquisition, ideal languages, varieties of meanings, language as a tool, and the nexus of language and thought, linking them to representative texts. The handbook moves on to offer seminal contributions from philosophers ranging from the pre-Socratics up to John Stuart Mill, preceding each major historical section with its own introductory assessment. With all of the most relevant primary texts on the philosophy of language included, covering well over two millennia, this judicious, and generous, selection of source material will be an indispensable research tool for historians of philosophy, as well as for philosophers of language, in the twenty-first century. A vital tool for researchers and contemporary philosophers, it will be a touchstone for much further research, with coverage of a long and varied tradition that will benefit today's scholars and enhance their awareness of earlier contributions to the field.
"Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, "Second Edition presents an interpretation of the negative and critical self-understanding characteristic of culture since romanticism and especially since Nietzsche, and answers the question of why the issue of modernity became a philosophical problem in European tradition. Pippin defends an original re-narration of the development of modern philosophy, substantially different from that common in orthodox, postmodernist and critical theory discussions, and one much more sensitive to the radicality of the most complete expression and defense of a modernist self-understanding - the classical German Idealist tradition, especially the position defended by Hegel. This interpretation is the basis for the claim that no paradigm shift, ideology critique, or new way of thinking can dispense with or overcome such modernist aspirations. In fact, the author argues, one can still detect the persistence of such aspirations and commitments in some of the harshest modernity critics, in Nietzsche and in Heidegger especially. This unique and engaging view of modernity is an essential read for students, academics, and researchers studying Modernism, 20th Century Philosophy, Social Theory, and Hegel and German Idealism.
This book examines the nature, sources, and implications of fallacies in philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it illustrates and evaluates various historical instances of this phenomenon. There is widespread interest in the practice and products of philosophizing, yet the important issue of fallacious reasoning in these matters has been effectively untouched. Nicholas Rescher fills this gap by presenting a systematic account of the principal ways in which philosophizing can go astray.
This is the first full study in English of the German historicist tradition. Frederick C. Beiser surveys the major German thinkers on history from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, providing an introduction to each thinker and the main issues in interpreting and appraising his thought. The volume offers new interpretations of well-known philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Max Weber, and introduces others who are scarcely known at all, including J. A. Chladenius, Justus Moeser, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Beyond an exploration of the historical and intellectual context of each thinker, Beiser illuminates the sources and reasons for the movement of German historicism-one of the great revolutions in modern Western thought, and the source of our historical understanding of the human world.
(YET ANOTHER INTRODUCTION IN PHENOMENOLOGY) In both his published and unpublished works, Edmund Husserl, the "father of phenomenology," struggles repeatedly with the relation of the individual subject and intersubjectivity. Since his phenomenology is based upon the temporalizing foundations of the subject, though, he is often accused of solipsism, and his efforts at integrating the subject with an intersubjective existence are registered as falling short of their goal. Important philosophers who use phenomenology as their basis, such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, furthermore, while implicitly criticizing his limitations, assume the existence of intersubjective foundations without 2 taking up the existence and formation of these foundations themselves. This book addresses the above problematic at several levels: First, it is a careful analysis of Husserl's understanding of inner time-consciousness. I take up each aspect of temporalizing consciousness (i. e. , Urimpression, retention, and protention), explaining it in light of Husserl's phenomenology and showing how it functions in the whole of the "living present," i. e. , our active, constituting consciousness. These sections of the book are helpful both to the uninitiated student trying to enter the world of Husserl's "inner ti- consciousness" and to the experienced Husserl scholar who desires a closer look at Husserl's theory of temporalizing consciousness. Second, as my analyses take us to Husserl's recently published manuscripts, I provide an explanation of Husserl's later considerations of temporalizing consciousness, showing how he developed his earliest conceptions.
Nietzsche's Immoralism begins a two-volume critical reconstruction of a socialist, democratic, and non-liberal Nietzschean politics. Nietzsche's ideal of amor fati (love of fate) cannot be individually adopted because it is incompatible with deep freedom of agency. However, we can create its social conditions thanks to an underappreciated aspect of his will-to-power psychology. We are driven not toward domination and conquest but toward resistance, contest, and play-a heightened feeling of power provoked by equal challenges that enables the non-instrumental affirmation of suffering. This incompatibilist, anti-teleological psychology leads to Nietzsche's distinctive immoralism: the abandonment of cultural means of human improvement for a historical materialist politics of breeding that produces future higher types through changes to our political order's material conditions. Politics becomes first philosophy: it is not grounded in moral values but is instead the very source of their legitimacy. Moreover, despite Nietzsche's professed aristocratism, his immoralism offers a stronger foundation for a renewed left, attacking conservative politics at its very root: the belief in moral order, authority, and responsibility.
With today's conservative mood on university and college campuses, academics and students will find "The Left Academy" a useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology fields such as social work and health. "The Left Academy" features essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition to the essays, this third volume includes a summary of Marxism--where it stands today and where it may go in the future. Students, academics, and general readers will find the book thought-provoking.
In this book, Justin Pack proposes a genealogy of the traditional suspicion of money and merchants. This genealogy is framed both by how money itself has changed and how different traditions responded to money. Money and merchants became heavily debated concerns in the Axial Age, which coincided with the spread of coinage. A deep suspicion of money and merchants was particularly notable in the Greek, Confucian and Christian traditions, and continued into the Middle Ages. These traditions wrestled with a new dialectic of purity that also appears with the widespread use of money. How were these concerns dealt with politically, socially and philosophically? How did they change over time? How did medieval Europe deal with money and how did this inform modern governmentality? To answer these questions, Pack turns to Hanna Arendt's work. Arendt argues that one of the outstanding characteristics of our time is thoughtlessness. This thoughtlessness is related to how modern life, especially under neoliberalism, is increasingly structured by abstract systems, abstract calculative rationality, abstract relations, and the profit motive. Money both drives and embodies this machinery. The hyper-complex abstract systems of modernity discourage, to use Arendtian terms, "thinking" (wonder, questioning everything) in favor of "cognition" (problem solving). Too often the result is thoughtless cognition-the ability to make things more productive and efficient paired with the incapacity to question and challenge the implications and morality of these systems.
This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives-from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noe, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.
A complete bibliography of British philosophy in a single source, this reference covers the period of 1870 to the present day. It contains entries on over 600 names, listing not only each author's books, but also his/her shorter writing and relevant secondary sources.
This book makes a compelling case for utilising experiences of resonance in various academic and societal fields. The concept of resonance was first introduced by Hartmut Rosa to foreground the importance of affective, emotional, transformative and uncontrollable experiences in socio-political contexts that he characterizes as alienating. Based on a critical reading of Rosa's theory and further developed through engagement with Theodor W. Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and others, this book introduces the notion of a 'spectrum of resonance' which encompasses both critical resonance and affirmationist resonance. This spectrum of resonance is used to analyse various forms of aesthetic experience illustrated with reference to Edgar Reitz's film Heimat and the music of Nick Cave and Kayhan Kalhor. The spectrum is also deployed in the fields of museum, memory and trauma studies to show how experiences of resonance contribute to the constitution of political and social identities. The focus here is on memory practices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the book seeks to decolonize resonance theory.
Gordon Graham presents a radically innovative study of Wittgenstein's philosophy, in relation to the age-old impulse to connect ordinary human life with the transcendent reality of God. He offers an account of its relevance to the study of religion that is completely different to the standard version of 'Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion' expounded by both its adherents and critics. Graham goes on to revitalize the philosophy of 'true religion', an alternative, though not a rival, to the lively philosophical theology of Plantinga and Swinburne that currently dominates the subject. This alternative style of philosophy of religion has equally deep historical roots in the philosophical works of Spinoza, Hume, Schleiermacher, and Mill. At the same time, it is more easily connected to the psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies of William James, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, and Mary Douglas. Graham uses Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy to argue in favour of the idea that 'true religion' is to be understood as human participation in divine life.
Hegel gave lecture series on aesthetics or the philosophy of art in various university terms, but never published a book of his own on this topic. His student, H. G. Hotho, compiled auditors' transcripts from these separate lecture series and produced from them the three volumes on aesthetics in the standard edition of Hegel's collected works. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert has now published one of these transcripts, the Hotho transcript of the 1823 lecture series, and accompanied it with a very extensive introductory essay treating many issues pertinent to a proper understanding of Hegel's views on art. She persuasively argues that the evidence shows Hegel never finalized his views on the philosophy of art, but modified them in significant ways from one lecture series to the next. In addition, she makes the case that Hotho's compilation not only concealed this circumstance, by the harmony he created out of diverse source materials, but also imposed some of his own views on aesthetics, views that differ from Hegel's and that the ongoing interpretation of the aesthetics part of Hegel's philosophy has unfortunately taken to be Hegel's own. This translation of the German volume, which contains the first publication of the Hotho transcript and Gethmann-Siefert's essay, makes these important materials accessible to the English reader, materials that should put the English-speaking world's future understanding and interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of art on a sounder footing.
Composition is the relation between a whole and its parts-the parts are said to compose the whole; the whole is composed of the parts. But is a whole anything distinct from its parts taken collectively? It is often said that 'a whole is nothing over and above its parts'; but what might we mean by that? Could it be that a whole just is its parts? This collection of essays is the first of its kind to focus on the relationship between composition and identity. Twelve original articles-written by internationally renowned scholars and rising stars in the field-argue for and against the controversial doctrine that composition is identity. An editor's introduction sets out the formal and philosophical groundwork to bring readers to the forefront of the debate.
The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards. Beginning with Plato’s extensive thinking about work’s relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world’s only treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe. This original study of Plato and his inheritors’ ideas provides practical suggestions for how to approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality. |
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