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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > General
George Berkeley's investigation of human epistemology remains one
of the most respected of its time - this edition contains the
treatise in full, complete with the author's preface. One of
Berkeley's most important beliefs was that of immaterialism. The
meaning being that nothing material exists unless it is perceived
by something or someone. Distinct from solipsism - the belief that
only the self exists - Berkeley's view is that material items are
ideas formed by distinct conscious minds; the concept of reality
being simply the summation of shared ideas rather than physical
objects fascinated philosophers of the era. Much of Berkeley's
philosophy is framed by then-new discoveries in the field of
physics. The concepts of color and light thus have a frequent
bearing on the overall thesis; disagreeing with Isaac Newton on the
subject of space, it was later that Berkeley's contrarian opinions
on matters such as calculus and free-thinking gained him further
renown.
This is above all a practical book. It discusses with a wealth of
illustration and insight such subjects as the organization of the
intellectual worker's time, materials, and his life; the
integration of knowledge and the relation of one's specialty to
general knowledge; the choice and use of reading; the discipline of
memory; the taking of notes, their classification and use; and the
preparation and organization of the final production.
This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and
Guattari's philosophy and architecture. Presenting their
wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture,
each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical
concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or
extends it. Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines
and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L.
Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually
substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of
architectural production and experimentation become inextricable
from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers,
producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and
experimental engagements with their ideas.
Ethology, or how animals relate to their environments, is currently
enjoying increased academic attention. A prominent figure in this
scholarship is Gilles Deleuze and yet, the significance of his
relational metaphysics to ethology has still not been scrutinised.
Jason Cullen's book is the first text to analyse Deleuze's
philosophical ethology and he prioritises the theorist's
examination of how beings relate to each other. For Cullen,
Deleuze's Cinema books are integral to this investigation and he
highlights how they expose a key Deleuzian theme: that beings are
fundamentally continuous with each other. In light of this
continuity then, Cullen reveals that how beings understand each
other shapes them and allows them to transform their shared worlds.
A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the
diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black
explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while
reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the
controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish.
This approach operates a critical shift by examining
psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black
desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of
psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black
texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black
literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial
and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical
system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities. The
Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin,
Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and
Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves
African American Culture, Fanonian and Caribbean Thought, South
African Black Consciousness, French Theory, Psychoanalysis, and
Gender and Queer Studies.
What does it mean to see time in the visual arts and how does art
reveal the nature of time? Paul Atkinson investigates these
questions through the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson,
whose theory of time as duration made him one of the most prominent
thinkers of the fin de siecle. Although Bergson never enunciated an
aesthetic theory and did not explicitly write on the visual arts,
his philosophy gestures towards a play of sensual differences that
is central to aesthetics. This book rethinks Bergson's philosophy
in terms of aesthetics and provides a fascinating and original
account of how Bergsonian ideas aid in understanding time and
dynamism in the visual arts. From an examination of Bergson's
influence on the visual arts to a reconsideration of the
relationship between aesthetics and metaphysics, Henri Bergson and
Visual Culture explores what it means to reconceptualise the visual
arts in terms of duration. Atkinson revisits four key themes in
Bergson's work - duration; time and the continuous gesture; the
ramification of life and durational difference - and reveals
Bergsonian aesthetics of duration through the application of these
themes to a number of 19th and 20th-century artworks. This book
introduces readers and art lovers to the work of Bergson and
contributes to Bergsonian scholarship, as well as presenting a new
of understanding the relationship between art and time.
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