Drawing on the culture's history before and after the birth of rap music, this book argues that the values attributed to Hip Hop by 'postmodern' scholars stand in stark contrast with those that not only implicitly guided its aesthetic elements, but are explicitly voiced by Hip Hop's pioneers and rap music's most consequential artists. It argues that the structural evacuation of the voices of its founders and organic intellectuals in the postmodern theorization of Hip Hop has foreclosed the culture's ethical values and political goals from scholarly view, undermining its unity and progress. Through a historically informed critique of the hegemonic theoretical framework in Hip Hop Studies, and a re-centering of the culture's fundamental proscription against 'biting,' this book articulates and defends the aesthetic and ethical values of Hip Hop against their concealment and subversion by an academic discourse that merely 'samples' the culture for its own reactionary ends.

Alain Badiou was born in 1937 in Rabat and Jean-Claude Milner in 1941 in Paris. They were both involved in the "Red Years" at the end of the Sixties and both were Maoists, but while Badiou was focusing all his attention on China, Milner was already taking his distance from it. Over the years, that original dispute over the destiny of gauchisme was fueled by deep, new differences between them concerning the role of philosophy and politics. In this wide-ranging and compelling dialogue, these two great thinkers explore the role of politics in today's world and consider the need for a formal theory of communist political organization. Whether they are addressing the era of revolutions, and in particular the Paris Commune and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or discussing the infinite, the universal, the name "Jew", violence, capitalism, the left, or Europe, Jean-Claude Milner's dyed-in-the-wool skepticism constantly runs up against Alain Badiou's doctrinal passion. This extraordinary debate ultimately leads to new areas of interrogation and shows that there is no better remedy for the crushing power of media-influenced thinking than the revival of the great disputes of the mind.

Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, by Franco Berardi 'Bifo', originates in the author's close personal acquaintance with Felix Guattari's writings and political engagement in the context of Berardi Bifo's activism in Italian autonomist politics and his ongoing collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s and 1980s. This biography gains distinction from its keen insight into Guattari's political practice and from a precise understanding of how this practice relates to the theoretical and conceptual aspects of Guattari's writings, alone and with Gilles Deleuze. Thanks to an approach at once personal and theoretically well informed, Bifo's biography provides a clear and accessible introduction to Guattari's works. This edition also includes a critical introduction and a 2005 interview with Bifo on a range of topics relating Guattari's works to the current political conjuncture.

In our modern, urbanized societies, our engagement with the natural world often seems distant and superficial. Human life is now far removed from its prehistoric origins, when humans dwelt deep within the forests and depended on them for their survival. In this important book, Vladimir Bibikhin, one of Russia's most influential twentieth-century philosophers, argues that, although most humans now live far from woods and forests, our existence remains profoundly linked to them. It was Aristotle who first appreciated their primal role, even deriving his notion of 'matter'w from the Greek words for wood and forest. As timber, the woods may be seen as inanimate material, but at the same time they also constitute a living ecosystem and the source of energy and life. By opening up this duality, the woods are transformed from simple matter to a living environment, serving as a reminder that we belong to the world of biological life to a far greater extent than we usually think. The Woods will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone concerned with the environment and our relationship to the natural world.

Volume 10 of the Routledge History of Philosophy presents a historical survey of the central topics in twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy. It chronicles what has been termed the 'linguistic turn' in analytic philosophy and traces the influence the study of language has had on the main problems of philosophy. Each chapter contains an extensive bibliography of the major writings in the field.
All the essays present their large and complex topics in a clear and well organised way. At the end, the reader finds a helpful Chronology of the major political, scientific and philosophical events in the Twentieth Century and an extensive Glossary of technical terms.

Contents:
Introduction Stuart Shanker 1. Philosophy of Logic A.D.Irving 2. Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century Michael Detlefsen 3. Frege Rainer Born 4. Wittgenstein's Tractatus James Bogen 5. Logical Positivism Oswald Hanfling 6. The Philosophy of Physics Rom Harre 7. The Philosophy of Science Today Joseph Agassi 8. Chance, Cause and Conduct: Probability Theory and the Explanation of Human Action Jeff Coulter 9. Cybernetics K.M.Sayre 10. Descartes' Legacy: The Mechanist/Vitalist Debates Stuart Shanker

What is postmodernity - a cultural breakthrough, or a cultural collapse? And what are its consequences for the arts - a new era of unprecedented creativity, or the state of acute crisis? And above all, is postmodernism a new and revolutionary phenomenon, or is it a radical, logical or misguided, development of modern culture, and particularly of its avant-garde tradition? What are the continuities? What are the discontinuities? These are just some of the questions which this study asks and attempts to answer. It draws upon a wide range of evidence: from the experience of daily life in a consumer society; science and religion; visual arts and literature; film and television; and the most arcane works of contemporary music. The author sets high standards for the notoriously inconclusive, and all too often confused, debate about the cultural significance of postmodernism and postmodernity; he shows how large is the volume of historical and artistic knowledge needed to seriously grapple with the issues involved in any conceivable answer to the query.

This book is a manuscript that was virtually complete when James W. Cornman died. Most of the chapters were in final form, and all but the last had been revised by the author. The last chapter was in handwritten form, and the concluding remarks were not finished. Swain took charge of the proofreading and John L. Thomas compiled the indices with the assistance of Lehrer. It is our opinion that this manuscript, like the other books Cornman published, is one of exceptional scholarly and philo sophical importance. As do all of his philosophical publications, this work reflects Cornman's great love for philosophy and his commitment to the search for truth. Every serious student and author of epistemology will benefit from and admire the thorough scholarship and rigorous argumentation they will find herein. It has been our privilege to partici pate in the preparation of the manuscript for the philosophical public. KEITH LEHRER MARSHALL SWAIN IX INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION TO EPISTEMOLOGICAL SKEPTICISM Many philosophers try to refute skepticism, but few try to give a precise characterization of the thesis they attack. My first aim, consequently, is to characterize skepticism, or, more precisely, several species of skepticism. Then I shall choose those species I wish to consider and justify my choice. To begin, let me distinguish what I shall call "epistemological skepticism" from the thesis I shall call "ontological nihilism" and from what is believed by someone whom I shall call an "ontological skeptic.""

The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early Frankfurt School and among the most innovative and uncategorizable of German modernist thinkers. It is against the horizon of the contemporary theoretical scene, combining impulses from post-structuralism, feminism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, that Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading Benjamin experts, undertakes her re-reading of his work. The subject of this sequence of eleven essays, assembled here for the first time in English translation, is Benjamin as theorist, whereby his work on thinking in images or UBilddnken and the relation of this to 'the first material of human existence ...the body" is taken as constituting the specificity of his philosophy. Arranged in three sections ( "Politics of Images and Body", "Other - Gender - Readings", and "Memory and Writing") the essays provide a passage into Benjamin's thinking in images.

"The object of this book," writes William C. Dowling in his preface, "is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument." The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur's famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur's argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur's Temps et recit, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of Temps et recit, Ricoeur's last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in Temps et recit: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed Time and Narrative, looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur's dismantling of established theories and arguments-Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation-while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur's analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another.

An engaging and accessible book of interviews with leading thinkers on the ideas of Jurgen Habermas and threats to democracy and the public sphere Covers urgent and importnat topics such as fake news, experts and expertise, populism, authoritarianism, human rights and the legacy of slavery Includes a Foreword by Habermas

In this volume of essays Russell is concerned to combat, in one way or another, the growth of dogmatism, whether of the Left or of the Right, which has hitherto characterised our tragic century.

A collection of essays which explores the significance of Wittgenstein for the Philosophy of Religion. Explorations of central notions in Wittgenstein's later philosophy are brought to bear on the clash between belief and atheism; understanding religious experience; language and ritual; evil and theodicies; miracles; and the possibility of a Christian philosophy.

Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology is an innovative volume which examines the relevance of archaeological theory to classical archaeology. It offers a wideranging overview of classical archaeology, from the Bronze Age to the Classical period and from mainland Greece to Cyprus. Within this framework Spencer examines many of the issues which have become important in the study of archaeology in recent years - time, the `past', gender, ideology, social structure and group identity. The papers in this collection cover such diverse topics as the rural landscape, classical art and scientific methodologies. Over the last century the study of classical archaeology has been orthodox and static. The essays in this collection examine it in the light of current theoretical archaeology and anthropology, making it more relevant and valuable to the study of archaeology in the 1990s. This is a diverse and topical collection, of great value to classicists, ancient historians, anthropologists and everyone interested in new approaches to archaeology.

Combining postmodernism with technoscience, this work considers the viability of public works such as the superconducting supercollider in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodernism vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th-century technoscience. Drawing upon conflicts between Popperians, postmodernists and feminists, Sassower claims that "translation" between competing discourses about technoscience is necessary to avoid cultural collisions and foster fruitful exchange between divergent discourses; also that a discussion of reality, both natural and social, is the common ground for this debate. He emphasizes also the material, political and economic conditions which underlie technoscientific projects, and stresses the indespensible role imagination and art play in teaching the responsible development of technology in the next century.

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing Heidegger and ethics together.
Working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to his first major book, "Being and Time, " Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his inquiries were concerned with ethics. She discovers a form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Opposing many contemporary views, Hodge proposes that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger made so pervasive.

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major new study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing them together.

By working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to Being and Time, his first major work, Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his enquires were concerned with ethics. She discovers a form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Against many contemporary views, she proposes therefore that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger had made so pervasive.

Nietzsche says "good Europeans" must not only cultivate a "supra-national" view, but also "supra-European" perspective to transcend their European biases and see beyond the horizon of Western culture. The volume takes up such conceptual frontier crossings and syntheses. Emphasizing Nietzsche's genealogy of European culture and his reflections upon the constitution of Europe in the broadest sense, its essays examine peoples and nations, values and arts, knowledge and religion. Nietzsche's apprehensions about the crises of nihilism and decadence and their implications for Europe's (and humankind's) future are investigated in this context. Concerning the crossing of notional frontiers, contributors examine Nietzsche's hoped-for dismantling of Europe's state borders, the overcoming of national prejudices and rivalries, and the propagation of a revitalizing "supra-European" perspective on the continent, its culture(s) and future. They also illuminate lines of syntheses, notably the syncretism of the ancient Greeks and its possible example for the European culture to-be. Finally certain of Europe's current problems are considered via the critical apparatus furnished by Nietzsche's philosophy and the diagnostic tools it provides.

Is there anything sacred that can simultaneously be considered strictly feminine? Two of the leaders of European feminist thought investigate stories of African rites, Catholic saints, Jewish traditions and psychological case studies in an overarching exploration of how women throughout the world cope with forces beyond their control or understanding. In an exchange of letters, they consider a range of emotional dispositions with reference to contemporary figures including Madonna, the late Princess of Wales, Mother Teresa and Eva Peron.

Veblen is probably one of the most important social philosophers that the United States has yet produced. A fierce and compelling critic of mainstream economic theory and its fundamental assumptions, he constructed an evolutionary history of mankind from primitive times to the machine age. Darwinian notions of evolution pervade Veblen's thought, originating in his view that economic thinking lags hopelessly behind the ever-changing realities of social life. Within this grand design, Veblen also produced many insights into human behaviour including the idea that conspicuous consumption - colloquially known as "keeping up with the Jones'" was a driving force in economic life. Besides this, he wrote on imperialism, explained why the modern German and Japanese states were more warlike than others and predicted a massive crisis for capitalism which came about in the 1930s. Veblen has been neglected in Britain. This selection of work brings together Veblen's unique attempts at understanding the evolution of economic patterns in a wider social context.

The publication in 1957 of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures ushered in the era of what can properly be termed modern linguistics - the science of language. This critical assessment brings together over 100 papers on every area of Chomsky's work, revealing how pervasive his influence has been on all aspects of modern thought, from linguistics to philosophy, psychology, computer science, social theory, political analysis and literary theory. Carlos Otero is one of the world's leading interpreters of Chomsky's ideas and brings together in these volumes papers which provide a comprehensive assessment of his contribution to modern thought.