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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > General
This book offers a thorough reanalysis of Charles Darwin's Origin
of Species, which for many people represents the work that alone
gave rise to evolutionism. Of course, scholars today know better
than that. Yet, few resist the temptation of turning to the Origin
in order to support it or reject it in light of their own work.
Apparently, Darwin fills the mythical role of a founding figure
that must either be invoked or repudiated. The book is an
invitation to move beyond what is currently expected of Darwin's
magnum opus. Once the rhetorical varnish of Darwin's discourses is
removed, one discovers a work of remarkably indecisive conclusions.
The book comprises two main theses: (1) The Origin of Species never
remotely achieved the theoretical unity to which it is often
credited. Rather, Darwin was overwhelmed by a host of phenomena
that could not fit into his narrow conceptual framework. (2) In the
Origin of Species, Darwin failed at completing the full conversion
to evolutionism. Carrying many ill-designed intellectual tools of
the 17th and 18th centuries, Darwin merely promoted a special brand
of evolutionism, one that prevented him from taking the decisive
steps toward an open and modern evolutionism. It makes an
interesting read for biologists, historians and philosophers alike.
"This original study offers a timely reconsideration of the work of
French hilosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard in relation to art,
performance and writing. How can we write about art, whilst
acknowledging the transformation that inevitably accompanies
translations of both media and temporality? That is the question
that persistently dogs Lyotard's own writings on art, and to which
this book responds through reference to artists from the
recently-formed canon of performance art history, including the
myths of seminal figures Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci, and the
controlled documentation of Gina Pane's actions. Through the
unstable, untranslatable element that Lyotard calls the figural,
his thought is brought to bear on attempts to write a history of
performance art and to question the paradoxically prescriptive
demand for rules to govern 're-performance'. Kiff Bamford
contextualises Lyotard's writings and approach with reference to
both his contemporaries, including Deleuze and Kristeva, and the
contemporary art about which they wrote, whilst arguing for the
pertinence of Lyotard's provocations today."
This book studies how the relationship between philosophy,
morality, politics, and science was conceived in the Vienna Circle
and how this group of philosophers tried to position science as an
antidote to totalitarianism and irrationalism. This leads to
investigation of the still understudied views of the Vienna Circle
on moral philosophy, meta-ethics, and the relationship between
philosophy of science and politics. Including papers from an
international group of scholars, The Socio-ethical Dimension of
Knowledge: The Mission of Logical Empiricism addresses these topics
and makes them available to scholars in the field of history of
philosophy of science.
David Bostock presents a critical appraisal of Bertrand Russell's
philosophy from 1900 to 1924-a period that is considered to be the
most important in his career. Russell developed his theory of logic
from 1900 to 1910, and over those years wrote the famous work
Principia Mathematica with A. N. Whitehead. Bostock explores
Russell's development of 'logical atomism', which applies this
logic to problems in the theory of knowledge and in metaphysics,
and was central to his philosophical work from 1910 to 1924. This
book is the first to focus on this important period of Russell's
development, examining the three key areas of logic and
mathematics, knowledge, and metaphysics, and demonstrating the
enduring value of his work in these areas.
The importance of Stoicism for Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense and
Michel Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject and The Care of the
Self is well known. However, few students of either classics or
philosophy are aware of the breadth of French and Italian
receptions of Stoicism. This book firstly presents this broad field
to readers, and secondly advances it by renewing dialogues with
ancient Stoic texts. The authors in this volume, who combine
expertise in continental and Hellenistic philosophy, challenge our
understanding of both modern and ancient concepts, arguments,
exercises, and therapies. It conceives of Stoicism as a vital
strand of philosophy which contributes to the life of contemporary
thought. Flowing through the sustained, varied engagement with
Stoicism by continental thinkers, this volume covers Jean-Paul
Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Alain
Badiou, Emile Brehier, Barbara Cassin, Giorgio Agamben, and Pierre
Hadot. Stoic sources addressed range from doxography and well-known
authors like Epictetus and Seneca to more obscure authorites like
Musonius Rufus and Cornutus.
This book's overarching premise is that discussion and critique in
the discourses of architecture and urbanism have their primary
focus on engagements with form, particularly in the sense of the
question as to what planning and architecture signify with respect
to the forms they take, and how their meanings or content (what is
"contained") is considered in relation to form-as-container. While
significant critical work in these disciplines has been published
over the past 20 years that engages pertinently with the writings
of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, there has been no address
to the co-incidence in the work of Benjamin and Foucault of an
architectural figure that is pivotal to each of their discussions
of the emergence of modernity: The arcade for Benjamin and the
panoptic prison for Foucault have a parallel role. In Foucault's
terms, panopticism is a "diagram of power." The parallel, for
Benjamin, would be his understanding of "constellation." In more
recent architectural writings, the notion of the diagram has
emerged as a key motif. Yet, and in as much as it supposedly
relates to aspects of the work of Foucault, along with Gilles
Deleuze, this notion of "diagram" amounts, for the most part, to a
thinly veiled reinstatement of geometry-as-idea. This book
redresses the emphasis given to form within the cultural philosophy
of modernity and-particularly with respect to architecture and
urbanism-inflects on the agency of force that opens a reading of
their productive capacities as technologies of power. It is
relevant to students and scholars in poststructuralist critical
theory, architecture, and urban studies. "This is a book about
Foucault and Benjamin and it is grounded in a deep knowledge of and
reflection upon their works, but it is also underpinned by an
impressive erudition. There are reflections on Hegel and Heidegger
(central to the author) and Derrida, along with Kierkegaard, and
others. This leads to a rich and suggestive discussion ... in
staging a spatial-architectural-political conversation between
Foucault and Benjamin." - Anonymous Reviewer "Mark Jackson's
Diagrams of Power in Benjamin and Foucault, The Recluse of
Architecture juxtaposes and interrogates its two leading actors so
as to draw from and through them a theory of architecture, which is
inseparable from its recluse. In doing so it elaborates a series of
complex connections with their various interlocutors and
inspirations, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, the Kabbalah, Agamben,
allegory, Marx, Deleuze, Klossowski, tragedy, capitalism,
modernity, and so on. The list is long and impressive. This is not
only done with an extremely high degree of scholarship, but is
presented in a light, lucid and very compelling manner in a voice
both personal and authoritative. The recluse is the figure of
mimesis itself, the appearance of a withdrawal, always already a
ruin. This book not only contributes a highly astute reading of its
philosophical objects, but it enacts the ontology of the recluse
through its own unfolding, simultaneously revealing and withholding
the meaning of architecture 'as such', so that we not only
understand its meaning, but feel the pulsing differential of the
book's object as if it were alive within us." - Stephen Zepke,
Independent Researcher, Vienna
Heidegger has often been seen as having no moral philosophy and a
political philosophy that can only support fascism. Sonia Sikka's
book challenges this view, arguing instead that Heidegger should be
considered a qualified moral realist, and that his insights on
cultural identity and cross-cultural interaction are not
invalidated by his support for Nazism. Sikka explores the
ramifications of Heidegger's moral and political thought for topics
including free will and responsibility, the status of humanity
within the design of nature, the relation between the individual
and culture, the rights of peoples to political self-determination,
the idea of race and the problem of racism, historical relativism,
the subjectivity of values, and the nature of justice. Her
discussion highlights aspects of Heidegger's thought that are still
relevant for modern debates, while also addressing its limitations
as reflected in his political affiliations and sympathies.
Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set
of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against
their contents and their themes, against their readers or against
other texts - this volume proposes a critical intervention into the
practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading
methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as
being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter
and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading,
including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a
new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading
are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but
recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading
ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by
critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as
translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered,
processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary
and cultural readings represent different 'agential cuts' in the
world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive
and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and
politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to
reading's intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which
we live.
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as
reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy
and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the
modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the
writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig,
Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold
Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss,
and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to
present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity.
In an examination of the concept of the exotic and of spatial
experience in their cultural, subjective, and philosophical
contingencies, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that exotic spaces may
contest and reconfigure the relationship between the familiar and
the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not
only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory,
as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the
fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings
suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative
transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or
dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, may
promote new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigure
the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived
as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or
mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in
their exposure: re-enchantment through epiphany; the collapse of
the rational self; liberation of the imagination from the confines
of the familiar world; and aesthetic transformation, revealing the
paradoxically 'primitive' nature of modern experience. In
strikingly original readings of canonical authors and compelling
rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic
experience can evidence the fragility of the European or Germanic
self as depicted in modernist literature, revealing the usually
unconsidered boundaries of the subject's own familiar world.
The second half of the 19th century in Russian philosophy sees the
more or less definitive triumph of Westernizing currents over the
Slavophiles. There is no doubt that both Nihilism and Populism, as
successive schools of Russian philosophy, are the authentic progeny
of the senior Westernizers- though in the development of their
philosophical doctrine they owe much less to German Romantacism
than to British utilitarianism, French positivism, and the
socialism of the left-wing Hegelians. Toward the end of the century
these philosophers come increasingly under the influence of the
scientific socialism of Karl Marx. Their non-Westernizing
contemporaries, such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Leontyev, and Rozanov,
devote themselves to a searing and negative critique of Western
culture in general and begin to despair of a Russia which would
accept salvation from the superficialities of Western European
thought and culture. This is one of three volumes of the first
historical anthology of Russian philosophical thought from its
origins to the present day, with critical and interpretive
commentary. The work includes 68 selections from 27 philosophers,
with new translations or retranslations especially for these
volumes.
In both science and philosophy, the twentieth century saw a radical
breakdown of certainty in the human worldview, as quantum
uncertainty and linguistic ambiguity destroyed the comfortable
certitudes of the past. As these disciplines form the foundation
for a human position in the world, a major epistemological
reorganization had to take place. In this book, quantum theorist
Stig Stenholm presents Bohr and Wittgenstein, in physics and in
philosophy, as central figures representing this revision. Each of
them took up the challenge of replacing apparent order and
certainty with a provisional understanding based on limited
concepts in constant flux. Stenholm concludes that the modern
synthesis created by their heirs is far from satisfactory, and the
story is so far an unfinished one. The book will appeal to any
researcher in either discipline curious about the foundation of
modern science, and works to provoke a renewal of discussion, and
the eventual emergence of a reformed clarity and understanding.
W. J. Mander presents the first ever synoptic history of British
Idealism, the philosophical school which dominated English-language
philosophy from the 1860s through to the early years of the
following century. Offering detailed examination of the origins,
growth, development, and decline of this mode of thinking, British
Idealism: A History restores to its proper place this now almost
wholly forgotten period of philosophical history. Through clear
explanation of its characteristic concepts and doctrines, and
paying close attention to the published works of its philosophers,
the volume provides a full-length history of this vital school for
those wishing to fill a gap in their knowledge of the history of
British Philosophy, while its detailed notes and bibliography will
guide the more dedicated scholar who wishes to examine further
their distinctive brand of philosophy. By covering all major
philosophers involved in the movement (not merely the most famous
ones like Bradley, Green, McTaggart, and Bosanquet but the lesser
known figures like the Caird brothers, Henry Jones,
A.S.Pringle-Pattison, and R.B.Haldane) and by looking at all
branches of philosophy (not just the familiar topics of ethics,
political thought, and metaphysics but also the less well
documented work on logic, religion, aesthetics, and the history of
philosophy), British Idealism: A History brings out the movement's
complex living pattern of unity and difference; something which
other more superficial accounts have tended to obscure.
This compelling book advances utilitarianism as the basis for a
viable public philosophy, effectively rebutting the common charge
that, as moral doctrine, utilitarian thought permits cruel acts,
justifies unfair distribution of wealth, and demands too much of
moral agents.
James Wood Bailey defends utilitarianism through novel use of game
theory insights regarding feasible equilibria and evolutionary
stability, elaborating a sophisticated account of institutions that
real-world utilitarians would want to foster. If utilitarianism
seems in principle to dictate that we make each and every choice
such that it leads to the best consequences overall, game theory
emphasizes that no choice has consequences in isolation, but only
in conjunction with many other choices of other agents. Viewing
institutions as equilibria in complex games, Bailey negotiates the
paradox of individual responsibilities, arguing that if individuals
within institutions have specific responsibilities they cannot get
from the principle of utility alone, the utility principle
nevertheless holds great value in that it allows us to identify
morally desirable institutions. Far from recommending cruel acts,
utilitarianism, understood this way, actually runs congruent to our
basic moral intuitions.
A provocative attempt to support the practical use of utilitarian
ethics in a world of conflicting interests and competing moral
agents, Bailey's book employs the work of social scientists to
tackle problems traditionally given abstract philosophical
attention. Vividly illustrating its theory with concrete moral
dilemmas and taking seriously our moral common sense,
Utilitarianism, Institutions, and Justice is an accessible,
groundbreaking work that will richly reward students and scholars
of political science, political economy, and philosophy.
This is the first book-length examination of the impact Leo
Strauss' immigration to the United States had on this thinking. Adi
Armon weaves together a close reading of unpublished seminars
Strauss taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s
with an interpretation of his later works, all of which were of
course written against the backdrop of the Cold War. First, the
book describes the intellectual environment that shaped the young
Strauss' worldview in the Weimar Republic, tracing those aspects of
his thought that changed and others that remained consistent up
until his immigration to America. Armon then goes on to explore the
centrality of Karl Marx to Strauss's intellectual biography. By
analyzing an unpublished seminar Strauss taught with Joseph Cropsey
at the University of Chicago in 1960, Armon shows how Strauss'
fragmentary, partial engagement with Marx in writing obscured the
important role that Marxism actually played as an intellectual
challenge to his later political thinking. Finally, the book
explores the manifestations of Straussian doctrine in postwar
America through reading Strauss' The City and Man (1964) as a
representative of his political teaching.
Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and
defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued,
produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a
particular time, in a particular place, is dominated, oppressed, or
exploited. Moreover, without relying on a general notion of human
emancipation, concrete critical theory can suggest political means
for the alleviation of these conditions. Because it puts
Althusser's ideas in dialogue with contemporary social science and
philosophy, the book as a whole makes contributions to Althusser
studies, to Anglo-American political philosophy, and to current
debates in the philosophy of the social sciences.
Paolo Mancosu presents a series of innovative studies in the
history and the philosophy of logic and mathematics in the first
half of the twentieth century. The Adventure of Reason is divided
into five main sections: history of logic (from Russell to Tarski);
foundational issues (Hilbert's program, constructivity,
Wittgenstein, Godel); mathematics and phenomenology (Weyl, Becker,
Mahnke); nominalism (Quine, Tarski); semantics (Tarski, Carnap,
Neurath). Mancosu exploits extensive untapped archival sources to
make available a wealth of new material that deepens in significant
ways our understanding of these fascinating areas of modern
intellectual history. At the same time, the book is a contribution
to recent philosophical debates, in particular on the prospects for
a successful nominalist reconstruction of mathematics, the nature
of finitist intuition, the viability of alternative definitions of
logical consequence, and the extent to which phenomenology can hope
to account for the exact sciences.
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Ishmael
- a Novel; 3
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M E (Mary Elizabeth) 1835 Braddon, Sallie Bingham Center for Women's His
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The series presents historical and systematic studies on the
philosophy of Alexius Meinong and his school, as well as on works
influenced by aspects of Meinong's philosophy. Furthermore, the
series is open to contributions in the analytic-phenomenological
tradition, mirroring the most recent developments in these
disciplines.
One thing this book attempts to show is that Kant's antinomies open
a way towards an overcoming of that nihilism that is a corollary of
the understanding of reality that presides over our science and
technology. But when Harries is speaking of the antinomy of Being
he is not so much thinking of Kant, as of Heidegger. Not that
Heidegger speaks of an antinomy of Being. But his thinking of Being
leads him and will lead those who follow him on his path of
thinking into this antinomy. At bottom, however, the author is
neither concerned with Heidegger's nor Kant's thought. He shows
that our thinking inevitably leads us into some version of this
antinomy whenever it attempts to grasp reality in toto, without
loss. All such attempts will fall short of their goal. And that
they do so, Harries claims, is not something to be grudgingly
accepted, but embraced as a necessary condition of living a
meaningful life. That is why the antinomy of Being matters and
should concern us all.
With a wealth of anecdote Dorothy Emmet looks back on the
philosophers who made a personal impact on her. She brings to life
the Oxford of the 1920s, and writes particularly about H.A.
Pritchard and R.G. Collingwood. She knew A.N. Whitehead and Samuel
Alexander, and remembers philosophers who struggled with political
dilemmas when a number of intellectuals were turning to Marxism.
Describing the post-war period she recalls R.B. Braithwaite,
Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre and others. Her personal
portraits will interest a wide readership, as well as making
essential reading for professional philosophers.
Recent years have seen a great revival of interest in
Wittgenstein's early masterpiece, the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus. The Enchantment of Words is a study of that
book, offering novel readings of all its major themes and shedding
light on issues in metaphysics, ethics and the philosophies of
mind, language, and logic.
McManus argues that Wittgenstein's aim in this deeply puzzling work
is to show that the 'intelligibility of thought' and the
'meaningfulness of language', which logical truths would delimit
and metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and language would
explain, are issues constituted by confusions. What is exposed is a
mirage of a kind of self-consciousness, a misperception of the ways
in which we happen to think, talk and act as reasons why we ought
to think, talk and act as we do. The root of that misperception is
our confusedly endowing words with a life of their own: we
'enchant', and are 'enchanted by', words, colluding in a confusion
that transposes on to them, and the world which we then see them as
'fitting', responsibilities that are actually ours to bear. Such
words promise to spare us the trouble, not only of thinking, but of
living.
In presenting this view, McManus offers readings of all of the
major themes of the Tractatus, including its discussion of logical
truth, objects, names, inference, subjectivity, solipsism and the
ineffable; McManus offers novel explanations of what is at stake in
Wittgenstein's comparison of propositions with pictures, of why
Wittgenstein declared the point of the Tractatus to be ethical, of
how a bookwhich infamously declares itself to be nonsensical can
both clarify our thoughts and require of us that we exercise our
capacity to reason in reading it, and of how Wittgenstein later
came to re-evaluate the achievement of the Tractatus.
EDITORS PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION THE works by which Professor
Green has hitherto been chiefly known to the general public are his
Introduction to Messrs. Longmans edition of Humes Philosophical
Works, and his articles in the Contemporary Review on some
doctrines of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Lewes. When in the year 1 877 Mr.
Green became Whytes Pro fessor of Moral Philosophy, his main desire
was, both in his teaching and writing, to develope more fully and
in a more constructive way the ideas which underlay his previous
critical writings and appeared in them. The present trea tise is
the first outcome of that desire and doubtless it would have been
only the first but for the premature and unexpected death of the
author in March, 1882. Even the Prolegomena to Ethics the title is
the authors own was left unfinished. The greater part of the book
had been used, some of it twice over, in the Professorial lectures
and about a quarter of it the first 116 pages was printed in the
numbers of Mind for January, April, and July, 1882. But, according
to a letter of the author written not long before his death, some
twenty or thirty pages remained to be added, and, though with this
ex ception the whole was written out nearly ready for print ing no
part of it can be considered to have undergone the final revision.
At his death Mr. Green left the charge of the manuscript to me and
I have now only to explain the course I have followed in preparing
it for publication. The manuscript was written in paragraphs, but
other wise was continuous and I may add that it was com posed
without regard to arrangement in Books and EDITORS PREFACE IX
Chapters. For that arrangement I am responsible, and also for
thenumbering and occasional re-division of the sections, and for
the frequent division of a section into two or more paragraphs. I
have also made the few cor rections in expression which seemed to
be necessary, and in one case I have ventured, for the sake of
clearness, to transfer a passage from one place to another.
References have been verified and supplied translations of Greek
quotations have been given, where their meaning was not obvious
from the text and a few notes have been added by way of explanation
or qualification, for the most part only where a mark in the
authors manuscript showed that he intended to reconsider the
passage. The Editors notes, except where they give merely a
reference or translation, are enclosed in square brackets. My
desire throughout has been to make no changes except in passages
which I felt sure Mr. Green would have altered had his attention
been called to them. With the further object of rendering the work
as intelligible as possible to the general reader I have ventured
to print an analysis. Mr. Green would probably have followed the
plan he adopted in the Introduction to Hume, and have placed a
short abstract on the margins of the pages. I have thought it
better to print my analysis as a Table of Contents, as that
arrangement clearly separates my work from the authors, and will
also probably be the most useful to those who care to read an
analysis at all. Perhaps I may further suggest to any reader who is
unaccustomed to metaphysical and psychological discussions that
much of the authors ethical views, though not their scientific
basis, may be gathered from the Third and Fourth Books alone. It
has been already explained that the book was leftunfinished. But on
the whole I thought it best to make no attempt to add anything,
especially as the comparison x EDITORS PREFACE which occupies the
last chapter seems to have reached a natural conclusion. The reader
will also find in the text indications of subjects which were to
have been dis cussed. In particular the author at any rate at one
time intended to introduce a criticism of Kants ethical views see
page 177. But I think this intention must have been abandoned
during the composition of the book, and, as it is hoped that before
long Mr...
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