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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > General
This book upends some of the myths that have come to surround the
work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno - not least amongst them,
his supposed fatalism. Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's
writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge
of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and
injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse.
By re-appraising Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, and
art, this book reconstructs this notoriously difficult author's
overall project from a radically new perspective (Adorno's famous
'standpoint of redemption'), and brings his central concerns to
bear on the problems of today. On the one hand, this means reading
Adorno alongside his principal interlocutors (including Kant, Marx
and Benjamin). On the other hand, it means asking how his secular
brand of social criticism can serve to safeguard the image of a
better world - above all, when the invocation of this image occurs
alongside Adorno's recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on
making images of God. By reading Adorno in this iconoclastic way,
Adorno and the Ban on Images contributes to current debates about
Utopia that have come to define political visions across the
political spectrum.
Since the publication in France of his "Oeuvres Completes" in the
mid-1970s, the breadth of Bataille's writing and influence has
become increasingly apparent across the disciplines in, for
example, the fields of literature, art, art history, philosophy,
critical theory, sociology, economics, and anthropology. He is now
held by many to be one of the most profound thinkers of the
century, the enormous ramifications of whose work have yet to be
fully grasped.
In response to this growing interest, "The Bataille Reader"
includes key texts from the broad spectrum of Bataille's work, from
the early essays interrogating surrealism and cultural politics in
the 1930s, down to texts from "The Accursed Share" (1949,
translated 1988), a major engagement in post-Marxist economic
theory generally regarded as being his most important work.
Generous coverage is given to Bataille's speculations, also of the
1930s, on the limits of being, experience and identity, as well as
to his post-war engagements with existentialism, Marxism, and
Hegelianism. The major texts are interspersed with some of the
brilliantly punctual essays Bataille produced throughout his career
as a prolific essayist, reviewer and originator of
highly-influential journals, such as "Documents, Acephale" and
"Critique." Clearly introduced and comprehensively annotated by the
editors, this book provides the best single-volume coverage of
Bataille's work available.
In his most recent work, the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton
has turned his attention to religion. Although a religious
sensibility ties together his astonishingly prodigious and dynamic
output as a philosopher, poet and composer, his recent exploration
of religious and theological themes from a philosophical point of
view has excited a fresh response from scholars. This collection of
writings addresses Scruton's challenging and subtle philosophy of
religion for the first time. The volume includes contributions from
those who specialize in the philosophy of religion, the history of
thought and culture, aesthetics, and church history. The collection
is introduced by Mark Dooley, author of two books on Scruton, and
includes a response to the writings from Scruton himself in which
he develops his idea of the sacred and the erotic and defends the
integrity of his work as an attempt to give a sense of the
Lebenswelt (or 'lifeworld'): how humans experience the world. He
argues that religion emerges from that experience and transforms us
from beings bound by causal necessity into persons who acknowledge
freedom, obligation and right. A unique and fascinating collection
of writings that sheds light on this hitherto unexplored aspect of
Roger Scruton's philosophy.
Analytic and Continental philosophy have become increasingly
specialised and differentiated fields of endeavour. This important
collection of essays details some of the more significant
methodological and philosophical differences that have separated
the two traditions, as well as examining the manner in which
received understandings of the divide are being challenged by
certain thinkers whose work might best be described as
post-analytic and meta-continental. Together these essays offer a
well-defined sense of the field, of its once dominant distinctions
and of some of the most productive new areas generating influential
ideas and controversy. In an attempt to get to the bottom of
precisely what it is that separates the analytic and continental
traditions, the essays in this volume compare and contrast them on
certain issues, including truth, time and subjectivity. The book
engages with a range of key thinkers from phenomenology,
post-structuralism, analytic philosophy and post-analytic
philosophy, examines the strengths and weaknesses of each
tradition, and ultimately encourages enhanced understanding,
dialogue and even rapprochement between these sometimes
antagonistic adversaries.
This intelligible yet challenging survey aims to introduce the
student to central metaphysical issues while at the same time
pursuing a coherent metaphysical view. The range of topics
discussed is refreshingly different from the average metaphysics
introduction, thereby making it ideal for upper-division
undergraduates and beginning graduate students. The author sets the
scene by taking the student through general theoretical matters,
including discussions on the nature of metaphysics and the nature
of concepts, and offering a general conception of the nature of
philosophy. He then proceeds to address a diversity of metaphysical
issues, ranging from color to modality to the nature of physical
objects through to the question of truth in fiction. Exercises
designed to stimulate further talking and to indicate further
dimensions of the topics are posed throughout the book to encourage
a more advanced study of the discipline.
In this book Eric Kramer introduces his theory of dimensional
accrual/dissociation to explain the difference between modernity
and postmodernity. He also argues that social scientific
operational definitions are useful but very often arbitrary. Thus,
realities based on them are available for creative (alternative)
validities. Kramer then concentrates on the concepts of modernity
and postmodernity to analyze how they have been defined and
structured and, in the end, he offers clear definitions of these
concepts and a better understanding of the work of those who have
shaped these ideas. Kramer applies this position to the concepts of
modernity and postmodernity, providing a painstaking review of the
origins, key thinkers, and current status of these ideas. By
reviewing the development of these ideas and providing clear
definitions of these concepts, Kramer helps scholars and
researchers in the social sciences and humanities better understand
applications and limitations of these key approaches in late
twentieth-century scholarship.
The primary goal of this volume is to describe the contemporary
state of affairs in Western psychotherapy, and to do so in a
Whiteheadian spirit: with genuine openness to the relative ways in
which creativity, beauty, truth, and peace manifest themselves in
various cultural traditions. This Whiteheadian Dialogue explores
afresh an important cross-elucidatory path: what have we, and what
can be learned from a dialogue with Eastern worldviews? In order to
generate meaningful contrasts between these different systems of
thought, all the papers address common core issues. On one hand,
how does the given system understand the interaction of the
individual, society, and nature (or cosmos)? On the other hand,
what is the paradigm of all pathology and what is its typical or
curative pattern?
The Logical Must is an examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein's
philosophy of logic, early and late, undertaken from an austere
naturalistic perspective Penelope Maddy has called "Second
Philosophy." The Second Philosopher is a humble but tireless
inquirer who begins her investigation of the world with ordinary
perceptual beliefs, moves from there to empirical generalizations,
then to deliberate experimentation, and eventually to theory
formation and confirmation. She takes this same approach to logical
truth, locating its ground in simple worldly structures and our
knowledge of it in our basic cognitive machinery, tuned by
evolutionary pressures to detect those structures where they occur.
In his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein also
links the logical structure of representation with the structure of
the world, but he includes one key unnaturalistic assumption: that
the sense of our representations must be given prior
to-independently of-facts about how the world is. When that
assumption is removed, the general outlines of the resulting
position come surprisingly close to the Second Philosopher's
roughly empirical account. In his later discussions of logic in
Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics, Wittgenstein also rejects this earlier assumption in
favor of a picture that arises in the wake of the famous
rule-following considerations. Here Wittgenstein and the Second
Philosopher operate in even closer harmony-locating the ground of
our logical practices in our interests, our natural inclinations
and abilities, and very general features of the world-until the
Second Philosopher moves to fill in the account with her empirical
investigations of the world and cognition. At this point,
Wittgenstein balks, but as a matter of personal animosity rather
than philosophical principle.
This is a clear and concise overview of and introduction to
Deleuze's theories of cinema. "Cinema After Deleuze" offers a clear
and lucid introduction to Deleuze's writings on cinema which will
appeal both to undergraduates and specialists in film studies and
philosophy. The book provides explanations of the many categories
and classifications found in Deleuze's two landmark books on cinema
and offers assessments of a range of films and directors, including
works by John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock,
Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais. Richard Rushton also
discusses contemporary directors such as Steven Spielberg, Lars von
Trier, Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-Wai in the light of Deleuze's
theories and in doing so brings Deleuze's Cinema books right up to
date. "Cinema After Deleuze" demonstrates why Deleuze is rightly
considered today to be one of the great theorists of cinema. The
book is essential reading for students in philosophy and film
studies alike. "The Deleuze Encounters" series provides students in
philosophy and related subjects with concise and accessible
introductions to the application of Deleuze's work in key areas of
study. Each book demonstrates how Deleuze's ideas and concepts can
enhance present work in a particular field.
What happens when deconstruction reads politics? This collection of
essays by some of Derrida's most significant readers thinks through
deconstruction's relation to politics by explicating the text of
Derrida in relation to political examples. Neither 'deconstruction'
nor 'reading' nor 'politics' is left untouched in the encounters
explored by the contributors to this volume. This book dispels any
notion of the separation of deconstruction from the everyday and
demonstrates the importance of deconstructive thought for the
political.
The book contributes to the refutation of the separation of
philosophy in the 20th century into analytic and continental. It is
shown that Edmund Husserl was seriously concerned with issues of
so-called analytic philosophy, that there are strict parallelisms
between Husserl's treatment of philosophical subjects and those of
authors in the analytic tradition, and that Husserl had a strong
influence on Rudolf Carnap's 'Aufbau'.
In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full
panorama of Charles S. Peirce's most important late writings. Among
the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential
graphs to be a significant contribution to human thought. The
manuscripts from 1895-1913, with many of them being published here
for the first time, testify to the richness and open-endedness of
his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to
reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well as the
conventional stories concerning the evolution of modern logic. This
first volume of Logic of the Future is on the historical
development, theory and application of Peirce's graphical method
and diagrammatic reasoning. It also illustrates the abundant
further developments and applications Peirce envisaged existential
graphs to have on the analysis of mathematics, language, meaning
and mind.
A new approach to reading Frege's notations that adheres to the
modern view that terms and well-formed formulas are any disjoint
syntactic categories. On this new approach, we can at last read
Frege's notations in their original form revealing striking new
solutions to many of the outstanding problems of interpreting his
philosophy.
Globalization and consumerism are two of the buzzwords of the early
twenty-first century. In Consuming Cultures, renowned scholars
explore the links between modernity and consumption. The book fills
a gap in contemporary thinking on the subject by approaching it
from a truly global point-of-view. It draws on case studies from
around the world, with Africa, Asia and Central America featuring
as prominently as Western countries. A transnational perspective
allows the authors to investigate the diversity of consumer
cultures and the interaction between them. The authors look at the
genealogy of the modern consumer and the development of consumer
cultures, from the porcelain trade and consumption in Britain and
China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to post Second
World War developments in America and Japan, and the contemporary
consumer politics of cosmopolitan citizenship. Challenging and
pioneering, Consuming Cultures problematizes popular accounts of
globalization and consumerism, decentring the West and
concentrating on putting history back into these accounts.
Shedding new light on the theme of "crisis" in Husserl's
phenomenology, this book reflects on the experience of awakening to
one's own naivete. Beginning from everyday examples, Knies examines
how this awakening makes us culpable for not having noticed what
was noticeable. He goes on to apply this examination to fundamental
issues in phenomenology, arguing that the appropriation of naive
life has a different structure from the reflection on
pre-reflective life. Husserl's work on the "crisis" is presented as
an attempt to integrate this appropriation into a systematic
transcendental philosophy. Crisis and Husserlian Phenomenology
brings Husserl into dialogue with other key thinkers in Continental
philosophy such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and
Derrida. It is suitable for students and scholars alike, especially
those interested in subjectivity, responsibility and the philosophy
of history.
Analytic philosophy has leveled many challenges to Kant's
ascription of necessary properties and relations to objects in his
Critique of Pure Reason. Some of these challenges can be answered,
it is argued here, largely in terms of techniques belonging to
analytic philosophy itself, in particular, to its philosophy of
language. This Kantian response is the primary objective of this
book. It takes the form of a compromise between the real existence
of the objects that we can intuit and that get our knowledge
started - dubbed initiators - and the ideality of the necessary
properties and relations that Kant ascribes to our sensible
representations of initiators, which he entitles appearances.
Whereas the real existence of initiators is independent of us and
our senses, the necessity of these properties and relations of
appearances is due to their origins in the mind. The Kantian
compromise between real existence and ideal necessity is formulated
in terms of David Kaplan's interpretation of de re necessity in his
article, "Quantifying In" - his response to Quine's concern that a
commitment to such a necessity leads to an acceptance of an
unwanted traditional Aristotelian essentialism. In addition, the
book first abstracts and then departs from its interpretation of
Kant to provide a realistic account of the relation between
existence and de re necessity.
This volume brings together a range of practical and theoretical
perspectives on responsibility in the context of refugee and
migrant integration. Addressing one of the major challenges of our
time, a diverse group of authors shares insights from history,
philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and from personal
experience. The book expands our understanding of the complex
challenges and opportunities that are associated with migration and
integration, and highlights the important role that individuals can
and should play in the process. Interview with the authors:
https://youtu.be/HDkaN_PBBF8
This volume opens up stimulating new perspectives on a broad
variety of Barcan Marcus's concerns ranging from the systematic
foundation and interpretation of quantified modal logic, nature of
extensionality, necessity of identity, direct reference theory for
proper names, notions of essentialism, second-order modal logic,
modal metaphysics, properties and classes, substitutional and
objectual quantification, actualism, the Barcan formula, possibilia
and possible-world semantics to epistemic and deontic modalities,
non-language-centered theories of belief, accounts of rationality,
consistency of a moral code, moral dilemmas, and much more. The
contributions demonstrate that Barcan Marcus's original and clear
ideas have had a formative influence on the direction in which
certain themes central to today's philosophical debate have
developed. Furthermore, the volume includes an illuminating
intellectual autobiography from Barcan Marcus herself as well as an
informal interview containing her unfiltered, frank answers. The
book brings together contributions by Ruth Barcan Marcus, Timothy
Williamson, Dagfinn Follesdal, Joelle Proust, Pascal Engel, Edgar
Morscher, Erik J. Olsson, and Michael Frauchiger.
Theopoetics of the Word weaves together Christian theology,
continental philosophy and cultural studies to present a new
theology of language and technology for the 21st century. It is the
final work of the famed death-of-God theologian Gabriel Vahanian
completed only weeks before his death in 2012. It radicalizes his
pioneering, iconoclastic work in contemporary religious thought by
addressing issues of identity, Christology, secularity and the
legacy of the Protestant West. The book continues Vahanian's
longtime engagement with the thought of Paul Tillich and Jacques
Ellul, and opens new pathways for thought in the work of Elisabeth
Roudinesco and Francois Laurelle. Vahanian's is a prophetic and
timely voice who has forged reputation as one of the most original
and poetic religious thinkers of our time, who tells us here, 'You
can only forget what you need to be reminded of. Read what follows
in this book. And forget it.'
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the
1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly
expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable,
high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
The volume takes on the much-needed task of describing and
explaining the nature of the relations and interactions between
mind, language and action in defining mentality. Papers by renowned
philosophers unravel what is increasingly acknowledged to be the
enacted nature of the mind, memory and language-acquisition, whilst
also calling attention to Wittgenstein's contribution. The volume
offers unprecedented insight, clarity, scope, and currency.
In this volume the philosophy of perception and observation is
discussed by leading philosophers with implications in the
philosophy of mind, in epistemology, and in philosophy of science.
In the last years the philosophy of perception underwent
substantial changes and new views appeared: the intentionality of
perception has been contested by relational theories of perception
(direct realism), a richer view of perceptual content has emerged,
new theories of intentionality have been defended against
naturalistic theories of representation (e. g. phenomenal
intentionality). These theoretical changes reflect also new
insights coming from psychological theories of perception. These
changes have substantial consequences for the epistemic role of
perception and for its role in scientific observation. In the
present volume, leading philosophers of perception discuss these
new views and show their implications in the philosophy of mind, in
epistemology and in philosophy of science. A special focus is laid
on Franz Brentano and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A reference volume for
all scholars and students of the history, psychology and philosophy
of perception, and cognitive science.
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