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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > General
This book focuses on the work of Mircea Eliade, taking a methodological concern, but also focusing on a wider concern, trying to indicate the many facets and implications of Eliade's scholarship as a historian of religions. Chapters two and three are concerned with the work of Eliade as a historian of religions, whereas chapter four examines the theological aspects of his work. After an examination of the human situation and his understanding of God, the book goes on to discover that the key to understanding Eliade's theological reflections is the role of nostalgia. As well as the theological aspects of Eliade's work, this book looks at his participation and contribution to cross-cultural dialogue, his theory of myth, his theory of archaic ontology, his concept of power and his views on time from the perspective of his roles as both a historian of religions and a literary figure.
The distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification has had a turbulent career in philosophy of science. At times celebrated as the hallmark of philosophical approaches to science, at times condemned as ambiguous, distorting, and misleading, the distinction dominated philosophical debates from the early decades of the twentieth century to the 1980s. Until today, it informs our conception of the content, domain, and goals of philosophy of science. It is due to this fact that new trends in philosophy of experimentation and history and sociology of science have been marginalized by traditional scholarship in philosophy. To acknowledge properly this important recent work we need to re-open the debate about the nature, development, and significance of the context distinction, about its merits and flaws. The contributions to this volume provide close readings and detailed analyses of the original textual sources for the context distinction.
In recent decades, there has been much scholarly controversy as to the basic ontological commitments of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The old picture of his thought as strictly idealistic, or committed to the ultimate reduction of bodies to the activity of mind, has come under attack, but Leibniz's precise conceptualization of bodies, and the role they play in his system as a whole, is still the subject of much controversy. One thing that has become clear is that in order to understand the nature of body in Leibniz, and the role body plays in his philosophy, it is crucial to pay attention to the related concepts of organism and of corporeal substance, the former being Leibniz's account of the structure of living bodies (which turn out, for him, to be the only sort of bodies there are), and the latter being an inheritance from the Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition which Leibniz appropriates for his own ends. This volume brings together papers from many of the leading scholars of Leibniz's thought, all of which deal with the cluster of questions surrounding Leibniz's philosophy of body.
The essays collected in this volume represent, in a revised version, the pa- pers of the Wittgenstein Conference held in November 1989 at the Univer- sity ofRome 'La Sapienza' to celebrate the centenary ofhis birth. They offer a systematic account ofWittgenstein's philosophy ofmind and contribute to illuminate his later conception of perceptive, emotional and cognitive lan- guage. Some of the reasons why it seemed the right time to promote an am- pIe confrontation ofideas on Wittgenstein's mature perspective are sufficiently c1ear as they derive from the need to sum up the state of research based on the availability of the Nachlass and the publication in the last decade of a conspicuous quantity ofwritings dedicated to philosophical psychology; other reasons are more complex as they depend on the already noticed tendency in the recent epistemological debate to interpret Wittgenstein's provocative and controversial theses in a "perverse" way, in a way which has been used as a banner for epistemic relativism, subjectivism, and irrationalism. The intention of this collection of essays is to construct an image of Wittgenstein's thought, which is as faithful as possible to his philosophy of mind and language from both a theoretical and exegetical point of view. The book also strives to assess the continuity and internal coherence of the theses developed throughout the different phases of his research.
This historico-critical edition of Schopenhauer's manuscript remains contains Schopenhauer's entire surviving philosophical notes, from his university years until his death in 1860. Translated here into English for the first time, it provides a fascinating insight into the workings of Schopenhauer's mind and an important key to his philosophical work. Translated by E.F.J. Payne
In the essays presented in this volume Bentham lays down the theoretical principles from which he develops his proposals for reform of the English poor laws in response to the perceived crisis in poor relief in the mid-1790s. These ideas were to be a significant influence on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.
This book discusses both the philosophy of language and linguistic philosophy.
Drawing on a tripartite taxonomy first suggested by the so-called English School of International Relations of a Hobbesian tradition of power politics, a Grotian tradition of concern with the rules that govern relations between states; and a Kantian tradition of thinking which transcends the existence of the states system, this book discusses the thinking of central political theorists about the modern states system. Thinkers covered are Hobbes, Grotius, Kant, Vitoria, Rousseau, Smith, Burke, Hegel, Gentz and Vattel.
This volume is a popular presentation of Nietzsche's thought. Hoover's analysis comes from the viewpoint of a Christian operating within a Thomist framework. An early chapter focuses on Nietzsche's life; the following chapters weave autobiographical materials into the treatment of his philosophical system, showing the close relationship between his life and thought. Hoover's study includes an analysis of Nietzsche's perspectivism, his contribution to propaganda theory, the demonstration of a deep and fundamental contradiction in his epistemology, and an analysis of his critique of anti-body idealism.
This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust
the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and
inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual,
sonic and performative phenomena, including provocative speculation
about how Proust might have responded to Deleuze and Beckett.
Morality, Moral Luck and Responsibility is a critical examination of our understanding of morality and responsibility through the questions raised by the problem of moral luck. The book considers two different approaches to moral luck, the Aristotelian vulnerability to factors outside the agent's control and the Kantian ambition to make morality immune to luck, and concludes that both approaches have more in common than previously thought. At the same time, it also considers recent developments in the field of virtue ethics and neo-kantianism. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in normative theories and the fundamental questions surrounding moral responsibility and the attribution of praise and blame.
Dick Popkin and James Force have attended a number of recent conferences where it was apparent that much new and important research was being done in the fields of interpreting Newton's and Spinoza's contributions as biblical scholars and of the relationship between their biblical scholarship and other aspects of their particular philosophies. This collection represents the best current research in this area. It stands alone as the only work to bring together the best current work on these topics. Its primary audience is specialised scholars of the thought of Newton and Spinoza as well as historians of the philosophical ideas of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The central idea developed by the contributions to this book is that the split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology - perhaps the most impor tant schism in twentieth-century philosophy - resulted from a radicalization of reciprocal partialities. Both schools of thought share, in fact, the same cultural background and their same initial stimulus in the thought of Franz Brentano. And one outcome of the subsequent rift between them was the oblivion into which the figure and thought of Brentano have fallen. The first step to take in remedying this split is to return to Brentano and to reconstruct the 'map' of Brent ani sm. The second task (which has been addressed by this book) is to revive inter est in the theoretical complexity of Brentano' s thought and of his pupils and to revitalize those aspects that have been neglected by subsequent debate within the various movements of Brentanian inspiration. We have accordingly decided to organize the book into two introductory es says followed by two sections (Parts 1 and 2) which systematically examine Brentano's thought and that of his followers. The two introductory essays re construct the reasons for the 'invisibility', so to speak, of Brentano and set out of his philosophical doctrine. Part 1 of the book then ex the essential features amines six of Brentano's most outstanding pupils (Marty, Stumpf, Meinong, Ehrenfels, Husserl and Twardowski). Part 2 contains nine essays concentrating on the principal topics addressed by the Brentanians."
twentieth-century literature about the distinction between explanation and und- standing)? Second, can we do justice to a particular writer's notion of that category by taking at face value what he writes about his own motivation for adopting it? In response to both types of questions, there is by now a consensus amongst many historians of science and of philosophy that (a) intellectual history - like other kinds of history - has to be careful not to uncritically adopt actors' categories, and (b) more generally, even the actors' own thinking about a particular issue has to be contextualized vis-a-vis their other intellectual commitments and interests, as well as the complex conditions that make the totality of their commitments possible. Such conditions include cognitive as well as practical, institutional, and cultural factors. The articles in this volume respond to these challenges in several ways. For example, one author (Christopher Pincock) seeks to read some of the nineteen- century philosophical writings about Erklaren and Verstehen as standing for a more fundamental problem, which he terms the problem of the "unity of experience.""
Is it possible, given culturally incongruent perspectives, to validate any common standards of behaviour? How can cultural relativity be a genuine problem if cultures are porous and inter-penetrable? Is it possible to implement human rights in societies without incorporating the idea into their fabric of culture? Is it possible for cultural communities to survive in the contemporary world without rights protection? This book addresses questions like these in the light of an inventive and original understanding of culture.
Leibniz's earliest philosophy and its importance for his mature philosophy have not been examined in detail, particularly in the level of detail that one can achieve by placing Leibniz's philosophy in the context of the sources for two of the most basic concerns of his philosophical career: his metaphysics of individuals and the principle oftheir individuation. In this book I provide for the first time a detailed examination of these two Leibnizian themes and trace its implications for how we should interpret other major Leibnizian themes and for how we should read Leibniz and other philosophers of the sixteenth and later centuries as 'modem' philosophers. Leibniz began his philosophical career more than 300 years ago, a fact that shapes fundamentally my attempt in the pages that follow to come to terms now with the texts that he left us. Leibniz's did not do philosophy in a way wholly congenial to twentieth century philosophical methodologies, especially those that have enjoyed some prominence in recent Anglo-American philosophy. Moreover, as we shall see, Leibniz is not a modem philosopher, when 'modem' is understood to mean making a sharp break with medieval philosophy. Indeed, I shall argue, scholars should discard such terms as 'modem' from historical philosophical scholarship, so that old texts can be allowed to remain old - to stand on their own in and from times now long past.
After his failure to replace metaphysics by a linguistic approach, Ludwig Boltzmann came to identify the philosophy of science with methodology which, in turn, he considered to be part of science itself, and thus not part of philosophy at all. His definition of philosophy as metaphysics meant that, from his point of view, all philosophers were metaphysicians, himself included. Boltzmann the philosopher was advised on the improvement of his Weltanschauung by Franz Brentano; to such effect that, by the summer of 1905, Boltzmann appeared to be close to a form of critical realism. However, the stronger this realism became, the more inconsistent it seemed to be with his Mach plus pictures' methodology of science. During this period, he planned to write a book, first on metaphysics and then later on what he called A priori probability' and what he considered to be its shortcomings. Apparently, the book was never completed. All know Boltzmann the great physicist. Much less widely known is that he was an original philosopher: one who had a great impact on early 20th Century Viennese philosophy, beginning with Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle and extending even to Popper and Feyerabend. Blackmore's delving into Boltzmann's correspondence, coupled with his unparalleled knowledge of Boltzmann's final years, allows him to present Boltzmann in an entirely new light to readers in the English language. For physicists, philosophers and historians.
In a virtuoso display of erudition, thoughtfulness and humour, Terry Eagleton teases apart the concept of hope as it has been (often mistakenly) conceptualised over six millennia, from ancient Greece to today. He distinguishes hope from simple optimism, cheeriness, desire, idealism or adherence to the doctrine of Progress, bringing into focus a standpoint that requires reflection and commitment, arises from clear-sighted rationality, can be cultivated by practice and self-discipline, and which acknowledges but refuses to capitulate to the realities of failure and defeat. Authentic hope is indubitably tragic, yet Eagleton also argues for its radical implications as 'a species of permanent revolution, whose enemy is as much political complacency as metaphysical despair'. It is a means of facing the future without devaluing the moment or obviating the past. Traversing centuries of thought about the many modes of hoping - from Ernst Bloch's monumental work through the Stoics, Aquinas, Marx and Kierkegaard, among others - this penetrating book throws new light on religious faith and political ideology as well as issues such as the problem of evil, the role of language and the meaning of the past. Hope Without Optimism is a brilliantly engaged, impassioned chronicle of human belief and desire in an increasingly uncertain world.
Applying: to Derrida: What might such an extraordinary phrase mean? How are we to read its many folds, its strange, enigmatic grammar? Who does the applying? To whom? In what cases does Derrida apply, and why should scholars apply (themselves) to Jacques Derrida, today, more than ever? In order to find possible answers to such questions, all prospective applicants should apply within to this extraordinary collection of essays, which provides some of the most innovative insights and radical departures in the field of Derridean studies. Striking out from a number of new headings and in a number of new directions each of the essays in this collection pushes at the borders of their topics, disciplines and ways of thinking, providing innovative and inventive insights into the work - and application - of Jacques Derrida on a diverse range of themes including Irish identity, communication, ethics, love, tele-technology, Victorian studies, the limits of philosophy, translation, otherness and literature, demonstrating that, today, despite repeated accusations over recent years that the work of Derrida has become passe, there is more vitality and spirit in engaging with the writings of Derri
This historico-critical edition of Schopenhauer's manuscript remains contains Schopenhauer's entire surviving philosophical notes, from his university years until his death in 1860. Translated here into English for the first time, it provides a fascinating insight into the workings of Schopenhauer's mind and an important key to his philosophical work. Translated by E.F.J. Payne.
What Are the Underlying Causes of History
We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalising. Non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures. But the western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image. If the first is indestructible and the second is irresistible, who can win and what will victory look like? The answer may lie in the capacity for violence in the world-system itself, threatening that system from within with the purest of symbolic forms, the challenge of resistance. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact is the summation of Baudrillard's work over twenty years. It is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time. |
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