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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > History of ideas, intellectual history
Mahoney provides a comprehensive study of the thought and action of Charles de Gaulle. This volume is neither a biography nor a historical narrative, although it addresses important aspects of de Gaulle's life and political career. Mahoney asserts that de Gaulle is systematically misunderstood, especially in the Anglo-American world. He is sometimes dismissed as a narrow or quixotic nationalist, pigeon-holed as an irrational anti-American, and often labelled with various anti-democratic appellations such as Bonapartist or Nietzschean. In responding to this wide-spread misunderstanding, Mahoney analyzes de Gaulle's approach to the problem of modern democracy, and he shows that de Gaulle neither despaired of liberal democracy nor succumbed to the illusions that anything is better than democratic mediocrity. De Gaulle believed that human beings were political animals who naturally desired to live in communities dedicated to shared, noble purposes. He also knew that modern men are individuals who resist or ignore these purposes. The statesman-writer de Gaulle believed it was the task of statesmanship to kindle these political purposes by reaching for the summits--for the dazzling light of national unity and ambition that he called grandeur. Mahoney shows that de Gaulle did not despair of liberal democracy; he did not succumb to the illusions of the impatient or tyrannical that anything is better than democratic mediocrity. This is an important corrective to scholars and students of modern political thought and European history, as well as an invaluable guide to democratic statesmanship in our time.
Assessing the dawn of the Anthropocene era, a poet and philosopher asks: How do we live at the end of the world? The end of the Holocene era is marked not just by melting glaciers or epic droughts, but by the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy—a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living.
In the 18th century "virtue" was a word to conjure with. It called to mind heroic predecessors from the Roman Republic such as Cato and Brutus and invoked qualities of personal integrity, selflessness and a concern for the common good, which, though urgently needed, seemed desperately lacking, both in the ruthless party struggles of the age of Anne and subsequently in the all pervading political corruption of the Walpole administration. When the longed for political saviour failed to materialize it was increasingly felt that if virtue existed at all then it would have to be sought for among the lower orders of society or else in provincial areas, where simpler and nobler values might still prevail. But with the coming of the French Revolution and Romanticism, virtue began to lose its powerful resonances. It now seemed naive and simplistic, all too ready to deny both the complexities of human nature and the possibility of determination by external cultural forces.
Suppose that a congenitally blind person has learned to distinguish and name a sphere and a cube by touch alone. Then imagine that this person suddenly recovers the faculty of sight. Will he be able to distinguish both objects by sight and to say which is the sphere and which the cube? This was the question which the Irish politician and scientist William Molyneux posed in 1688 to John Locke. Molyneux's question has intrigued a wide variety of intellectuals for three centuries. Those who have attempted to solve it include Berkeley, Reid, Leibniz, Voltaire, La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot, M ller, Helmholtz, William James and Gareth Evans. This book is the first comprehensive survey of the history of the discussion about Molyneux's problem. It will be of interest to historians of both philosophy and psychology.
"A scientific opinion is one which there is some reason to believe is true; an unscientific opinion is one which is held for some reason other than its probable truth". One of Russell's most important books, this early classic on science illuminates his thinking on the promise and threat of scientific progress. Russell considers three questions fundamental to an understanding of science: the nature and scope of scientific knowledge, the increased power over nature that science affords, and the changes in the lives of human beings that result from new forms of science. With customary wit and clarity, Russell offers brilliant discussions of many major scientific figures, including Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Darwin. Unavailable for many years, this book should prove interesting reading for Russell followers and anyone interested in popular science and philosophy.
Angie Sandhu examines the relation between intellectuals and society by examining this question in political theory. She critically engages with contemporary debates on the subject both in Britain and the U.S. drawing on a wide range of material. "Intellectuals and the People" carefully sets out a new argument that calls for intellectuals to address their own elite locations in society by challenging notions of intellectual difference and autonomy.
A unique chronicle of the hundred-year period when the Jewish people changed the world - and it changed them Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Bernhardt and Kafka. Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. But many have vanished from our collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. These visionaries all have something in common - their Jewish origins and a gift for thinking outside the box. In 1847 the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world's population, and yet they saw what others could not. How?
In The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine some of the world's leading scholars, in a wide range of disciplines, come together to consider the extraordinary achievement of Sir Henry Maine, sometime Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge (1877-1888) and one of the most powerful and original minds of the Victorian age. The disciplinary range and scholarly stature of the contributors is itself testimony to the fascination of Maine's work which, after a period of relative neglect, is now recognized as a unique and fecund contribution to the development of social scientific study. The book is divided into four sections, dealing with the principal strands of Maine's life and writing, viz. his views on social and political progress, his anthropological and social scientific works, his legal and jurisprudential thought and finally his writings on Indian affairs, the product (in part) of his experiences as the legal member of Council of the Governor-General from 1862 to 1869.
American Sociology has changed radically since 1945, when the field
was dominated by young lions attempting to make sociology a
science. The 1968 student revolt ended much of this, leaving
sociology divided and directionless. By the 1980s, enrolments had
fallen and departments were closing. But sociology revived, and at
both the graduate and undergraduate level the field became
dominated by women. What changed and what didn't, and why? Areas of
interest, methodology, and status hierarchies were all affected by
the changes, but there were also continuities. Some of the
continuities reached back to the nineteenth century, when sociology
was closely related to reform movements.
Kozo Uno influenced a whole generation of marxian political
economists in post World War II Japan. Thomas Sekine worked closely
with Uno in Japan and later came to York University in Toronto,
where he introduced Uno's ideas to Canadian scholars. Sekine has
significantly enlarged and refined Uno's work, and in the process
has influenced scholars in both Japan and Canada. This anthology is
a collection of essays in marxian political economy by scholars who
have been influenced by Sekine's particular appropriation of Uno's
ideas.
This volume, first published in 1988, offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of the history of a complex and varied body of ideas over a period of more than a thousand years. A work of both synthesis and assessment, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought presents the results of several decades of critical scholarship in the field, and reflects in its breadth of enquiry precisely that diversity of focus which characterised the medieval sense of the 'political', preoccupied with universality at some levels, and with almost minute particularity at others. Thus among the vital questions explored by the distinguished team of contributors are the nature of authority, of justice, of property; the problem of legitimacy, of allegiance, of resistance to the powers that be; the character and function of law, and the role of custom in sustaining a social structure. While the predominant emphasis of the volume is necessarily upon those ideas that developed within Latin Christendom, full weight is also given to the impact of Byzantine, Jewish, and Islamic thought, and the whole comprises a unique distillation of knowledge upon a multi-faceted screen.
First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Can societies fall ill? Can institutions die, or social practices degenerate? Must social norms be embodied? To what extent is social action habitual? Is social life part of nature or does it transcend it? This book explores the meaning and many facets of naturalism in social philosophy. It investigates the consequences of concepts such as "second nature" and "forms of life" for social philosophy. It analyses the ways in which social action, gender, work and morality are embodied. It surveys the conceptions of nature at play in social criticism. It provides students and experts of social philosophy with both an overview and critical analyses of the many facets of naturalism in social philosophy from Hume and Hegel to Contemporary Critical Theory. Contributors: Louis Carre, Fabian Freyenhagen, Martin Hartmann, Axel Honneth, Thomas Khurana, Steven Levine, Sabrina Lovibond, Arvi Sarkela, Barbara Stiegler, Mariana Teixeira, Italo Testa
The construction and the role of the economic canon, the accepted list of great works and great authors, has been the subject of much recent literary and historical debate. By contrast, the concept of the canon has been largely dormant in the study of the history of economics, with the canonical sequence of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, etc. constituting the skeleton for most teaching and research. This important collection represents the first critical attempt at exploring and defining the relationship between the canon and the construction of the history of economics.
Philhellenism the fascination with the art, politics, religion and society of ancient Greece- is a powerful and compelling phenomenon in German culture and intellectual history, creating a language and a series of key ideas that were to exert a continuous influence on German thought, aesthetics and politics well into the twentieth century. In this book Valdez examines the first generation of German Philhellenes from Winckelmann to Goethe. He shows how German Philhellenism was torn between the search for a historical whole which could explain and encompass Greek excellence, and the desire to incorporate individual aspects of Greece in a wider ethical and artistic enterprise, and finally, to give it a place in the history of freedom itself. Valdez also shows that German philhellenic ideas grew out of a dialogue with French and British ideas and historiography. He charts how the fascination with Greek antiquity was reflected in theatre and literature and how the longings and idealisation of Philhellenes clashed with the more critical and sober historians of the Enlightenment. The book also explains how the search for the historical reality of philhellenic ideals created intense emotional and ideological conflicts about the unique nature of male friendship in ancient Greece and about the position of women in ancient Athens.
Yasuma Takata (1883-1971), nicknamed the Japanese Marshall by Martin Bronfenbrenner, dominated sociology and then economics in Japan over a long period. In sociology he was known through his articles published in German, whilst as an economist he remained rather unknown in the West, despite of his works along the line connecting Walras, Bohm-Bawerk, Wicksell and Keynes. His scope is wide enough to view Marx critically and accommodate Veblen, Pareto and Schumpeter. Accepting the orthodox economic theory as a first approximation, he tried to introduce institutional factors and power relationships as a second approximation. This volume is edited so as to represent his synthesis of economics and sociology.
Science and the Quest for Reality is an interdisciplinary anthology that situates contemporary science within its complex philosophical, historical, and sociological contexts. The anthology is divided between, firstly, characterizing science as an intellectual activity and, secondly, defining its social role. The philosophical and historical vicissitudes of science's truth claims has raised profound questions concerning the role of science in society beyond its technological innovations. The deeper philosophical issues thus complement the critical inquiry concerning the broader social and ethical influence of contemporary science. In the tradition of the 'Main Trends of the Modern World' series, this volume includes both classical and contemporary works on the subject.
In the year 1985, presumed to mark the 850th anniversary of Maimonides' birth, the Sixth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter was dedicated to Maim onides as philosopher. We did not enter into the other aspects of his work, rabbinical, legal, medical, etc., except in so far as the relation between his philosophy and his work in halakha (Jewish law) is itself a philosophical question. That no one is quite certain about Maimonides' date of birth is symbolic of the state of his philosophy as well. Maimonides' thought poses various enigmas, lends itself to contradictory interpretations and gives rise today, as it did in the Middle Ages, to sustained controversies. Some of the contribu tions to the present volume deal with these and cognate topics. Others deal with certain aspects of the philosophical tradition in which Maimonides was rooted, with some traits peculiar to the Islamic society in the midst of which he lived, and with his influence on Christian scholasticism. Maimonides' thought had many facets, and for this and other reasons the question as to his place and stature in the history of philosophy admits of no simple answer. In this volume an attempt has been made to draw atten tion to some of these complexities."
The human species is very young, but in a short time it has acquired some striking, if biologically superficial, variations across the planet. As this book shows, however, none of those biological variations can be understood in terms of discrete races, which do not actually exist as definable entities. Starting with a consideration of evolution and the mechanisms of diversification in nature, this book moves to an examination of attitudes to human variation throughout history, showing that it was only with the advent of slavery that considerations of human variation became politicized. It then embarks on a consideration of how racial classifications have been applied to genomic studies, demonstrating how individualized genomics is a much more effective approach to clinical treatments. It also shows how racial stratification does nothing to help us understand the phenomenon of human variation, at either the genomic or physical levels. |
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