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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > History of ideas, intellectual history
This edited collection brings together literary scholars and art historians, and maps how satire became a less genre-driven and increasingly visual medium in the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Changing satire demonstrates how satire proliferated in various formats, and discusses a wide range of material from canonical authors like Swift to little known manuscript sources and prints. As the book emphasises, satire was a frame of reference for well-known authors and artists ranging from Milton to Bernini and Goya. It was moreover a broad European phenomenon: while the book focuses on English satire, it also considers France, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain, and discusses how satirical texts and artwork could move between countries and languages. In its wide sweep across time and formats, Changing satire brings out the importance that satire had as a transgressor of borders. -- .
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the first modern philosophers and one of the most important. His contributions were often groundbreaking, and his impact remains in such fields as logic, mathematics, science, international law, and ethics. Historical Dictionary of Leibniz's Philosophy, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on Leibniz's philosophy, written work, teachers, contemporaries, and philosophers influenced by him. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Leibniz's Philosophy.
A few years after Austria's disastrous defeat in the First World War, Vienna, a city hardly known for intellectual fervor or serious discourse, suddenly emerged as a mecca for psychology. At a time seemingly most unpropitious for scholarly speculation, interbellum Vienna, economically and spiritually bankrupt at its onset, enjoyed a brief, remarkable two decades of excellence and innovation in an unfamiliar realm, that of abstract ideas. The most notable beneficiary of this intellectual Zeitgeist was the field of psychology; Viennese psychology became famous and its gurus and gadflies became world figures. This is the first book to present that history within the context of the political and social events of the time. Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Karl Buhler, Erik Erikson, and Helene Deutsch were among the hundreds of famous psychologists who lived in Vienna and established training centers there. Not only were the historical events momentous, but Vienna's psychologists were often politically active and subversive. Since a majority of them were socialist and Jewish, Vienna's leading psychologists emigrated when Austria was annexed by Germany, abruptly ending the Golden Age.
This book deals with the development of thinking under different cultural conditions, focusing on the evolution of mathematical thinking in the history of science and education. Starting from Piaget's genetic epistemology, it provides a conceptual framework for describing and explaining the development of cognition by reflective abstractions from systems of actions.
Davis demonstrates how Simone Weil's Marxism challenges current neoliberal understandings of the self and of human rights. Explaining her related critiques of colonialism and of political parties, it presents Weil as a twentieth-century political philosopher who anticipated and critically responded to the most contemporary political theory. Simone Weil's short life (1909-1943) is best understood as deeply invested in and engaged with the world around her, one she knew she would leave behind sooner rather than later if she continued to take risks on the side of the oppressed. In this important and timely book, Benjamin P. Davis presents Simone Weil first and foremost as a political philosopher. To do so, he places Weil's political writings in conversation with feminist philosophy, decolonial philosophy, aesthetic theory, human rights discourse, and Marxism. Against the backdrop of Weil's commitments, Davis provides reads Weil explicitly into debates in contemporary Critical Theory. Davis argues that in the battles of today, we urgently need to reconnect with Simone Weil's ethical and political imagination, which offers a critique of oppression as part of a deeper attention to the world.
As climate change becomes an increasingly important part of public discourse, the relationship between time in nature and history is changing. Nature can no longer be considered a slow and immobile background to human history, and the future can no longer be viewed as open and detached from the past. Times of History, Times of Nature engages with this historical shift in temporal sensibilities through a combination of detailed case studies and synthesizing efforts. Focusing on the history of knowledge, media theory, and environmental humanities, this volume explores the rich and nuanced notions of time and temporality that have emerged in response to climate change.
This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel's ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel's lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.
Buridan was a brilliant logician in an age of brilliant logicians, sensitive to formal and philosophical considerations. There is a need for critical editions and accurate translations of his works, for his philosophical voice speaks directly across the ages to problems of concern to analytic philosophers today. But his idiom is unfamiliar, so editions and trans lations alone will not bridge the gap of centuries. I have tried to make Buridan accessible to philosophers and logicians today by the introduc tory essay, in which I survey Buridan's philosophy of logic. Several problems which Buridan touches on only marginally in the works trans lated herein are developed and discussed, citing other works of Buridan; some topics which he treats at length in the translated works, such as the semantic theory of oblique terms, I have touched on lightly or not at all. Such distortions are inevitable, and I hope that the idiosyncracies of my choice of philosophically relevant topics will not blind the reader to other topics of value Buridan considers. My goal in translating has been to produce an accurate renaering of the Latin. Often Buridan will couch a logical rule in terms of the grammatical form of a sentence, and I have endeavored to keep the translation consistent. Some strained phrases result, such as "A man I know" having a different logic from "I know a man. " This awkwardness cannot always be avoided, and I beg the reader's indulgence. All of the translations here are my own."
In its portrayal of Judaism as a worldwide conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of Christian civilization, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion remains one of the most infamous documents ever written. Despite being proven a crude forgery, the pamphlet managed to pervade twentieth-century thinking, often being twisted to suit its handlers' purposes, and to justify the most extreme persecution of the Jews. In A Rumor About the Jews, Stephen Eric Bronner provides a history of this notorious fabrication-one which has renewed salience in a "post truth" society dominated by "fake news"-and explores its influence on right-wing movements throughout the twentieth century and the ongoing appeal of bigotry. This new edition of Bronner's 2000 classic (described by Kirkus as "the best short book on anti-Semitism") expands the arguments of the first edition, bringing the work up to date in a new political context.
With a recent surge of interest in the field, a volume taking stock of important theoretical shifts in the philosophy of history is greatly needed. A Philosophy of History fills this gap by weaving together a range of perspectives on the field which finds itself at a crossroads, and asks where it is headed in the 21st century. The book takes a concerted effort to go beyond the customary three-fold distinction between the speculative, analytic and narrativist approaches in philosophy of history. It considers, what comes after the enduring 'narrativist turn'. Chapters incorporate cutting-edge discussions on the relevance of contemporary political phenomena such as populism, the relation between science and history, pragmatism and the paradigmatic challenge of the Anthropocene. It also re-evaluates the continued relevance of major historical thinkers like Leibniz and R.G. Collingwood, and the endlessly fresh insights they can offer to key debates in the field today. Philosophy of History is a much-needed reappraisal of the philosophy and theory of history; offering an up-to-date overview of major developments in the field, and addressing the pressing questions of where to go next in a 'post-analytical', 'post-narrativist' world.
Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others. The enlightenment's key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the 'proto-postmodernist' practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through the eyes of Others: Persians, women, Tahitians, Londoners, natives and naives, the blind, and even imaginary extra-terrestrials. This book aims to show that this self-estrangement, as a means to gain critical distance from one's taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the enlightenment, and remains vital for critical and constructive sociopolitical thinking today.
War is Hell is a study of the philosophy of war and peace, ranging critically from ancient peace thinking to today. The author uses a Socratic method, focused on political philosophy rather than on cultural or psychological aspects of war and peace making. The book is not a treatise on ethics, but rather an analysis of some aspects of the nature of war and peace.
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 Traite des systemes is a milestone in the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. This is a study of its content, structure, sources and importance. It includes a discussion of Condillac's analysis of good and bad systems, the adequacy of his knowledge and under standing of the speculative metaphysics of the preceding century, the effectiveness of his method of attack on seventeenth-century metaphysical systems, his conception of empirical and scientific method, and in particular his understanding of the role of hypotheses, his application of the Newtonian scientific method to politics, physics, and the arts, and, finally, his preoccupation with the meaning of words and with the origin and purpose oflanguage. Speculative metaphysical systems, such as those of Descartes, Malebranche, Boursier, Leibniz and Spinoza, are attacked by Con dillac, as are popular superstitions and prejudices, with the weapon of linguistic criticism. It is the systematic use of this weapon which makes the Traite des systemes more than a reflection of his contem poraries' antipathy towards speculative metaphysics. In memory of my MOTHER and FATHER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to several people. I should like first and foremost to thank Dr. W. H. Barber, who has for many years tirelessly given me encouragement and invaluable assistance. I wish to thank also Professors RH. Rasmussen, A. D. Wilshere and C. Wake for their help and their support in the early days of the preparation of this study. lowe special thanks also to Mrs. M. V."
This volume contains a number of studies on Jewish-Christian re lations, in which special attention is given to the Netherlands and England, and the texts of some recently discovered and other rare documents in the same field. The work originates in a symposium on this subject held on 23 January 1985 at the University of Leiden under the auspices of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute for the study of Anglo-Dutch relations. Various authors have contributed to this volume. Each author is responsible for his own contribu tion; thus, in cases of discrepancies in interpretation, orthography or method of transcription we have made no attempt at harmoni zation. We thank all those who have made publication possible. The Stichting Dr Hendrik Muller's Vaderlandsch Fonds gave a gener ous grant in defrayal of the cost of printing, and the Ir. F.E.D. Enschede-Stichting kindly covered the additional expenses re sulting from the translation and editing of some of the contribu tions. Last but not least we should like to thank Prof. R.H. Pop kin for his stimulating interest in the publication of this volume."
Atheism was the most fundamental challenge to early-modern French certainties. Leading educators, theologians and philosophers labelled such atheism as manifestly absurd, confident that neither the fact nor behaviour of nature was explicable without reference to God. The alternative was a categorical naturalism. This book demonstrates that the Christian learned world had always contained the naturalistic 'atheist' as an interlocutor and a polemical foil, and its early-modern engagement and use of the hypothetical atheist were major parts of its intellectual life. In the considerations and polemics of an increasingly fractious orthodox culture, the early-modern French learned world gave real voice and eventually life to that atheistic presence. Without understanding the actual context and convergence of the inheritance, scholarship, fierce disputes, and polemical modes of orthodox culture, the early-modern generation and dissemination of absolute naturalism are inexplicable. This book brings to life that Christian learned culture, its dilemmas, and its unintended consequences.
The general view of scholars is that the Kabbalah had no meaningful influence on Leibniz's thought. } But on the basis of new evidence I am convinced that the question must be reopened. The Kabbalah did influence Leibniz, and a recognition of this will lead to both a better understanding of the supposed "quirkiness, 2 of Leibniz's philosophy and an appreciation ofthe Kabbalah as an integral but hitherto ignored factor in the emergence of the modem secular and scientifically oriented world. During the past twenty years there has been increasing willingness to recognize the important ways in which mystical and occult thinking contributed to the development of science and the emergence 3 of toleration. However, the Kabbalah, particularly the Lurianic Kabbalah with its monistic vitalism and optimistic philosophy of perfectionism and universal salvation, has not yet been integrated into the new historiography, although it richly deserves to be. On the basis of manuscripts in libraries at Hanover and Wolfenbiittel, it is clear that Leibniz's relationship with Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614- 1698) and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-1689), the two leading Christian Kabbalists of the period, was much closer than previously imagined and that his direct knowledge of their writings, especially the collection of 4 kabbalistic texts they published in the Kabbala Denudata, was far more detailed than most scholars have realized. During 1688 Leibniz spent more than a month at Sulzbach with von Rosenroth.
This book provides a focus for future discussion in one of the most important debates within historical theology within the protestant tradition - the debate about the definition of a category of analysis that operates over five centuries of religious faith and practice and in a globalising religion. In March 2009, TIME magazine listed 'the new Calvinism' as being among the 'ten ideas shaping the world.' In response to this revitalisation of reformation thought, R. Scott Clark and D. G. Hart have proposed a definition of 'Reformed' that excludes many of the theologians who have done most to promote this driver of global religious change. In this book, the Clark-Hart proposal becomes the focus of a debate. Matthew Bingham, Chris Caughey, and Crawford Gribben suggest a broader and (they argue) more historically responsible definition for 'Reformed,' as Hart and Scott respond to their arguments.
The received view of Martin Heidegger's work is that he leaves little room for reason in the practice of philosophy or the conduct of life. Citing his much-scorned remark that reason is the "stiff-necked adversary of thought", critics argue that Heidegger's philosophy effectively severs the tie between reason and normativity, leaving anyone who adheres to his position without recourse to justifying reasons for their beliefs and actions. Transcending Reason is a collection of essays by leading Heidegger scholars that challenges this view by exploring new ways to understand Heidegger's approach to the relationship between reason, normativity, and the philosophical methodology that gives us access to these issues. The volume points to Heidegger's novel approach to reason understood in terms of what he calls Dasein's 'transcendence'-the ability to occupy the world as a space of normatively structured meanings in which we navigate our striving to be. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of this new and innovative take on Heidegger's philosophy, this collection considers the possibility that he does not sever but rather reconceives the relation between reason and normativity.
In Kant's Struggle for Autonomy: On the Structure of Practical Reason, Raef Zreik presents an original synoptic view of Kant's practical philosophy, uncovering the relatively hidden architectonics of Kant's system and critically engaging with its broad implications. He begins by investigating the implicit strategy that guides Kant in making the distinctions that establish the autonomous spheres: happiness, morality, justice, public order-legitimacy. The organizing principle of autonomy sets these spheres apart, assuming there is self-sufficiency for each sphere. Zreik then develops a critique of this strategy, showing its limits, its costs, and its inherent instability. He questions self-sufficiency and argues that autonomy is a matter of ongoing struggle between the forces of separation and unification. Zreik proceeds to suggest that we "read Kant backward," reading early Kant in light of late Kant. This reading reveals Kant's strategy of both taking things apart and putting them together, focusing on the joints, transitions, and metastructures of the system. The image emanating from this account of Kant's legal and moral philosophy is of an intimate yet tragic conflict within Kant's thought-one that leaves us to our own judgment as to where to draw the boundaries between spheres, opening the door for politicizing Kant's practical philosophy.
The topic of history was not a principal theme of the classical American Pragmatists, but in this book Marnie Binder presents the case for a pragmatist philosophy of history, examining supporting material from William James, John Dewey, F.C.S. Schiller, C.S. Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams. While the thinkers explored here have significant differences among themselves, together they provide distinct contributions to a fuller picture of what guides our selective memory and our present attention, and they indicate how this is all maintained via confirmation in the future. Philosophy needs history to help clarify meanings and concepts; part of the methodology of pragmatism is derived from history, as it is attested over time. History needs philosophy to critically analyze historical data; pragmatic interests influence how we study and record history. A Pragmatist Philosophy of History, therefore, provides a rich context for a method that brings the two disciplines together.
If there is one thing that people agree about concerning the massive, leaderless, spontaneous protests that have spread across the globe over the past decade, it's that they were failures. The protesters, many claim, simply could not organize; nor could they formulate clear demands. As a result, they failed to bring about long-lasting change. In the Street challenges this seemingly forgone conclusion. It argues that when analyses of such events are confined to a framework of success and failure, they lose sight of the on-the-ground efforts of political actors who demonstrate, if for a fleeting moment, that another way of being together is possible. The conception of democratic action developed here helps us see that events like Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi uprising, or the weeks-long protests that took place all around the US after George Floyd's killing by the police are best understood as democratic enactments created in and through "intermediating practices," which include contestation, deliberation, judging, negotiation, artistic production, and common use. Through these intermediating practices, people become "political friends"; they act in ways other than expected of them to reach out to others unlike themselves, establish relations with strangers, and constitute a common amidst disagreements. These democratic enactments are fleeting, but what remains in their aftermath are new political actors and innovative practices. The book demonstrates that the current obsession with the "failure" of spontaneous protests is the outcome of a commonly accepted way of thinking about democratic action, which casts organization as a technical matter that precedes politics and moments of spontaneous popular action as sudden explosions. The origins of this widely shared understanding lie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of popular sovereignty, shaped by his rejection of theatricality and idealization of immediacy. Insofar as contemporary thinkers see democratic moments as the unmediated expressions of people's will and/or instantaneous eruptions, they, like Rousseau, reduce spontaneity to immediacy and erase the rich and creative practices of political actors. In the Street counters this Rousseauian influence by appropriating Aristotle's notion of "political friendship," and developing an alternative conceptualization of democratic action through a close reading of Antonio Negri, Jurgen Habermas, and Jacques Ranciere and the global protests of 1968 that inspired these thinkers and their work.
When this book was first published, more than five years ago, I added an appendix on How the Pythagoreans discovered Proposition 11.5 of the 'Elements'. I hoped that this appendix, although different in some ways from the rest of the book, would serve to illustrate the kind of research which needs to be undertaken, if we are to acquire a new understanding of the historical development of Greek mathematics. It should perhaps be mentioned that this book is not intended to be an introduction to Greek mathematics for the general reader; its aim is to bring the problems associated with the early history of deductive science to the attention of classical scholars, and historians and philos ophers of science. I should like to conclude by thanking my translator, Mr. A. M. Ungar, who worked hard to produce something more than a mechanical translation. Much of his work was carried out during the year which I spent at Stanford as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. This enabled me to supervise the work of transla tion as it progressed. I am happy to express my gratitude to the Center for providing me with this opportunity. Arpad Szabo NOTE ON REFERENCES The following books are frequently referred to in the notes. Unless otherwise stated, the editions are those given below. Burkert, W. Weisheit und Wissensclzaft, Studien zu Pythagoras, Philo laos und Platon, Nuremberg 1962."
This book argues that the work of the Austrian economists, including Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, has been too narrowly interpreted. Through a study of Viennese politics and culture, it demonstrates that the project they were engaged in was much broader: the study and defense of a liberal civilization. Erwin Dekker shows the importance of the civilization in their work and how they conceptualized their own responsibilities toward that civilization, which was attacked left and right during the interwar period. Dekker argues that what differentiates their position is that they thought of themselves primarily as students of that civilization rather than as social scientists, or engineers. This unique focus and approach is related to the Viennese setting of the circles, which constitute the heart of Viennese intellectual life in the interwar period. |
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