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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present
Human, All Too Human (1878) marks the point where Nietzsche
abandons German romanticism for the French Enlightenment. At a
moment of crisis in his life (no longer a friend of Richard Wagner,
forced to leave academic life through ill health), he sets out his
views in a scintillating and bewildering series of aphorisms which
contain the seeds of his later philosophy (e.g. the will to power,
the need to transcend conventional Christian morality). The result
is one of the cornerstones of his life's work. It well deserves its
subtitle 'A Book for Free Spirits', and its original dedication to
Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here finds a new
champion. Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is a scathing and powerful
critique of philosophy, religion and science. Here Nietzsche
presents us with problems and challenges that are as troubling as
they are inspiring, while at the same time outlining the virtues,
ideas, and practices which will characterise the philosophy of the
future. Relentless, energetic, tirelessly probing, he both
determines that philosophy's agenda and is himself the embodiment
of the type of thought he wants to foster.
This text presents and addresses the philosophical movement of
antiphilosophy working thru the texts of Christian thinkers such as
Pascal and Kierkegaard. The author as influenced by Alain Badiou,
portrays these Christian thinkers as of a subjective dimension
negating the possibility of an objective quest for truth. The claim
here is that antiphilosophy is abundant in the eyes of these two
thinkers who frame the thought event as represented by
Christianity, ultimately resigning itself to more or less the
opposite of philosophy itself. Readers will discover why
philosophical reason should never be convinced by that which denies
its very authority. Subjecting faith to the perils of philosophical
analysis, confronting the philosophical tradition with the truth of
the Christian faith, and occupying the space between the two: such
are the challenges facing an antiphilosophy of Christianity. This
text will appeal to researchers and students working in continental
philosophy, philosophy of religion and those in religious studies
who want to investigate the links between Christianity and
antiphilosophy.
Kant's account of emotions has only recently begun to receive the
attention that this topic deserves, as it casts new light over the
manifold features of transcendental philosophy. The authors expand
the contemporary overview of the Kantian treatment from both a
neuroscientific and a continental philosophical perspective. The
volume opens paths to reevaluate neglected aspects of the Kantian
model of human rationality.
The Kant Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the
world of Immanuel Kant, one of the most important and influential
thinkers in the history of philosophy. Meticulously researched and
extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major
works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the
central themes of Kant's thought. Students will discover a wealth
of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include
clear definitions of all the key terms used in Kant's writings and
detailed synopses of his key works. The Dictionary also includes
entries on Kant's major philosophical influences, such as Plato,
Descartes, Berkeley and Leibniz, and those he influenced and
engaged with, including Fichte, Hume and Rousseau. It covers
everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Kant's
philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often
complex terminology. The Kant Dictionary is the ideal resource for
anyone reading or studying Kant or Modern European Philosophy more
generally.
Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics introduces the importance of
body politics from both Eastern and Western perspectives. Hwa Yol
Jung begins with Giambattista Vico's anti-Cartesianism as the birth
of the discipline. He then explores the homecoming of Greek mousike
(performing arts), which included oral poetry, dance, drama, and
music; Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogical body politics; the making of
body politics in Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce
Irigaray; Marshall McLuhan's transversal and embodied philosophy of
communication; and transversal geophilosophy. This tour de force
will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the above
thinkers, as well as for students and scholars of comparative
philosophy, communication theory, environmental philosophy,
political philosophy, or continental philosophy
Husserl's 20th-century phenomenological project remains the
cornerstone of modern European philosophy. The place of ethics is
of importance to the ongoing legacy and study of phenomenology
itself. Husserl's Ethics and Practical Intentionality constitutes
one of the major new interventions in this burgeoning field of
Husserl scholarship, and offers an unrivaled perspective on the
question of ethics in Husserl's philosophy through a focus on
volumes not yet translated into English. This book offers a
refreshing perspective on stagnating ethical debates that pivot
around conceptions of relativism and universalism, shedding light
on a phenomenological ethics beyond the common dichotomy.
Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!:
A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a
fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the
ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships
between visuality and the ethical are usually theorized in negative
terms, according to the dyadic logics of seeing on the one hand,
and being seen, on the other. Here, agency and power are assumed to
operate either on the side of those who see, or on the side of
those who control the means by which people and things enter into
visibility. To be seen, by contrast - when it occurs outside of
those parameters of control- is to be at a disadvantage; hence, for
instance, contemporary theorist Peggy Phelan's rejection of the
idea, central to activist practices of the 1970's and 80's, that
projects of political emancipation must be intertwined with, and
are dependent on, processes of 'making oneself visible'.
Acknowledgment of the vulnerability of visibility also underlies
the realities of life lived within increasingly pervasive systems
of imposed and self-imposed surveillance, and apparently confident
public performances of visual self display. Showing Off!: A
Philosophy of Image is written against the backdrop of these
phenomena, positions and concerns, but asks what happens to our
debates about visibility when a third term, that of 'self-showing',
is brought into play. Indeed, it proposes a fundamentally positive
relationship between visuality and the ethical, one primarily
rooted not in acts of open and non-oppressive seeing or spectating,
as might be expected, but rather in our capacity to inhabit both
the risks and the possibilities of our own visible being. In other
words, this book maintains that the proper site of generosity and
agency within any visual encounter is located not on the side of
sight, but on that of self-showing - or showing off!
Winner - AERA 2011 Outstanding Book Award Jacques Rancire:
Education, Truth, Emancipation demonstrates the importance of
Rancires work for educational theory, and in turn, it shows just
how central Rancires educational thought is to his work in
political theory and aesthetics. Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta
illustrate brilliantly how philosophy can benefit from Rancires
particular way of thinking about education, and go on to offer
their own provocative account of the relationship between
education, truth, and emancipation. Including a new essay by
Rancire himself, this book is a must-read for scholars of social
theory and all who profess to educate.
This book is concerned with the evaluation of natural argumentative
discourse, and, in particular, with the language in which arguments
are expressed. It introduces a systematic procedure for the
analysis and assessment of arguments, which is designed to be a
practical tool, and may be considered a pseudo-algorithm for
argument evaluation. The first half of the book lays the
theoretical groundwork, with a thorough examination of both the
nature of language and the nature of argument. This leads to a
definition of argumentation as reasoning expressed within a
procedure, which itself yields the three frames of analysis used in
the evaluation procedure: Process, Reasoning, and Expression. The
second half begins with a detailed discussion of the concept of
fallacy, with particular attention on fallacies of language, their
origin and their effects. A new way of looking at fallacies emerges
from these chapters, and it is that conception, together with the
understanding of the nature of argumentation described in earlier
sections, which ultimately provides the support for the
Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation. The
first two levels of this innovative procedure are outlined, while
the third, that dealing with language, and involving the
development of an Informal Argument Semantics, is fully described.
The use of the system, and its power of analysis, are illustrated
through the evaluation of a variety of examples of argumentative
texts.
The questions have been with us since the dim, dark dusk of early
humanity. Who are we? How did we get here? Who is in charge? In
"The Discovery of Everything, the Creation of Nothing, " author Jim
Robert Bader communicates his personal philosophy on these age-old
enigmas as they apply to modern society.Intended as a primer for
the mind of the layman, "The Discovery of Everything, the Creation
of Nothing" presents a manifesto of the soul that insists the truth
is not only out there, but easily accessible to anyone. Based on
years of research and observation, Bader distills the complexities
and addresses relevant topics from an "everyman" perspective by
pondering the nature of the universe. He reflects on the thoughts
and discoveries of others to bring knowledge to the common man.In
"The Discovery of Everything, the Creation of Nothing, " Bader
offers a new way of understanding the world. He confronts old
assumptions, and he challenges the traditional way of thinking to
better cope with and comprehend the nature of the world around us.
Maine de Biran's work has had an enormous influence on the
development of French Philosophy - Henri Bergson called him the
greatest French metaphysician since Descartes and Malebranche,
Jules Lachelier referred to him as the French Kant, and
Royer-Collard called him simply 'the master of us all' - and yet
the philosopher and his work remain unknown to many English
speaking readers. From Ravaisson and Bergson, through to the
phenomenology of major figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Michel Henry, and Paul Ricoeur, Biran's influence is evident and
acknowledged as a major contribution. The notion of corps propre,
so important to phenomenology in the twentieth century, originates
in his thought. His work also had a huge impact on the distinction
between the virtual and the actual as well as the concepts of
effort and puissance, enormously important to the development of
Deleuze's and Foucault's work. This volume, the first English
translation of Maine de Biran in nearly a century, introduces
Anglophone readers to the work of this seminal thinker. The
Relationship Between the Physical and the Moral in Man is an
expression of Biran's mature 'spiritualism' and philosophy of the
will as well as perhaps the clearest articulation of his
understanding of what would later come to be called the mind-body
problem. In this text Biran sets out forcefully his case for the
autonomy of mental or spiritual life against the reductive
explanatory power of the physicalist natural sciences. The
translation is accompanied by critical essays from experts in
France and the United Kingdom, situating Biran's work and its
reception in its proper historical and intellectual context.
Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, this is a
comprehensive survey of the latest phenomenological research into
the perennial philosophical problem of truth. Starting with an
historical introduction chronicling the variations on truth at play
in the Phenomenological tradition, the book explores how Husserls
methodology equips us with the tools to thoroughly explore notions
of truth, reality and knowledge. From these foundations, the book
goes on to explore and extend the range of approaches that
contemporary phenomenological research opens up in the face of the
most profound ontological and epistemological questions raised by
the tradition. In the final section, the authors go further still
and explore how phenomenology relates to other variations on truth
offered up by hermeneutic, deconstructive and narrative
approaches.Across the 12 essays collected in this volume,
Variations on Truth explores and maps a comprehensive and rigorous
alternative to mainstream analytic discussions of truth, reality
and understanding.
This timely volume brings together a diverse group of expert
authors in order to investigate the question of phenomenology's
relation to the political. These authors take up a variety of
themes and movements in contemporary political philosophy. Some of
them put phenomenology in dialogue with feminism or philosophies of
race, others with Marxism and psychoanalysis, while others look at
phenomenology's historical relation to politics. The book shows the
ways in which phenomenology is either itself a form of political
philosophy, or a useful method for thinking the political. It also
explores the ways in which phenomenology falls short in the realm
of the political. Ultimately, this collection serves as a starting
point for a groundbreaking dialogue in the field about the nature
of the relationship between phenomenology and the political. It is
a must-read for anyone who is interested in phenomenology or
contemporary social and political philosophy.
Although there is a significant literature on the philosophy of
Jacques Derrida, there are few analyses that address the
deconstructive critique of phenomenology as it simultaneously plays
across range of cultural productions including literature,
painting, cinema, new media, and the structure of the university.
Using the critical figures of "ghost" and "shadow"-and initiating a
vocabulary of phantomenology-this book traces the implications of
Derridean "spectrality" on the understanding of contemporary
thought, culture, and experience.This study examines the
interconnections of philosophy, art in its many forms, and the
hauntology of Jacques Derrida. Exposure is explored primarily as
exposure to the elemental weather (with culture serving as a
lean-to); exposure in a photographic sense; being over-exposed to
light; exposure to the certitude of death; and being exposed to all
the possibilities of the world. Exposure, in sum, is a kind of
necessary, dangerous, and affirmative openness.The book weaves
together three threads in order to format an image of the
contemporary exposure: 1) a critique of the philosophy of
appearances, with phenomenology and its vexed relationship to
idealism as the primary representative of this enterprise; 2) an
analysis of cultural formations-literature, cinema, painting, the
university, new media-that highlights the enigmatic necessity for
learning to read a spectrality that, since the two cannot be
separated, is both hauntological and historical; and 3) a
questioning of the role of art-as semblance, reflection, and
remains-that occurs within and alongside the space of philosophy
and of the all the "posts-" in which people find themselves.Art is
understood fundamentally as a spectral aesthetics, as a site that
projects from an exposed place toward an exposed, and therefore
open, future, from a workplace that testifies to the blast wind of
obliteration, but also in that very testimony gives a place for
ghosts to gather, to speak with each other and with humankind. Art,
which installs itself in the very heart of the ancient dream of
philosophy as its necessary companion, ensures that each phenomenon
is always a phantasm and thus we can be assured that the
apparitions will continue to speak in what Michel Serres's has
called the "grotto of miracles." This book, then, enacts the
slowness of a reading of spectrality that unfolds in the
chiaroscuro of truth and illusion, philosophy and art, light and
darkness.Scholars, students, and professional associations in
philosophy (especially of the work of Derrida, Husserl, Heidegger,
and Kant), literature, painting, cinema, new media, psychoanalysis,
modernity, theories of the university, and interdisciplinary
studies.
This edited volume examines the relationship between collective
intentionality and inferential theories of meaning. The book
consists of three main sections. The first part contains essays
demonstrating how researchers working on inferentialism and
collective intentionality can learn from one another. The essays in
the second part examine the dimensions along which philosophical
and empirical research on human reasoning and collective
intentionality can benefit from more cross-pollination. The final
part consists of essays that offer a closer examination of themes
from inferentialism and collective intentionality that arise in the
work of Wilfrid Sellars. Groups, Norms and Practices provides a
template for continuing an interdisciplinary program in philosophy
and the sciences that aims to deepen our understanding of human
rationality, language use, and sociality.
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) stands outside the traditional canon of
twentieth-century French philosophers. Where he is not simply
forgotten or overlooked, he is dismissed as a 'relentlessly
unsystematic' thinker, or, following Jean-Paul Sartre's lead,
labelled a 'Christian existentialist' - a label that avoids
consideration of Marcel's work on its own terms. How is one to
appreciate Marcel's contribution, especially when his uvre appears
to be at odds with philosophical convention? Helen Tattam proposes
a range of readings as opposed to one single interpretation, a
series of departures or explorations that bring his work into
contact with critical partners such as Henri Bergson, Paul Ric ur
and Emmanuel Levinas, and offer insights into a host of
twentieth-century philosophical shifts concerning time, the
subject, the other, ethics, and religion. Helen Tattam's ambitious
study is an impressively lucid account of Marcel's engagement with
the problem of time and lived experience, and is her first
monograph since the award of her doctorate from the University of
Nottingham.
This work offers a concise and accessible introduction to the key
empiricists of the 17th and 18th centuries, ideal for undergraduate
students. Empiricism is one of the most widely discussed topics in
philosophy. Students regularly encounter the well known opposition
between rationalism and empiricism - the clash between reason and
experience as sources of knowledge and ideas - at an early stage in
their studies. "The Empiricists: A Guide for the Perplexed" offers
a clear and thorough guide to the key thinkers responsible for
developing this central concept in the history of philosophy. The
book focuses on the canonical figures of the empiricist movement,
Locke, Berkeley and Hume, but also explores the contributions made
by other key figures such as Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle and
Newton.Laurence Carlin presents the views of these hugely
influential thinkers in the context of the Scientific Revolution,
the intellectual movement in which they emerged, and explores in
detail the philosophical issues that were central to their work.
Specifically designed to meet the needs of students seeking a
thorough understanding of the topic, this book is the ideal guide
to a key concept in the history of philosophy. "Continuum's Guides
for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions
to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can
find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering.
Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject
difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and
ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of
demanding material.
Has postmodern American culture so altered the terrain of medical
care that moral confusion and deflated morale multiply faster than
both technological advancements and ethical resolutions? The Ethos
of Medicine in Postmodern America is an attempt to examine this
question with reference to the cultural touchstones of our
postmodern era: consumerism, computerization, destruction of
meta-narratives, and stakeholder late capitalism . The cultural
insights of the postmodern thinkers help elucidate the changes in
healthcare delivery that are occurring early in the 21st century.
Although only Foucault among postmodern thinkers actually focused
his critique on medical care itself, their combined analysis
provides a valuable perspective for gaining understanding of
contemporary changes in healthcare deliver. It is often difficult
to envision what is happening in the psychosocial, cultural dynamic
of an epoch as you experience it. Therefore it is useful to have a
technique for refracting those observations through the lens of
another system of thought. The prism of postmodern thought offers
such a device with which to view the eclipse of changing medical
practice. Any professional practice is always thoroughly embedded
in the social and cultural matrix of its society, and the medical
profession in America is no exception. Corporatization,
consumerism, and computerization of medical practice and the
clinical encounter constitute the three C s of Postmodern American
healthcare. In drawing upon of the insights of key Continental
thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard,
Baudrillard, Bauman, and Levinas as well as American scholars, I do
not necessarily endorse the views of postmodernism but believe much
can be learned from their insight. Furthermore my comments are also
informed by empirical information from health services research and
the sociology of medicine. I attempt to develop a new understanding
of healthcare delivery in the 21st century and suggest positive
developments that might be nurtured to avoid the barren Silicon
Cage of corporate, bureaucratized medical practice. Bringing to
this analysis are current healthcare issues such as the patient
centered medical home, clinical practice guidelines, and electronic
health records, the insights of an interdisciplinary examination
that include postmodern thought, medical sociology, bioethics, and
health services research.
Bernard Lonergan (1904-84) is acknowledged as one of the most
significant philosopher-theologians of the 20th century. Lonergan,
Meaning and Method in many ways complements Andrew Beards' previous
book on Lonergan, Insight and Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2010). Andrew
Beards applies Lonergan's thought and brings it into critical
dialogue and discussion with other contemporary philosophical
interlocutors, principally from the analytical tradition. He also
introduces themes and arguments from the continental tradition, as
well as offering interpretative analysis of some central notions in
Lonergan's thought that are of interest to all who wish to
understand the importance of Lonergan's work for philosophy and
Christian theology. Three of the chapters focus upon areas of
fruitful exchange and debate between Lonergan's thought and the
work of three major figures in current analytical philosophy: Nancy
Cartwright, Timothy Williamson and Scott Soames. The discussion
also ranges across such topics as meaning theory, metaphilosophy,
epistemology, philosophy of science and aesthetics.
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