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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Social & political philosophy
Respect plays a prominent role in contemporary moral philosophy, as
well as our every-day moral thought. Ordinary discussion about
morality is often framed in terms of demands for respect or
complaints about being disrespected, yet basic questions about the
concept and role of respect are frequently overlooked. Here,
leading philosophers present their latest ideas and fresh
perspectives to point research on the topic in new directions.
Following an introduction to the historical rise of respect as a
central concept in moral discourse, Part I addresses the
fundamental questions of what respect is; its nature and basis.
Part II then examines questions in moral theory, for example what
exactly ought to be respected, what role respect plays in morality,
and which different types of respect are appropriate and morally
significant. Part III concludes with the practical application of
requirements of respect, with implications for significant moral
issues of our time including environmental ethics, social justice,
disability, bioethics, and more.
Zhang Taiyan (1868-1936) is famous for being one of the first
thinkers in China to promote revolution in the early twentieth
century. Scholars have addressed Zhang's revolutionary and
nationalist thought, but until this work there has not been any
sustained engagement with Zhang's Buddhist writings which aimed to
understand and criticize the world from the perspective of
consciousness. These philosophical works are significant because
they exemplify how, as Chinese intellectuals entered the global
capitalist world, they constantly tried to find resources to create
an alternative. As the author argues in the conclusion, this desire
to create an alternative to capitalism remained throughout
twentieth century China and continues today in the works of
critical intellectuals such as Wang Hui. Thus this work is
important not only to understand our past, but to hope for a better
future.
This book is a collection of new, published and revised essays on
the place and value of scientific realism in psychology. Through
critical analyses of contemporary psychology, essays argue that the
realist requirements of a properly scientific psychology are often
misunderstood even in the discipline's putatively scientific heart,
with profound conceptual and empirical consequences. Against this,
and in answer to recent calls to demonstrate the relevance of
realism, the essays sketch the elements of a realist program: they
discuss the recent history, development and principal features of a
distinctive, thoroughgoing, realism for psychology: its theories,
concepts, methods and applications. It thus aims to extend realism
from philosophy to psychology, articulate a realist metatheory,
clarify realism's relevance, and promote its discussion.
This edited volume focuses on gender and love as emerging through
complex "entanglements and weavings". At a time when
constructionist ideas are losing support, we interrogate
theoretical paradigms to assess if constructionist notions still
hold value or if new approaches are needed to address the effects
of materiality and non-human agency. Without claiming any unison or
definite answers, we offer situated, agential cuts into gender and
love in various discursive-material phenomena, including Biblical
and Rabbinic literature, ecosexual performance art, the writings of
Ursula Le Guin and Angela Carter, butch identities, Bengali
folktales, Ferzan OEzpetek's cinema, Golem literature, sexual
pursuits in Danish nightlife, mother-daughter relationships, women
warriors in the PKK, and BDSM performances. Artistic photographer
Sara Davidmann has contributed to the book with the cover
illustration and a creative afterword including seven photographs
on the interaction between the photographer, her studio, and LGBTQ+
people.
"Axel Honneth: Critical Essays" brings together a collection of
critical interpretations on the work of Axel Honneth, from his
earliest writings on philosophical anthropology, his reappraisal of
critical theory and critique of post-structuralism, to the
development and extension of the theory of recognition, his debate
with Nancy Fraser and his most recent work on reification. The book
also includes a comprehensive reply by Axel Honneth that not only
addresses issues and concerns raised by his critics but also
provides significant insights and clarifications into his project
overall. The book will be essential reading for all those
interested in Honneth s work, and in critical theory, philosophy
and social theory more generally.
Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities
-Germaine de Stael, Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier-Kathleen Kete
creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in
post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the
traditionalist view of ambition prevailed-that is, ambition as
morally wrong unless subsumed into a corporate whole-the new regime
was marked by a rising tide of competitive individualism. Greater
opportunities for personal advancement, however, were shadowed by
lingering doubts about the moral value of ambition. Kete identifies
three strategies used to overcome the ethical "burden" of ambition:
romantic genius (Stael), secular vocation (Stendhal), and
post-mythic destiny (Cuvier). In each case, success would seem to
be driven by forces outside one's control. She concludes by
examining the still relevant (and still unresolved) conundrum of
the relationship of individual desires to community needs, which
she identifies as a defining characteristic of the modern world.
Gillian Brock develops a viable cosmopolitan model of global
justice that takes seriously the equal moral worth of persons, yet
leaves scope for defensible forms of nationalism and for other
legitimate identifications and affiliations people have. Brock
addresses two prominent kinds of skeptic about global justice:
those who doubt its feasibility and those who believe that
cosmopolitanism interferes illegitimately with the defensible scope
of nationalism by undermining goods of national importance, such as
authentic democracy or national self-determination. The model
addresses concerns about implementation in the world, showing how
we can move from theory to public policy that makes progress toward
global justice. It also makes clear how legitimate forms of
nationalism are compatible with commitments to global justice.
Global Justice is divided into three central parts. In the first,
Brock defends a cosmopolitan model of global justice. In the
second, which is largely concerned with public policy issues, she
argues that there is much we can and should do toward achieving
global justice. She addresses several pressing problems, discussing
both theoretical and public policy issues involved with each. These
include tackling global poverty, taxation reform, protection of
basic liberties, humanitarian intervention, immigration, and
problems associated with global economic arrangements. In the third
part, she shows how the discussion of public policy issues can
usefully inform our theorizing; in particular, it assists our
thinking about the place of nationalism and equality in an account
of global justice.
This book studies the tension between arts and politics in four
contemporary artists from different countries, working with
different media. The film directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
film parts of their natal city to refer to specific political
problems in interpersonal relations. The novelist Arundhati Roy
uses her poetic language to make room for people's desires; her
fiction is utterly political and her political essays make place
for the role of narratives and poetic language. Ai Weiwei uses
references to Chinese history to give consistency to its 'economic
miracle'. Finally, Burial's electronic music is firmly rooted in a
living, breathing London; built to create a sound that is entirely
new, and yet hauntingly familiar. These artists create in their own
way a space for politics in their works and their oeuvre but their
singularity comes together as a desire to reconstruct the political
space within art from its ruins. These ruins were brought by the
disenchantment of 1970s: the end of art, postmodernism, and the
rise of design, marketing and communication. Each artwork bears the
mark of the resistance against the depoliticisation of society and
the arts, at once rejecting cynicism and idealism, referring to
themes and political concepts that are larger than their own
domain. This book focuses on these productive tensions.
A growing number of political philosophers favor a view called
liberal perfectionism. According to this view, liberal political
morality is characterized by a commitment to helping individuals
lead autonomous lives and making other valuable choices. In this
book Jonathan Quong rejects this widely held view and offers an
alternative account of liberal political morality. Quong argues
that the liberal state should not be engaged in determining what
constitutes a valuable or worthwhile life nor trying to make sure
that individuals live up to this ideal. Instead, it should remain
neutral on the issue of the good life, and restrict itself to
establishing the fair terms within which individuals can pursue
their own beliefs about what gives value to their lives. Liberalism
without Perfection thus defends a position known as political
liberalism.
In the first part of the book, Quong subjects the liberal
perfectionist position to critical scrutiny, advancing three major
objections that raise serious doubts about the liberal
perfectionist position with regard to autonomy, paternalism, and
political legitimacy. In the second part of the book, Quong
presents and defends a distinctive version of political liberalism.
In particular, he clarifies and develops political liberalism's
central thesis: that political principles, in order to be
legitimate, must be publicly justifiable to reasonable people.
Drawing on the work of John Rawls, Liberalism without Perfection
offers its own interpretation of this idea, and rebuts some of the
main objections that have been pressed against it. In doing so, it
provides novel arguments regarding the nature of an overlapping
consensus, the structure of political justification, the idea of
public reason, and the status of unreasonable persons.
Edited by two preeminent scholars, this book provides coverage of
the policy issues related to the increasingly diverse treatments,
practices, and applications of psychedelics. Hallucinogenic
substances like LSD, mescaline, peyote, MDMA, and ayahuasca have a
reputation as harmful substances that are enjoyed only by
recreational users committing criminal acts. But leading
international researchers and scholars who contributed to this book
hold that the use of psychedelic substances for health, religious,
intellectual, and artistic purposes is a Constitutional right-and a
human right. Based on that conclusion, these scholars focus on
policy issues that regulate the use of psychedelic drugs in
medicine, religion, personal life, and higher education, arguing
that existing regulations should match current and anticipated
future uses. This volume has two parts. The first surveys research
on the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine, religion, and
truth-seeking, following these topics through history and
contemporary practice. The second section treats government
policices that regulate the psychological, physiological,
biochemical, and spiritual aspects of research and experience in
these fields. The Psychedelic Policy Quagmire: Health, Law,
Freedom, and Society challenges medical and legal policy experts,
ethicists, scientists, and scholars with the question: How can we
formulate policies that reduce the dangers of psychedelics' misuse
and at the same time maximize the emerging diverse benefits? Covers
history, law, social use, intellectual and sacramental practice,
and current medical research, bringing the debate about psychedelic
drugs up to date for the 21st century Summarizes evidence regarding
the positive therapeutic effects of psychoactive drugs to show why
regulations need to be changed Encompasses the work of the leading
international researchers in the field Includes personal
observations, vignettes, and narratives
Within literature, history, politics, philosophy and theology, the
interpretation of utopian ideals has evolved constantly.
Juxtaposing historical views on utopian diagnoses, prescriptions
and on the character and value of utopian thought with more modern
interpretations, this volume explores how our ideal utopia has
transformed over time. Challenging long-held interpretations, the
contributors turn a fresh eye to canonical texts, and open them up
to a twenty-first century audience. From Moore's Utopia to Le
Guin's The Dispossessed, Utopian Moments puts forward a lively and
accessible debate on the nature and significance of utopian thought
and tradition. Each essay focuses on a key passage from the
selected work using it to encourage both the specialist and the
reader new to the field to read afresh. Written by an international
team of leading scholars, the essays range from the sixteenth
century to the present day and are designed to be both stimulating
and accessible.
This book, newly translated from the original Spanish, first offers
a summary of the main theories about what we today call the State',
a category that draws together various interests in the research
into the past of human societies and, at the same time, inspires
passionate political and ideological debate. The authors review
political philosophies from Greek antiquity to contemporary
evolutionism. They then examine how the State has been viewed and
studied within archaeology in the twentieth century, and offer an
alternative approach based upon historical materialism. Their
argument that this method can be profitably used to study the
archaeological record is a sophisticated and creative contribution
to current theory, and will inspire debate about its implications
for our understanding of human history.
How do people and institutions manage to bring their different
perspectives into an effective and productive interplay? How can we
overcome obstacles for the creative potentials of distributed
perspectives? Traditionally, the perspectives of people and
institutions are considered to be fixed and isolated points of
view. In such a picture, the perspectives seem determined in
advance by positions and persons seem trapped within their
perspectival horizons. In contrast, the new approach of this
volume's contributions focuses on the simple but fundamental fact
that people (in their perceiving, speaking, thinking, and acting)
always already refer to fellow human beings and coordinate their
own perspectives with those of other persons and institutions. The
contributions of the present volume concentrate on the structures,
mechanisms, and dynamics of the interplays of different
perspectives of interacting, communicating, and cooperating persons
and institutions. The volume focuses on how the creative potentials
as well as the organizational effectiveness of distributed
perspectives can be set free.
Issues to do with animal ethics remain at the heart of public
debate. In Beyond Animal Rights, Tony Milligan goes beyond standard
discussions of animal ethics to explore the ways in which we
personally relate to other creatures through our diet, as pet
owners and as beneficiaries of experimentation. The book connects
with our duty to act and considers why previous discussions have
failed to result in a change in the way that we live our lives. The
author asks a crucial question: what sort of people do we have to
become if we are to sufficiently improve the ways in which we
relate to the non-human? Appealing to both consequences and
character, he argues that no improvement will be sufficient if it
fails to set humans on a path towards a tolerable and sustainable
future. Focussing on our direct relations to the animals we connect
with the book offers guidance on all the relevant issues, including
veganism and vegetarianism, the organic movement, pet ownership,
and animal experimentation.
In this book Henry A. Giroux passionately argues that education and
critical pedagogy are needed now more than ever to combat
injustices in our society caused by fake news, toxic masculinity,
racism, consumerism and white nationalism. At the heart of the book
is the idea that pedagogy has the power to create narratives of
desire, values, identity, and agency at time when these narratives
are being manipulated to promote right wing populism and emerging
global fascist politics. The book expands on the notion of the
plague as not only a medical crisis but also a crisis of politics,
ethics, education, and democracy itself. The chapters cover a range
topics beginning with historical perspectives on fascism and moving
on to issues of social atomization, depoliticization, neoliberal
pedagogy, the scourge of staggering inequality, populism, and
pandemic pedagogy. The book concludes with a call for educators to
make education central to politics, develop a discourse of critique
and possibility, reclaim the vision of a radical democracy, and
embrace their role as powerful agents of change.
What makes individuals what they are? How should they judge their
social and political interaction with the world? What makes them
authentic or inauthentic? This original and provocative study
explores the concept of "authenticity" and its relevance for
radical politics. Weaving together close readings of three 20th
century thinkers: Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Jean-Paul
Sartre with the concept of authenticity, Stephen Eric Bronner
illuminates the phenomenological foundations for self-awareness
that underpin our sense of identity and solidarity. He claims that
different expressions of the existential tradition compete with one
another in determining how authenticity might be experienced, but
all of them ultimately rest on self-referential judgments. The
author's own new framework for a political ethic at once serves as
a corrective and an alternative. Wonderfully rich, insightful, and
nuanced, Stephen Eric Bronner has produced another bookshelf staple
that speaks to crucial issues in politics, philosophy, psychology,
and sociology. Existentialism, Authenticity, Solidarity will appeal
to scholars, students and readers from the general public alike.
This book critically examines the relationship between civility,
citizenship and democracy. It engages with the oft-neglected idea
of civility (as a Western concept) to explore the paradox of high
democracy and low civility that plagues India. This concept helps
analyse why democratic consolidation translates into limited
justice and minimal equality, along with increased exclusion and
performative violence against marginal groups in India. The volume
brings together key themes such as minority citizens and the
incivility of caste, civility and urbanity, the struggles for
'dignity' and equality pursued by subaltern groups along with
feminism and queer politics, and the exclusionary politics of the
Citizenship Amendment Act, to argue that civility provides crucial
insights into the functioning and social life of a democracy. In
doing so, the book illustrates how a successful democracy may also
harbour illiberal values and normalised violence and civil
societies may have uncivil tendencies. Enriched with case studies
from various states in India, this book will be of interest to
scholars and researchers of political science, political
philosophy, South Asian studies, minority and exclusion studies,
political sociology and social anthropology.
Human-horse relationships take the central place in this edited
collection examining the horse's perspective by asking: How are
human-equine relationships communicated, enacted, understood,
encouraged, and restricted? The contributors apply varied
disciplinary methods as they emphasize comprehending horses not
solely in terms of their functional uses, but also as impactful
participants in relationships, whether more-or less-equally. By
exploring the "who" of horses, The Relational Horse offers a better
understanding of horses' lived experiences and interests within the
worlds they share with humans, and a way forward for human-equine
studies that more equitably represents the horse in those shared
worlds.
Most people think that the difficulty of balancing career and
personal/family relationships is the fault of present-day society
or is due to their own inadequacies. But in this major new book,
eminent moral philosopher Michael Slote argues that the difficulty
runs much deeper, that it is due to the essential nature of the
divergent goods involved in this kind of choice. He shows more
generally that perfect human happiness and perfect virtue are
impossible in principle, a view originally enunciated by Isaiah
Berlin, but much more thoroughly and synoptically defended here
than ever before.
Ancient Greek and modern-day Enlightenment thought typically
assumed that perfection was possible, and this is also true of
Romanticism and of most recent ethical theory. But if, as Slote
maintains, imperfection is inevitable, then our inherited
categories of virtue and personal good are far too limited and
unqualified to allow us to understand and cope with the richer and
more complex life that characterizes today's world. And The
Impossibility of Perfection argues in particular that we need some
new notions, new distinctions, and even new philosophical methods
in order to distill some of the ethical insights of recent feminist
thought and arrive at a fuller and more realistic picture of
ethical phenomena.
Organized around five key themes, this accessible introduction
offers a thorough survey of the affective turn in contemporary
political science. "Politics and the Emotions" is a unique
collection of essays that reflects the affective turn in the
analysis of today's political world. Contributed by both prominent
and younger scholars from Europe, US, and Australia, the book aims
to advance the debate on the relation between politics and the
emotions. To do so, essays are organized around five key thematic
areas: emotion, antagonism and deliberation, the politics of fear,
the affective dimension of political mobilization, the politics of
reparation, and politics and the triumph of the therapeutic. In
addition, each chapter includes a case study to demonstrate the
application of concepts to practical issues, from the war on terror
in the UK and the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in the US to
women's liberation movement in New Zealand and Dutch policy
experiments. "Politics and the Emotions" provides an accessible
introduction to a rapidly developing field that will appeal to
students in political theory, public and social policy, as well as
the theory and practice of democracy.
William Petty (1623-1687) was a key figure in the English
colonization of Ireland, the institutionalization of experimental
natural philosophy, and the creation of social science.
Examining Petty's intellectual development and his invention of
"political arithmetic" against the backdrop of the European
scientific revolution and the political upheavals of Interregnum
and Restoration England and Ireland, this book provides the first
comprehensive intellectual biography of Petty based on a thorough
examination not only of printed sources but also of Petty's
extensive archive and pattern of manuscript circulation. It is also
the first fully contextualized study of what political
arithmetic--widely seen as an ancestor of modern social and
economic analysis--was originally intended to do.
Ted McCormick traces Petty's education among French Jesuits and
Dutch Cartesians, his early work with the "Hartlib Circle" of
Baconian natural philosophers, inventors, and reformers in England,
his involvement in the Cromwellian conquest and settlement of
Ireland, and his engagement with both science and the politics of
religion in the Restoration. He argues that Petty's crowning
achievement, political arithmetic, was less a new way of analyzing
economy or society than a new "instrument of government" that
applied elements of the new science--a mechanical worldview, a
corpuscularian theory of matter, and a Baconian stress on empirical
method and the transformative purposes of natural philosophy--to
the creation of industrious and loyal populations. Finally, he
examines the transformation Petty's program of social engineering,
after his death, into an apparently apolitical form of statistical
reasoning.
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