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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy
Out from the Shadows showcases the work of 18 analytical feminists from a variety of traditional areas of philosophy: social and political philosophy, normative ethics, virtue theory, metaethics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. The collection is unique both in its focus on analytical feminism and in its breadth across the subdisciplines within philosophy. The book highlights successful uses of concepts and approaches from traditional philosophy, and illustrates the contributions that feminist approaches have made and could make to the analysis of issues in key areas of traditional philosophy, while also demonstrating that traditional philosophy ignores feminist insights and feminist critiques of traditional philosophy at its own peril.
We typically think we have free will. But how could we have free will, if for anything we do, it was already true in the distant past that we would do that thing? Or how could we have free will, if God already knows in advance all the details of our lives? Such issues raise the specter of "fatalism". This book collects sixteen previously published articles on fatalism, truths about the future, and the relationship between divine foreknowledge and human freedom, and includes a substantial introductory essay and bibliography. Many of the pieces collected here build bridges between discussions of human freedom and recent developments in other areas of metaphysics, such as philosophy of time. Ideal for courses in free will, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion, Freedom, Fatalism, and Foreknowledge will encourage important new directions in thinking about free will, time, and truth.
In George Berkeley's two most important works, the Principles of
Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Bewtween Hylas and Philonous,
he argued that there is no such thing as matter: only minds and
ideas exist, and physical things are nothing but collections of
ideas. In defense of this idealism, he advanced a battery of
challenging arguments purporting to show that the very notion of
matter is self-contradictory or meaningless, and that even if it
were possible for matter to exist, we could not know that it does;
and he then put forward an alternative world-view that purported to
refute both skepticism and atheism.
We live in an age of growing dissatisfaction with the standard operations of representative democracy. The solution, according to a long radical democratic tradition, is the unmediated power of the people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated as the quintessential expression of popular power, and this power promises to transcend ordinary institutional politics. But the outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing as the ordinary politics they sought to overcome, breeding skepticism about democratic politics in all its forms. Potentia argues that the very meaning of popular power needs to be rethought. It offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focusing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorized power. Specifically, the book's argument turns on a new interpretation of potentia as a capacity that is dynamically constituted in a web of actual human relations. This means that a group's potentia reflects any hostility or hierarchy present in the relations between its members. There is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence; a group's power deserves to be called popular only if it avoids oligarchy and instead durably establishes its members' equality. Where radical democrats interpret Hobbes' "sleeping sovereign" or Spinoza's "multitude" as the classic formulations of unmediated popular power, Sandra Leonie Field argues that for both Hobbes and Spinoza, conscious institutional design is required in order for true popular power to be achieved. Between Hobbes' commitment to repressing private power and Spinoza's exploration of civic strengthening, Field draws on early modern understandings of popular power to provide a new lens for thinking about the risks and promise of democracy.
Biomedical ethics is a burgeoning academic field with complex and
far-reaching consequences. Whereas in Western secular bioethics
this subject falls within larger ethical theories and applications
(utilitarianism, deontology, teleology, and the like), Islamic
biomedical ethics has yet to find its natural academic home in
Islamic studies.
Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2 contains fourteen articles - thirteen previously published and one new - that reflect the fast-moving changes in the field over the last five years. The field of experimental philosophy is one of the most innovative and exciting parts of the current philosophical landscape; it has also engendered controversy. Proponents argue that philosophers should employ empirical research, including the methods of experimental psychology, to buttress their philosophical claims. Rather than armchair theorizing, experimental philosophers should go into the field to research how people actually think and reason. In a sense this is a return to a view of philosophy as the progenitor of psychology: inherently concerned with the human condition, with no limits to its scope or methods. In the course of the last decade, many experimental philosophers have overturned assumptions about how people think in the real world. This volume provides an essential guide to the most influential recent work on this vital and exciting area of philosophical research.
In choosing between moral alternatives -- choosing between various
forms of ethical action -- we typically make calculations of the
following kind: A is better than B; B is better than C; therefore A
is better than C. These inferences use the principle of
transitivity and are fundamental to many forms of practical and
theoretical theorizing, not just in moral and ethical theory but in
economics. Indeed they are so common as to be almost invisible.
What Larry Temkin's book shows is that, shockingly, if we want to
continue making plausible judgments, we cannot continue to make
these assumptions.
In ancient Rome parents would consult the priestess Carmentis shortly after birth to obtain prophecies of the future of their newborn infant. Today, parents and doctors of critically ill children consult a different oracle. Neuroimaging provides a vision of the child's future, particularly of the nature and severity of any disability. Based on the results of brain scans and other tests doctors and parents face heart-breaking decisions about whether or not to continue intensive treatment or to allow the child to die. Paediatrician and ethicist Dominic Wilkinson looks at the profound and contentious ethical issues facing those who work in intensive care caring for critically ill children and infants. When should infants or children be allowed to die? How accurate are predictions of future quality of life? How much say should parents have in these decisions? How should they deal with uncertainty about the future? He combines philosophy, medicine and science to shed light on current and future dilemmas.
Forgiveness and Remembrance examines the complex moral psychology of forgiving, remembering, and forgetting in personal and political contexts. It challenges a number of entrenched ideas that pervade standard philosophical approaches to interpersonal forgiveness and offers an original account of its moral psychology and the emotions involved in it. The volume also uses this account to illuminate the relationship of forgiveness to political reconciliation and restorative political practices in post-conflict societies. Memory is another central concern that flows from this, since forgiveness is tied to memory and to emotions associated with the memory of injury and injustice. In its political function, memory of wrongdoing - and of its victims - is embodied in processes of memorialization, such as the creation of monuments, commemorative ceremonies, and museums. The book casts light on the underexplored relationship of memorialization to transitional justice and politically consequential interpersonal forgiveness. It examines the symbolism and the symbolic moral significance of memorialization as a political practice, reflects on its relationship to forgiveness, and, finally, argues that there are moral responsibilities associated with memorialization that belong to international actors as well as to states.
The third edition of The Basics of Bioethics continues to provide a balanced and systematic ethical framework to help students analyze a wide range of controversial topics in medicine, and consider ethical systems from various religious and secular traditions. The Basics of Bioethics covers the "Principalist" approach and identifies principles that are believed to make behavior morally right or wrong. It showcases alternative ethical approaches to health care decision making by presenting Hippocratic ethics as only one among many alternative ethical approaches to health care decision-making. The Basics of Bioethics offers case studies, diagrams, and other learning aids for an accessible presentation. Plus, it contains an all-encompassing ethics chart that shows the major questions in ethics and all of the major answers to these questions.
Barack Obama is often lauded as a 'pragmatist, ' yet when most
people employ the term, they mean it in the vaguest sense: that
he's practical and willing to compromise to get things done.
However, the public philosophy of pragmatism, which has been the
subject of a rich revival in the past couple of decades, is far
more than this. First developed in the late nineteenth century,
pragmatism is primarily a way of thinking--an anti-dualist
philosophy that attempts to overcome the dichotomies between self
and object, nature and culture, mind and body, theory and practice,
and fact and value. When applied to governance, pragmatists
advocate the use of tactics like third party mediation and
problem-solving to achieve anti-dualist principles: cosmopolitan
localism, analytical holism, progressive conservatism, and
processual structuralism.
This is a reissue, with new introduction, of Susan Sauve Meyer's
1993 book, in which she presents a comprehensive examination of
Aristotle's accounts of voluntariness in the Eudemian and
Nicomachean Ethics. She makes the case that these constitute a
theory of moral responsibility--albeit one with important
differences from modern theories.
According to Russellian monism, an alternative to the familiar theories in the philosophy of mind that combines attractive components of physicalism and dualism, matter has intrinsic properties that both constitute consciousness and serve as categorical bases for the dispositional properties described in physics. Consciousness in the Physical World collects various works on Russellian monism, including historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces. Most chapters are sympathetic with the view, but some are skeptical. Together, they constitute the first book-length treatment of the view itself, its relationship to other theories, its motivations, and its problems.
Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind surveys philosophical
issues raised by the situated movement in cognitive science, that
is, the treatment of cognitive phenomena as the joint products of
brain, body, and environment. The book focuses primarily on the
hypothesis of extended cognition, which asserts that human
cognitive processes literally comprise elements beyond the boundary
of the human organism. Rupert argues that the only plausible way in
which to demarcate cognitions is systems-based: cognitive states or
processes are the states of the integrated set of mechanisms and
capacities that contribute causally and distinctively to the
production of cognitive phenomena--for example, language-use,
memory, decision-making, theory construction, and, more
importantly, the associated forms of behavior. Rupert argues that
this integrated system is most likely to appear within the
boundaries of the human organism. He argues that the systems-based
view explains the existing successes of cognitive psychology and
cognate fields in a way that extended conceptions of cognition do
not, and that once the systems-based view has been adopted, it is
especially clear how extant arguments in support of the extended
view go wrong.
There has recently been a good deal of interest in moral sentimentalism, but most of that interest has been exclusively either in metaethical questions about the meaning of moral terms or in normative issues about benevolence and/or caring and their place in morality. In Moral Sentimentalism Michael Slote attempts to deal with both sorts of issues and to do so, primarily, in terms of the notion or phenomenon of empathy. Hume sought to do something like this over two centuries ago, though he didn't have the term "empathy" and used "sympathy" instead; and in effect Slote is seeking to give moral sentimentalism a "second wind" in and for contemporary circumstances. By relying systematically on empathy in its account of normative morality and in what it has to say about the meaning of moral vocabulary, Moral Sentimentalism offers a unified overall ethical picture that can then be tested against ethical rationalism. Rationalism has recently dominated the scene in ethics, but by showing how sentimentalism can make coherent and intuitive sense of such preferred rationalist notions as autonomy, respect, and justice--and by showing how a sentimentalism based in empathy can deal with ethically significant aspects of the moral life that rationalism tends to ignore or skimp on--Slote hopes a wider and more active debate between rationalism and sentimentalism can be set in motion. There are signs that sentimentalist modes of thought are gaining new footholds on the way ethics is done, and this new book is very hopeful about these possibilities.
Data Ethics of Power takes a reflective and fresh look at the ethical implications of transforming everyday life and the world through the effortless, costless, and seamless accumulation of extra layers of data. By shedding light on the constant tensions that exist between ethical principles and the interests invested in this socio-technical transformation, the book bridges the theory and practice divide in the study of the power dynamics that underpin these processes of the digitalization of the world. Gry Hasselbalch expertly draws on nearly two decades of experience in the field, and key literature, to advance a better understanding of the challenges faced by big data and AI developers. She provides an innovative ethical framework for studying and governing Big-Data and Artificial Intelligence. Offering both a historical account and a theoretical analysis of power dynamics and their ethical implications, as well as incisive ideas to guide future research and governance practices, the book makes a significant contribution to the establishment of an emerging data and AI ethics discipline. This timely book is a must-read for scholars studying AI, data, and technology ethics. Policymakers in the regulatory, governance, public administration, and management sectors will find the practical proposals for a human-centric approach to big data and AI to be a valuable resource for revising and developing future policies.
Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.
The editors of Ethics at the Cinema invited a diverse group of moral philosophers and philosophers of film to engage with ethical issues raised within, or within the process of viewing, a single film of each contributor's choice. The result is a unique collection of considerable breadth. Discussions focus on both classic and modern films, and topics range from problems of traditional concern to philosophers (e.g. virtue, justice, and ideals) to problems of traditional concern to filmmakers (e.g. sexuality, social belonging, and cultural identity).
In this short monograph, John Horty explores the difficulties
presented for Gottlob Frege's semantic theory, as well as its
modern descendents, by the treatment of defined expressions.
When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities-but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions-not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.
This is fundamentally a text about race and antiblack racism and their subsequent production of the problem of alienation (separation) of human beings from one another, from their bodies, and from themselves, globally, but with distinct and conscious focus on the historical context of apartheid and “post”-apartheid South Africa through the psychological lens of one of the country’s first and distinguished clinical psychologists, Noel Chabani Manganyi. The book is a philosophically critical engagement with his work, and it constitutes, as it were, part of the author’s overarching project of attempting to reclaim and retrieve hitherto overlooked, ignored and invisibilised Black thinkers of the past and present. Although Manganyi has written over 10 books, the most important and popular being Being-Black-in-the-World (1973) and Alienation and the Body in Racist Society (1977), his ideas and work have, for one reason or another, been disregarded by mainstream South African psychology, let alone philosophy. The author foregrounds philosophy as also a culprit because Manganyi himself describes his work as that of “a psychologist who thinks and conceptualises psychological reality in a phenomenological way”. Manganyi has the distinction of being the first Black clinical psychologist trained in South Africa as the title of his latest book, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist (2016) indicates. His body of published work reveals that from the beginning he has been involved in an attempt to contextualise his discipline, psychology, to the lived realities of his country, that is, apartheid racism and the alienation it produced on Black people. In other words, his main concern has been to utilise psychological discourse to address issues relevant to what can broadly be called “the Black lived-experience” in an antiblack racist society and their experience of the condition of alienation. As such he stood as a solitary figure whose voice was pushed to the margins of the psychological establishment, which was either silent about or complicit in the oppression of Blacks by the apartheid regime. By exploring Manganyi’s serious concerns about apartheid racism and its attendant devastating production of alienation among Black people, the author argues that the problem of alienation produced by continuing rampant antiblack racism (even from the hands of a Black government) constitutes itself as a lingering problem of “post”-apartheid South Africa. The author demonstrates that apartheid and alienation are not only conceptually synonymous but experientially related because what connects antiblack racism (apartheid) and alienation is the fact of our embodied existence in the world and that Black alienation manifests itself through the body. After all, antiblack racism is predicated on bodily appearance and body differences among human beings. Manganyi himself places a high premium on the body precisely because, in his view, the Black subjects have inherited a negative sociological schema of their black bodies as a result of which most of them experience themselves as somethings or objects outside of themselves, that is. The value of revisiting Manganyi’s contribution can be underlined by reference to imperatives posed in recent incidents of antiblack racism and contemporary approaches to race and embodiment in disciplines such as philosophy (Black existentialism), psychology, sociology, cultural studies and identity politics. This book's focus spans a wide variety of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, political philosophy, critical race studies and post-colonialism, and therefore will be of interest to a broad cross-section of undergraduate and graduate students, scholars and activists.
This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist
ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of
morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical
insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological
and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is
inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her
book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility"
that express our identities, values, and connections to others in
socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be
empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating
forms of socially entrenched bias. Responsible ethical theory
should reveal and question the moral significance of social
differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of
contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics.
David B. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities, moralities that exist across different traditions and cultures, all of which address facets of the same problem: how we are to live well together. Wong examines a wide array of positions and texts within the Western canon as well as in Chinese philosophy, and draws on philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, history, and literature, to make a case for the importance of pluralism in moral life, and to establish the virtues of acceptance and accommodation. Wong's point is that there is no single value or principle or ordering of values and principles that offers a uniquely true path for human living, but variations according to different contexts that carry within them a common core of human values. We should thus be modest about our own morality, learn from other approaches, and accommodate different practices in our pluralistic society.
Americans have a deeply ambivalent relationship to guns. The United States leads all nations in rates of private gun ownership, yet stories of gun tragedies frequent the news, spurring calls for tighter gun regulations. The debate tends to be acrimonious and is frequently misinformed and illogical. The central question is the extent to which federal or state governments should regulate gun ownership and use in the interest of public safety. In this volume, David DeGrazia and Lester Hunt examine this policy question primarily from the standpoint of ethics: What would morally defensible gun policy in the United States look like? Hunt's contribution argues that the U.S. Constitution is right to frame the right to possess a firearm as a fundamental human right. The right to arms is in this way like the right to free speech. More precisely, it is like the right to own and possess a cell phone or an internet connection. A government that banned such weapons would be violating the right of citizens to protect themselves. This is a function that governments do not perform: warding off attacks is not the same thing as punishing perpetrators after an attack has happened. Self-protection is a function that citizens must carry out themselves, either by taking passive steps (such as better locks on one's doors) or active ones (such as acquiring a gun and learning to use it safely and effectively). DeGrazia's contribution features a discussion of the Supreme Court cases asserting a constitutional right to bear arms, an analysis of moral rights, and a critique of the strongest arguments for a moral right to private gun ownership. He follows with both a consequentialist case and a rights-based case for moderately extensive gun control, before discussing gun politics and advancing policy suggestions. In debating this important topic, the authors elevate the quality of discussion from the levels that usually prevail in the public arena. DeGrazia and Hunt work in the discipline of academic philosophy, which prizes intellectual honesty, respect for opposing views, command of relevant facts, and rigorous reasoning. They bring the advantages of philosophical analysis to this highly-charged issue in the service of illuminating the strongest possible cases for and against (relatively extensive) gun regulations and whatever common ground may exist between these positions.
A milestone in the history of popular theology, 'The Screwtape Letters' is an iconic classic on spiritual warfare and the power of the devil. This profound and striking narrative takes the form of a series of letters from Screwtape, a devil high in the Infernal Civil Service, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior colleague engaged in his first mission on earth trying to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian. Although the young man initially looks to be a willing victim, he changes his ways and is 'lost' to the young devil. Dedicated to Lewis's friend and colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, 'The Screwtape Letters' is a timeless classic on spiritual conflict and the invisible realities which are part of our religious experience. |
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