|
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy
Moral Theory: An Introduction explores some of the most
historically important and currently debated moral theories about
the nature of the right and good. Providing an introduction to
moral theory that explains and critically examines the theories of
such classical moral philosophers as Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant,
Bentham, Mill, and Ross, this book acquaints students with the work
of contemporary moral philosophers. All of the book's chapters have
been revised in light of recent work in moral theory. The second
edition includes a new chapter on ethical egoism, an extensively
revised chapter on moral particularism, and expanded coverage of
divine command theory, moral relativism, and consequentialism.
Additionally, this edition discusses recent work by moral
psychologists that is making an impact on moral theory.
This book features more than 20 papers that celebrate the work of
Hajnal Andreka and Istvan Nemeti. It illustrates an interaction
between developing and applying mathematical logic. The papers
offer new results as well as surveys in areas influenced by these
two outstanding researchers. They also provide details on the
after-life of some of their initiatives. Computer science connects
the papers in the first part of the book. The second part
concentrates on algebraic logic. It features a range of papers that
hint at the intricate many-way connections between logic, algebra,
and geometry. The third part explores novel applications of logic
in relativity theory, philosophy of logic, philosophy of physics
and spacetime, and methodology of science. They include such
exciting subjects as time travelling in emergent spacetime. The
short autobiographies of Hajnal Andreka and Istvan Nemeti at the
end of the book describe an adventurous journey from electric
engineering and Maxwell's equations to a complex system of computer
programs for designing Hungary's electric power system, to
exploring and contributing deep results to Tarskian algebraic logic
as the deepest core theory of such questions, then on to
applications of the results in such exciting new areas as
relativity theory in order to rejuvenate logic itself.
Computer-mediated communication and cyberculture are
dramatically changing the nature of social relationships. Whether
cyberspace will simply retain vestiges of traditional communities
with hierarchical social links and class-structured relationships
or create new egalitarian social networks remains an open question.
The chapters in this volume examine the issue of social justice on
the Internet by using a variety of methodological and theoretical
perspectives.
Political scientists, sociologists, and communications and
information systems scholars address issues of race, class, and
gender on the Internet in chapters that do not assume any
specialized training in computer technology.
This book is a complete presentation of the most important themes
of Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory, and of its relevance for
the understanding of the modern society. After an Introduction,
which traces Adorno's biographical and intellectual profile, the
book is structured in three parts. The first is devoted to
theoretical philosophy, and in particular to the concepts of
philosophy, negative dialectics and metaphysics, and his aim is to
clarify the Adornian understanding of such difficult concepts. The
second is devoted to the main themes of Adorno's social theory: the
concept of domination, the relationship with Marxism, the theory of
the decay of the individual, the critique of mass manipulation. The
third part is devoted to aesthetics and culture criticism, and
entails a conclusion in which the author outlines a confrontation
between the Adornian and the Habermasian critique of modernity.
Written from the perspective of a practising artist, this book
proposes that, against a groundswell of historians, museums and
commentators claiming to speak on behalf of art, it is artists
alone who may define what art really is. Jelinek contends that
while there are objects called 'art' in museums from deep into
human history and from around the globe - from Hans Sloane's
collection, which became the foundation of the British Museum, to
Alfred Barr's inclusion of 'primitive art' within the walls of
MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art - only those that have been made
with the knowledge and discipline of art should rightly be termed
as such. Policing the definition of art in this way is not to
entrench it as an elitist occupation, but in order to focus on its
liberal democratic potential. Between Discipline and a Hard Place
describes the value of art outside the current preoccupation with
economic considerations yet without resorting to a range of
stereotypical and ultimately instrumentalist political or social
goods, such as social inclusion or education. A wider argument is
also made for disciplinarity, as Jelinek discusses the great
potential as well as the pitfalls of interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary working, particularly with the so-called
'creative' arts. A passionate treatise arguing for a new way of
understanding art that forefronts the role of the artist and the
importance of inclusion within both the concept of art and the art
world.
Applying Jewish Ethics: Beyond the Rabbinic Tradition is a
groundbreaking collection that introduces the reader to applied
ethics and examines various social issues from contemporary and
largely under-represented, Jewish ethical perspectives. For
thousands of years, a rich and complex system of Jewish ethics has
provided guidance about which values we should uphold and utilize
to confront concrete problems, create a healthy social fabric, and
inspire meaningful lives. Despite its longevity and richness, many
Judaic and secular scholars have misconstrued this ethical
tradition as a strictly religious and biblically based system that
primarily applies to observant Jews, rather than viewing it as an
ethical system that can provide unique and helpful insights to
anyone, religious or not. This pioneering collection offers a deep,
broad, and inclusive understanding of Jewish ethical ideas that
challenges these misconceptions. The chapters explain and apply
these ethical ideas to contemporary issues connected to racial
justice, immigration, gender justice, queer identity, and economic
and environmental justice in ways that illustrate their relevance
for Jews and non-Jews alike.
Set theory is an autonomous and sophisticated field of
mathematics that is extremely successful at analyzing mathematical
propositions and gauging their consistency strength. It is as a
field of mathematics that both proceeds with its own internal
questions and is capable of contextualizing over a broad range,
which makes set theory an intriguing and highly distinctive
subject. This handbook covers the rich history of scientific
turning points in set theory, providing fresh insights and points
of view. Written by leading researchers in the field, both this
volume and the Handbook as a whole are definitive reference tools
for senior undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in
mathematics, the history of philosophy, and any discipline such as
computer science, cognitive psychology, and artificial
intelligence, for whom the historical background of his or her work
is a salient consideration
Serves as a singular contribution to the intellectual history of
the 20th centuryContains the latest scholarly discoveries and
interpretative insights
This monograph presents a general theory of weakly implicative
logics, a family covering a vast number of non-classical logics
studied in the literature, concentrating mainly on the abstract
study of the relationship between logics and their algebraic
semantics. It can also serve as an introduction to (abstract)
algebraic logic, both propositional and first-order, with special
attention paid to the role of implication, lattice and residuated
connectives, and generalized disjunctions. Based on their recent
work, the authors develop a powerful uniform framework for the
study of non-classical logics. In a self-contained and didactic
style, starting from very elementary notions, they build a general
theory with a substantial number of abstract results. The theory is
then applied to obtain numerous results for prominent families of
logics and their algebraic counterparts, in particular for
superintuitionistic, modal, substructural, fuzzy, and relevant
logics. The book may be of interest to a wide audience, especially
students and scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy,
computer science, or related areas, looking for an introduction to
a general theory of non-classical logics and their algebraic
semantics.
The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of
reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often
surprising, occasionally controversial results. Looking back on its
publication Badiou declared: "I had inscribed my name in the
history of philosophy". Later he was brave enough to admit that
this inscription needed correction. The central elements of
Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read
through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds,
published nearly twenty years later. At the same time as presenting
the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this
book is also the first to draw out the central component of
Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across
the core elements Being and Event-the void, the multiple, the set
and the event-Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's
ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is
primarily a presentation of indifferent being. Badiou and
Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section
reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text
for all Badiou readers.
Our work in psychiatry always involves both sides of the
mind-body divide. But despite much effort to clarify the nature of
the relation between mind and body, this question is still a
riddle. That is a puzzling situation, to put it mildly.
One central unresolved question in understanding the mind-brain
relationship is not of an experimental type but stems from
difficulties in the use of concepts. St. Augustine ( 400 CE) wrote
that it is impossible for humans to understand how the mind is
attached to the body. Despite the inherent paradox that humans as
minds plus bodies are entirely puzzling and incomprehensible, this
would appear to be an accurate statement until now, despite an
extensive literature that tries to solve the difficulty,
particularly as a result of the recent increase in the knowledge of
brain function.
This essay, "Brain in Mind," shows that the difficulty is due to
the Occidental tradition of metaphysics-ontology, which claims that
reality is mindindependent; that belief eliminates the mind from
reality, because the mind cannot become mind-independent.
Principles from phenomenology (Jaspers) and constructivism (von
Glasersfeld and others), and the awareness that all
reality-structures involve the subject's pragmatic designing
activity in an unstructured background, show a contradiction-free
way of dealing with the question, which is also of help for other
areas of knowledge.
The Proposed Roads to Freedom is a treatise by the philosopher
Bertrand Russell, which contemplates a society in which
anarcho-communism is coupled with worker syndicalism. Russell
discusses various aspects of socialist-communist and syndicalist
thought, and applies them to the various portions of civil society.
Beginning with an examination of the history of the political
theories and their potential for success, Russell proposes a sort
of 'guild socialism' whereby workers are organized into different
groupings and specialisms, as opposed to the centralized,
bureaucratic system advocated by state socialism. Although Russell
believes that the socialist system would be the closest to
perfection, he does not believe that it would be entirely lacking
of flaws. Furthermore, Russell attributes many problems of the
theory as solvable over time; a fine-tuning of the technical
implementation of socialist economics would, so the author
proposes, iron out the problems and inefficiencies in the system.
|
|