|
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy
This book assesses how governance has evolved in six nations -
England, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands -
between 1970 and 2018. More specifically, it examines how the
governance approaches and the sets of policy tools used to govern
have altered with respect to four public policy sectors that
represent core responsibilities of the modern OECD state:
education, energy, environment and health. To structure this
analytical approach, the book harnesses sociological
institutionalism in the area of 'policy sequencing' to trace both
the motivations and the consequences of policy-makers' altering
governance approaches and the resulting policy tools. Combining a
comparative and international focus, this book will appeal to
scholars and students of public policy and governance.
The variety of approaches to the concept of trust in philosophy
reflects the fact that our worries are diverse, from the Hobbesian
concern for the possibility of rational cooperation to
Wittgenstein's treatment of the place of trust in knowledge. To
speak of trust is not only to describe human action but also to
take a perspective on it and to engage with it. Olli Lagerspetz
breathes new life into the philosophical debate by showing how
questions about trust are at the centre of any in-depth analyses of
the nature of human agency and human rationality and that these
issues, in turn, lie at the heart of philosophical ethics. Ideal
for those grappling with these issues for the first time, Trust,
Ethics and Human Reason provides a thorough and impassioned
assessment of the concept of trust in moral philosophy.
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.
This book provides a new interpretation of the ethical theory of
G.W.F. Hegel. The aim is not only to give a new interpretation for
specialists in German Idealism, but also to provide an analysis
that makes Hegel's ethics accessible for all scholars working in
ethical and political philosophy. While Hegel's political
philosophy has received a good deal of attention in the literature,
the core of his ethics has eluded careful exposition, in large part
because it is contained in his claims about conscience. This book
shows that, contrary to accepted wisdom, conscience is the central
concept for understanding Hegel's view of practical reason and
therefore for understanding his ethics as a whole. The argument
combines careful exegesis of key passages in Hegel's texts with
detailed treatments of problems in contemporary ethics and
reconstructions of Hegel's answers to those problems. The main
goals are to render comprehensible Hegel's notoriously difficult
texts by framing arguments with debates in contemporary ethics, and
to show that Hegel still has much to teach us about the issues that
matter to us most. Central topics covered in the book are the
connection of self-consciousness and agency, the relation of
motivating and justifying reasons, moral deliberation and the
holism of moral reasoning, mutual recognition, and the rationality
of social institutions.
Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention--grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life. Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded--or been victimized by--power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.
Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The
nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly
of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume.
Philosophers have long been intrigued by animal minds and
vegetarianism, but only around the last quarter of the twentieth
century did a significant philosophical literature begin to be
developed on both the scientific study of animals and the ethics of
human uses of animals. This literature had a primary focus on
discussion of animal psychology, the moral status of animals, the
nature and significance of species, and a number of practical
problems. This Oxford Handbook is designed to capture the nature of
the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many
of the major problems. Several chapters in this volume explore
matters that have never previously been examined by philosophers.
The authors of the thirty-five chapters come from a diverse set of
philosophical interests in the History of Philosophy, the
Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Biology, the Philosophy of
Cognitive Science, the Philosophy of Language, Ethical Theory, and
Practical Ethics. They explore many theoretical issues about animal
minds and an array of practical concerns about animal products,
farm animals, hunting, circuses, zoos, the entertainment industry,
safety-testing on animals, the status and moral significance of
species, environmental ethics, the nature and significance of the
minds of animals, and so on. They also investigate what the future
may be expected to bring in the way of new scientific developments
and new moral problems.
This book of original essays is the most comprehensive single
volume ever published on animal minds and the ethics of our use of
animals.
Politics as Radical Creation examines the meaning of democratic
practice through the critical social theory of the Frankfurt
School. It provides an understanding of democratic politics as a
potentially performative good-in-itself, undertaken not just to the
extent that it seeks to achieve a certain extrinsic goal, but also
in that it functions as a medium for the expression of creative
human impulses. Christopher Holman develops this potential model
through a critical examination of the political philosophies of
Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. Holman argues that, while Arendt
and Marcuse's respective theorizations each ultimately restrict the
potential scope of creative human expression, their juxtaposition -
which has not been previously explored - results in a more
comprehensive theory of democratic existence, one that is uniquely
able to affirm the creative capacities of the human being. Yielding
important theoretical results that will interest scholars of each
theorist and of theories of democracy more generally, Politics as
Radical Creation provides a valuable means for rethinking the
nature of contemporary democratic practice.
Kristi A. Olson asks: What is a fair income distribution? She
rejects equal income shares: equal pay undercompensates workers in
dangerous and onerous jobs. The envy test, which takes both income
and work into account, fares better. Yet, a distribution in which
no one prefers someone else's circumstances to her own-as the envy
test requires-is unlikely to exist, and even when it does exist,
the normative connection between envy and fairness has not been
established. After critiquing existing answers, Olson invokes the
idea of mutual justifiability: when someone claims that her
situation should be improved at someone else's expense, she must be
able to give a reason that cannot be reasonably rejected by a free
and equal individual who regards everyone else as the same. To give
the answer bite, Olson distinguishes two types of envy. Reasons
based on personal envy can be reasonably rejected; reasons based on
impersonal envy cannot. Olson then tests the solidarity solution
against the theories of Ronald Dworkin, Philippe Van Parijs, and
Marc Fleurbaey and applies it directly to the concrete issues of
the gender wage gap and taxation. By providing a new approach to
problems of fair resource allocation, The Solidarity Solution
establishes philosophical discussion as critical to today's fight
to end economic injustice.
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.
In this groundbreaking study, Stephen H. Webb offers a new
theological understanding of the material and spiritual: that, far
from being contradictory, they unite in the very stuff of the
eternal Jesus Christ.
Accepting matter as a perfection (or predicate) of the divine
requires a rethinking of the immateriality of God, the doctrine of
creation out of nothing, the Chalcedonian formula of the person of
Christ, and the analogical nature of religious language. It also
requires a careful reconsideration of Augustine's appropriation of
the Neo-Platonic understanding of divine incorporeality as well as
Origen's rejection of anthropomorphism. Webb locates his position
in contrast to evolutionary theories of emergent materialism and
the popular idea that the world is God's body. He draws on a little
known theological position known as the ''heavenly flesh''
Christology, investigates the many misunderstandings of its origins
and relation to the Monophysite movement, and supplements it with
retrievals of Duns Scotus, Caspar Scwenckfeld and Eastern Orthodox
reflections on the transfiguration. Also included in Webb's study
are discussions of classical figures like Barth and Aquinas as well
as more recent theological proposals from Bruce McCormack, David
Hart, and Colin Gunton. Perhaps most provocatively, the book argues
that Mormonism provides the most challenging, urgent, and
potentially rewarding source for metaphysical renewal today.
Webb's concept of Christian materialism challenges traditional
Christian common sense, and aims to show the way to a more
metaphysically sound orthodoxy.
The relationship between mind and matter, mental states and
physical states, has occupied the attention of philosophers for
thousands of years. Richard Fumerton's primary concern is the
knowledge argument for dualism - an argument that proceeds from the
idea that we can know truths about our existence and our mental
states without knowing any truths about the physical world. This
view has come under relentless criticism, but here Fumerton makes a
powerful case for its rehabilitation, demonstrating clearly the
importance of its interconnections with a wide range of other
controversies within philosophy. Fumerton analyzes philosophical
views about the nature of thought and the relation of those views
to arguments for dualism, and investigates the connection between a
traditional form of foundationalism about knowledge, and a
foundationalist view about thought that underlies traditional
arguments for dualism. His book will be of great interest to those
studying epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
This book is written for software product teams that use AI to add
intelligent models to their products or are planning to use it. As
AI adoption grows, it is becoming important that all AI driven
products can demonstrate they are not introducing any bias to the
AI-based decisions they are making, as well as reducing any
pre-existing bias or discrimination. The responsibility to ensure
that the AI models are ethical and make responsible decisions does
not lie with the data scientists alone. The product owners and the
business analysts are as important in ensuring bias-free AI as the
data scientists on the team. This book addresses the part that
these roles play in building a fair, explainable and accountable
model, along with ensuring model and data privacy. Each chapter
covers the fundamentals for the topic and then goes deep into the
subject matter - providing the details that enable the business
analysts and the data scientists to implement these fundamentals.
AI research is one of the most active and growing areas of computer
science and statistics. This book includes an overview of the many
techniques that draw from the research or are created by combining
different research outputs. Some of the techniques from relevant
and popular libraries are covered, but deliberately not drawn very
heavily from as they are already well documented, and new research
is likely to replace some of it.
Proclus's Commentary on the Republic of Plato contains in its fifth
and sixth essays the only systematic analysis of the workings of
the allegorical text to reach us from polytheist. In the context of
defending Homer against the criticisms leveled by Socrates in the
Republic, Proclus, a late-antique polytheist thinker, provides not
only a rich selection of interpretive material, but also an
analysis of Homer's polysemous text whose influence can be observed
in the work of the founder of modern semiotics, Charles Sanders
Peirce. This first modern translation into English, with Greek text
facing and limited commentary, makes it possible to appreciate the
importance of Proclus in the history of both hermeneutics and
semiotics
The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception
of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which
continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an
absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance,
sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic
'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been
marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that
which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of
dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine
Malabou, Slavoj Zizek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought
considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has
emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for
difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to
reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic
narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's
philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding
of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices
in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is
central to this revaluation of Hegel.
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.
|
|