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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy
This book offers a new theoretical framework within which to
understand "the mind-body problem". The crux of this problem is
phenomenal experience, which Thomas Nagel famously described as
"what it is like" to be a certain living creature. David Chalmers
refers to the problem of "what-it-is-like" as "the hard problem" of
consciousness and claims that this problem is so "hard" that
investigators have either just ignored the issue completely,
investigated a similar (but distinct) problem, or claimed that
there is literally nothing to investigate - that phenomenal
experience is illusory. This book contends that phenomenal
experience is both very real and very important. Two specific
"biological naturalist" views are considered in depth. One of these
two views, in particular, seems to be free from problems; adopting
something along the lines of this view might finally allow us to
make sense of the mind-body problem. An essential read for anyone
who believes that no satisfactory solution to "the mind-body
problem" has yet been discovered.
What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an
attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a
general theory of mental content. The content of conscious
experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given
to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle
Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious
emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental
notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the
notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She
argues that all experience essentially involves all four things,
and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in
experience-of 'the given'-lies in giving a correct specification of
the nature of these four things and the relations between them.
Montague argues that conscious perception, conscious thought, and
conscious emotion each have a distinctive, irreducible kind of
phenomenology-what she calls 'sensory phenomenology', 'cognitive
phenomenology', and 'evaluative phenomenology' respectively-and
that these kinds of phenomenology are essential in accounting for
the intentionality of these mental phenomena.
Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis, is a poststructural
exploration of the interface between architecture and the body.
Chris L. Smith skilfully introduces and explains numerous concepts
drawn from poststructural philosophy to explore the manner by which
the architecture/body relation may be rethought in the 21st
century. Multiple well-known figures in the discourses of
poststructuralism are invoked: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorges Luis
Borges and Michel Serres. These figures bring into view the
philosophical frame in which the body is formulated. Alongside the
philosophy, the architecture that Smith comes to refer to as 'bare
architecture' is explored. Smith considers architecture as a
complex construction and the book draws upon literature, art and
music, to provide a critique of the limits, extents and
opportunities for architecture itself. The book considers key works
from the architects Douglas Darden, Georges Pingusson, Lacatan and
Vassal, Carlo Scarpa, Peter Zumthor, Marco Casagrande and Sami
Rintala and Raumlabor. Such works are engaged for their capacities
to foster a rethinking of the relation between architecture and the
body.
Notes and Introduction by Mark G. Spencer, Brock University,
Ontario John Locke (1632-1704) was perhaps the most influential
English writer of his time. His Essay concerning Human
Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690) weighed
heavily on the history of ideas in the eighteenth century, and
Locke's works are often ? rightly ? presented as foundations of the
Age of Enlightenment. Both the Essay and the Second Treatise (by
far the more influential of the Two Treatises) were widely read by
Locke's contemporaries and near contemporaries. His
eighteenth-century readers included philosophers, historians and
political theorists, but also community and political leaders,
engaged laypersons, and others eager to participate in the
expanding print culture of the era. His epistemological message
that the mind at birth was a blank slate, waiting to be filled,
complemented his political message that human beings were free and
equal and had the right to create and direct the governments under
which they lived. Today, Locke continues to be an accessible
author. He provides food for thought to university professors and
their students, but has no less to offer the general reader who is
eager to enjoy the classics of world literature.
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Anti-Machiavel
(Hardcover)
Innocent Gentillet; Edited by Ryan Murtha; Translated by Simon Patericke
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R2,209
R1,782
Discovery Miles 17 820
Save R427 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often
the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by
suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its
painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The
result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and
feeling of the artist and the audience, art's defenders make art
self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and
limiting self-description of people's lives lived in an "audit
culture", a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence
of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the
counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that
the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people's work-lives,
their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The
book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation
fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value
judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic,
ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the "value"
they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains
contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with
contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature,
education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.
In Adulthood, Morality, and the Fully Human, John J. Shea describes
an adult, moral, and fully human self in terms of integrity and
mutuality. Those who are fully human are caring and just. Violence
is the absence of care and justice. Peace-the pinnacle of human
development-is their embodiment. Integrity and mutuality together
beget care and justice and care and justice together beget peace.
Shea shows the practical importance of the fully human self for
education, psychotherapy, and spirituality. This book is especially
recommended for scholars and those in helping professions.
Climate Engineering: A Normative Perspective takes as its subject a
prospective policy response to the urgent problem of climate
change, one previously considered taboo. Climate engineering, the
"deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment
in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change," encapsulates
a wide array of technological proposals. Daniel Edward Callies here
focuses on one proposal currently being researched-stratospheric
aerosol injection-which would spray aerosol particles into the
upper atmosphere to thus reflect a small portion of incoming
sunlight and slightly cool the globe. This book asks important
questions that should guide moral and political discussions of
geoengineering. Does engaging in such research lead us towards
inexorable deployment? Could this research draw us away from the
more important tasks of mitigation and adaptation? Should we avoid
risky interventions in the climate system altogether? What would
legitimate governance of this technology look like? What would
constitute a just distribution of the benefits and burdens
associated with stratospheric aerosol injection? Who ought to be
included in the decision-making process? Callies offers a normative
perspective on these and other questions related to engineering the
climate, ultimately arguing for research and regulation guided by
norms of legitimacy, distributive justice, and procedural justice.
Gandhi and Philosophy presents a breakthrough in philosophy by
foregrounding modern and scientific elements in Gandhi's thought,
animating the dazzling materialist concepts in his writings and
opening philosophy to the new frontier of nihilism. This
scintillating work breaks with the history of Gandhi scholarship,
removing him from the postcolonial and Hindu-nationalist axis and
disclosing him to be the enemy that the philosopher dreads and
needs. Naming the congealing systematicity of Gandhi's thoughts
with the Kantian term hypophysics, Mohan and Dwivedi develop his
ideas through a process of reason that awakens the possibilities of
concepts beyond the territorial determination of philosophical
traditions. The creation of the new method of criticalisation - the
augmentation of critique - brings Gandhi's system to its exterior
and release. It shows the points of intersection and infiltration
between Gandhian concepts and such issues as will, truth, violence,
law, anarchy, value, politics and metaphysics and compels us to
imagine Gandhi's thought anew.
Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen
Colbert investigates classical and contemporary understandings of
satire, parody, and irony, and how these genres function within a
deliberative democracy. Elizabeth Benacka examines the rhetorical
history, theorization, and practice of humor spanning from ancient
Greece and Rome to the contemporary United States. In particular,
this book focuses on the contemporary work of Stephen Colbert and
his parody of a conservative media pundit, analyzing how his humor
took place in front of an uninitiated audience and ridiculed a
variety of problems and controversies threatening American
democracy. Ultimately, Benacka emphasizes the importance of humor
as a discourse capable of calling forth a group of engaged citizens
and a source of civic education in contemporary society.
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