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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy
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.
Asserting that 'Lenin was closer to Max's Weber's "Politics as
Vocation'" than to the German working-class struggle', Italian
philosopher and radical theorist of 1960s 'operaismo', Mario Tronti
has engaged in a lifelong project of thinking 'the autonomy of the
political'. These essays mark the conjunction of the
English-language edition of Tronti's 1966 "Workers and Capital"
with the centenary of Weber's famous 1919 lecture.
The philosophy of Ayn Rand has had a role equal or greater than
that of Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek in shaping the contemporary
neo-liberal consensus. Its impact was powerful on architects of
Reaganomics such as Alan Greenspan, former Director of the World
Bank, and the new breed of American industrialists who developed
revolutionary information technologies in Silicon Valley. But what
do we really know of Rand's philosophy? Is her gospel of
selfishness really nothing more than a reiteration of a
quintessentially American "rugged individualism"? This book argues
that Rand's philosophy can in fact be traced back to a moment,
before World War I, when the work of a now-forgotten German
philosopher called Max Stirner possessed an extraordinary appeal
for writers and artists across Europe. The influence of Stirnerian
Egoism upon that phase of intense creative innovation we now call
Modernism was seminal. The implications for our understanding of
Modernism are profound - so too for our grasp of the "cultural
logic of late capitalism". This book presents the reader with a
fresh perspective on the Modernist classics, as well as introducing
less familiar art and writing that is only now beginning to attract
interest in the West. It arrives at a fresh and compelling
re-evaluation of Modernism: revealing its selfish streak.
This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two
million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and
other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various
political regimes in our species' history. Our genetic and cultural
evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch bestowed a wide range of
predispositions on our species that continue to shape the politics
we support and the performances we enjoy. The book's case studies
range from an initiation ritual in the Mbendjela tribe in the Congo
to a 1947 drama by Bertolt Brecht and include a popular puppet play
in Tokugawa Japan. A final section examines the gradual
disintegration of social cohesion underlying the rise of polarized
politics in the USA after 1965, as such films as The Godfather,
Independence Day, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker accelerated the
nation's slide toward authoritarian Trumpism.
Hegel's critique of Early German Romanticism and its theory of
irony resonates to the core of his own philosophy in the same way
that Plato's polemics with the Sophists have repercussions that go
to the centre of his thought. The Anti-Romantic examines Hegel's
critique of Fr. Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher. Hegel rarely
mentions these thinkers by name and the texts dealing with them
often exist on the periphery of his oeuvre. Nonetheless,
individually, they represent embodiments of specific forms of
irony: Schlegel, a form of critical individuality; Novalis, a form
of sentimental nihilism; Schleiermacher, a monstrous hybrid of the
other two. The strength of Hegel's polemical approach to these
authors shows how irony itself represents for him a persistent
threat to his own idea of systematic Science. This is so, we
discover, because Romantic irony is more than a rival ideology; it
is an actual form of discourse, one whose performative objectivity
interferes with the objectivity of Hegel's own logos. Thus, Hegel's
critique of irony allows us to reciprocally uncover a Hegelian
theory of scientific discourse. Far from seeing irony as a form of
consciousness overcome by Spirit, Hegel sees it as having become a
pressing feature of his own contemporary world, as witnessed in the
popularity of his Berlin rival, Schleiermacher. Finally, to the
extent that ironic discourse seems, for Hegel, to imply a certain
world beyond his own notion of modernity, we are left with the
hypothesis that Hegel's critique of irony may be viewed as a
critique of post-modernity.
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.
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