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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy
This first book-length collection on Levinas and education gathers new texts written especially for this volume by an international group of scholars well known for their work in philosophy, educational theory, and on Levinas. It provides an introduction to some of Levinas's major themes of ethics, justice, hope, hospitality, forgiveness and more, as its contributing authors address some fundamental educational issues such as: what it means to be a teacher; what it means to learn from a teacher; the role of language in the curriculum; literature, ethics, and education; moral education and human relations in schools; ethics of responsibility and philosophical-pedagogical discourse; educational hospitality and interculturalism; unconditional responsibility and education; educating for participatory democratic citizenship; the pedagogy of peace; logic, rationality, and ethics; connecting teaching to spirituality. Levinas always insisted that his aim was not to provide "a program," and accordingly, it is not the intent of the authors to look in Levinas's texts for a set of guidelines, rules, or precepts to be applied to education. Rather, this study invites educators, and researchers in philosophy and philosophy of education, to a thoughtful and critical reading of Levinas, and to engage with his unique style of analysis and questioning as they uncover with these authors the necessity and the possibility of thinking education anew in terms of ethics, justice, responsibility, hope and faith.
As the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl has been hugely influential in the development of contemporary continental philosophy. In The Philosophy of Husserl, Burt Hopkins shows that the unity of Husserl's philosophical enterprise is found in the investigation of the origins of cognition, being, meaning, and ultimately philosophy itself. Hopkins challenges the prevailing view that Husserl's late turn to history is inconsistent with his earlier attempts to establish phenomenology as a pure science and also the view of Heidegger and Derrida, that the limits of transcendental phenomenology are historically driven by ancient Greek philosophy. Part 1 presents Plato's written and unwritten theories of eide and Aristotle's criticism of both. Part 2 traces Husserl's early investigations into the formation of mathematical and logical concepts and charts the critical necessity that leads from descriptive psychology to transcendentally pure phenomenology. Part 3 investigates the movement of Husserl's phenomenology of transcendental consciousness to that of monadological intersubjectivity. Part 4 presents the final stage of the development of Husserl's thought, which situates monadological intersubjectivity within the context of the historical a priori constitutive of all meaning. Part 5 exposes the unwarranted historical presuppositions that guide Heidegger's fundamental ontological and Derrida's deconstructive criticisms of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. The Philosophy of Husserl will be required reading for all students of phenomenology.
Claude Levi-Strauss and the style of thinking known as 'structuralism, ' with which his work is conventionally associated, is widely recognized as having made a seminal contribution to the discipline of anthropology. More generally, his writings register the turn to language in social theory in the 1960s, and are marked by the influence of Kant, Rousseau, Saussurian linguistics, Marx and Freud. In turn, Levi-Strauss is recognized as having been a key influence on thinkers such as Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. This volume seeks to address a key gap in the burgeoning secondary literature about Levi-Strauss: his importance to the study of religions. This volume pays particular attention to Levi-Strauss' writings on totemism, myth and "la pensee sauvage," situating these writings both in terms of previous theories of religion and in terms of the wider influences that informed his work. This volume provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of Levi-Strauss' life and work, the thinkers and theories that informed his writings, and his contribution to the study of religions.
This book examines the figure of the public intellectual through the work of Emile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair. It analyses Zola's famous letter "J'Accuse" supporting Alfred Dreyfus and its philosophical and political consequences for the intellectual world, including Indian public intellectuals. The volume is an examination of the critical role which can be played by public intellectuals today by referring to the "J'Accuse" model and an homage to the ideal of living decently and truthfully through the exercise of critical reason and moral excellence. Accessible and comprehensive, the book will be essential reading for students of philosophy and critical reasoning. It will be of interest to general readers as well.
A bold and beautifully written exploration of the "afterlife" of God, showing how apparently secular habits of mind in fact retain the structure of religious thought. Once in the West, our lives were bounded by religion. Then we were guided out of the darkness of faith, we are often told, by the cold light of science and reason. To be modern was to reject the religious for the secular and rational. In a bold retelling of philosophical history, Michael Rosen explains the limits of this story, showing that many modern and apparently secular ways of seeing the world were in fact profoundly shaped by religion. The key thinkers, Rosen argues, were the German Idealists, as they sought to reconcile reason and religion. It was central to Kant's philosophy that, if God is both just and assigns us to heaven or hell for eternity, we must know what is required of us and be able to choose freely. In trying to live moral lives, Kant argued, we are engaged in a collective enterprise as members of a "Church invisible" working together to achieve justice in history. As later Idealists moved away from Kant's ideas about personal immortality, this idea of "historical immortality" took center stage. Through social projects that outlive us we maintain a kind of presence after death. Conceptions of historical immortality moved not just into the universalistic ideologies of liberalism and revolutionary socialism but into nationalist and racist doctrines that opposed them. But how, after global wars and genocide, can we retain faith in any conception of shared moral progress and, if not, what is to become of the idea of historical immortality? That is our present predicament. A seamless blend of philosophy and intellectual history, The Shadow of God is a profound exploration of secular modernity's theistic inheritance.
Richard Rorty is one of the most influential, controversial and widely-read philosophers of the twentieth century. In this GuideBook to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Tartaglia analyzes this challenging text and introduces and assesses:
Rorty and the Mirror of Nature is an ideal starting-point for anyone new to Rorty, and essential reading for students in philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory and social science.
This series, originally published in the 1920s and 1930s, includes work by some of the twentieth century's most well-known thinkers, scientists, philosophers, doctors, critics and artists. When first published it was immediately recognized as a noteworthy event. Written from various points of view, with one books frequently opposing the argument of another, the volumes provide the reader with numerous aspects of modern thought. It Sheds light on the conception of disciplines at the time Shows how disciplinary thinking is shaped by humanistic rhetoric Illustrates how literature is reshaped by scientific discourses Reveals the changing status of public intellectuals between the wars
This book explores the enduring appeal of child pornography and its ramifications for criminal justice systems around the world. It is based on an extensive review of academic literature and newspaper coverage, a trawl of websites frequented by those with a sexual interest in children, a survey of how police investigate these offences, examination of prosecutors' decisions, and interviews with judges. It provides a framework for understanding the contemporary nature of this problem, especially the harms it causes, its intimate relationship with new technologies and the challenges it poses to law enforcement authorities. The internet plays a pivotal role. Its sheer size, the anarchic way it grows, the lack of any boundaries to its expansion and its disregard for national borders make it a legal environment without parallel. An unwavering focus on the threat of sexual abuse has contributed to the emergence of a context where routine dealings with children are viewed through a 'paedophilic' lens. This can have the unfortunate consequence of distracting attention from more urgent concerns (such as poverty and neglect), which make children vulnerable to sexual exploitation. In this way an emphasis on the sexualisation of children could be said to aggravate the problem that it sets out to address. The book: provides a comprehensive analysis of child pornography issues in all of their complexity, including legal, psychological, criminal justice and social perspectives. presents significant volume of original empirical data gathered from police, prosecutors and judges. includes new qualitative and quantitative information set against a background of shifting international developments. The analysis is explicitly comparative. draws on a variety of sources including support groups for paedophiles, newspaper coverage of court cases involving child pornography, victim testimony and police operations.
Few philosophers can induce as much puzzlement among students as Hegel. His works are notoriously dense and make very few concessions for a readership unfamiliar with his systematic view of the world. Allen Speight's introduction to Hegel's philosophy takes a chronological perspective on the development of Hegel's system. In this way, some of the most important questions in Hegelian scholarship are illuminated by examining in their respective contexts works such as the "Phenomenology and the Logic". Speight begins with the young Hegel and his writings prior to the "Phenomenology" focusing on the notion of positivity and how Hegel's social, economic and religious concerns became linked to systematic and logical ones. He then examines the "Phenomenology" in detail, including its treatment of scepticism, the problem of immediacy, the transition from "consciousness" to "self-consciousness", and the emergence of the social and historical category of "Spirit". The following chapter explores the Logic, paying particular attention to a number of vexed issues associated with Hegel's claims to systematicity and the relation between the categories of Hegel's logic and nature or spirit (Geist). The final chapters discuss Hegel's ethical and political thought and the three elements of his notion of "absolute spirit": art, religion and philosophy, as well as the importance of history to his philosophical approach as a whole.
The Secret Symmetry of Maimonides and Freud presents the parallels between The Guide of the Perplexed and The Interpretation of Dreams, considering how Maimonides might be perceived as anticipating Freud's much later work. In this volume, Nathan M. Szajnberg suggests that humankind has secrets to hide and does so by using common mechanisms and embedding revealing hints for the benefit of the true reader. Using a psychoanalytic approach in tandem with literary criticism and an in-depth assessment of Judaica, Szajnberg demonstrates the similarities between these two towering Jewish intellectual pillars. Using concepts of esoteric literature from the Torah and later texts, this book analyses their ideas on concealing and revealing to gain a renewed perspective on Freud's view of dreams. Throughout, Szajnberg articulates the challenges of reading translated works and how we can address the pitfalls in such translations. The book is a vital read for psychoanalysts in training and practice, as well as those interested in Judaica, the history of ideas and early Medieval studies.
In "Spiritual Writings", renowned Oxford theologian George Pattison presents previously neglected Christian writings that will forever alter our understanding of the great philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. In fact, Pattison argues that the Kierkegaard known to the history of modern ideas is, in an important sense, not Kierkegaard at all. In philosophy and literature Kierkegaard is perceived as epitomizing existential angst, whilst in theology he is seen as expounding a radical form of Christianity based on a paradoxical and absurd faith that demands hatred of the world and the rejection of all forms of communal religion. However, both pictures rely on highly debatable interpretations of a relatively small selection of texts; there is much more to Kierkegaard than the image of the 'melancholy Dane' or the iconoclastic critic of established Christendom might suggest. Alongside the pseudonymous works for which he is best known - and which do indeed deal with such concepts as melancholy, anxiety, 'fear and trembling', paradox, the absurd, and despair - Kierkegaard also wrote many religious works, usually in the form of addresses, which he called 'upbuilding discourses' (which might, in English, be called 'devotional talks'). Taken as a whole, these writings offer something very different from the popular view. As "Spiritual Writings" shows, they embody a spirituality grounded in a firm sense of human life as a good gift of God. Kierkegaard calls on us to love God and, in loving God, to love life-quite concretely - and to love our own lives, even when they have become wretched or despairing.
The problem of the nature of values and the relation between values and rationality is one of the defining issues of twentieth-century thought, and Max Weber was one of the defining figures in the debate. In this book, Turner and Factor consider the development of the dispute over Max Weber's contribution to this discourse, by showing how Weber's views have been used, revised, and adapted in new contexts. The story of the dispute is itself fascinating, for it cuts across the major political and intellectual currents of the twentieth century, from positivism, pragmatism, and value-free social science, through the philosophy of Jaspers and Heidegger, to Critical Theory and the revival of Natural Right and Natural Law. As Weber's ideas were imported to Britain and America, they found new formulations and new adherents and critics, and became absorbed into different traditions and new issues. This book was first published in 1984.
This book brings together leading figures in history, sociology, political science, feminism and critical theory to interpret, evaluate, criticize and update Weber's legacy. In a collection of specially commissioned pieces and translated articles the Weberian scholarship recognizes Max Weber as the figure central to contemporary debates on the need for societal rationality, the limits of reason and the place of culture and conduct in the supposedly post-religious age. In Part 1, Wolfgang Mommsen, Wilhelm Hennis, Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter provide a full and varied account of the theme of rationalization in the world civilizations. In Part 2 Pierre Bourdieu and Barry Hindess critically examine Weber's social action model, and Johannes Weiss and Martin Albrow address the putative 'crisis' of Western rationality. In Part 3 Jeffrey Alexander, Ralph Schroeder, Bryan Turner, Roslyn Bologh and Sam Whimster scrutinize Weber's understanding of modernity with its characteristic plurality of 'gods and demons'; they focus on its implications for individuality and personality, the body and sexuality, feminism and aesthetic modernism. Part 4 turns to politics, law and the state in the contemporary world: Colin Gordon on liberalism, Luciano Cavalli on charismatic politics, Stephen Turner and Regis Factor on decisionism and power and Scott Lash on modernism, substantice rationality and law. This book was first published in 1987.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Max Weber, central thinkers to the discussion of political legitimacy, represent two very different stages and forms of social theory: early modern political philosophy and classical sociology. In these studies, Dr Merquior describes and assesses their individual contributions to the understanding of the concept of political legitimacy. Dr Merquior compares Rousseau and Weber to a handful of other major theorists and highlights the contemporary prospects of the alternatives between democratic participation and bureaucratizm. This book was first published in 1980.
'Courage is knowing what not to fear' Plato 'One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors' Without the work of Plato, western thought is, quite literally, unthinkable. No single influence has been greater, in every age and in every philosophic field. Even those thinkers who have rejected Plato's views have found themselves working to an agenda he set. Yet between the neo-platonist interpretations and the anti-platonist reactions, the stuff of 'Platonism' proper has often been obscured. The philosopher himself has not necessarily helped in the matter: at times disconcertingly difficult, at other disarmingly simple, Plato can be an elusive thinker, his meanings hard to pin down. His dialogues are complex and often ironically constructed and do not simply expand his views - which in any case changed and developed over a long life. In this lucid and exciting introductory guide, Bernard Williams takes his reader back to first principles, re-reading the key texts to reveal what the philosopher actually said. The result is a rediscovered Plato: often unexpected, always fascinating and rewarding.
"Robert Brandom" is one of the most significant philosophers writing today, yet paradoxically philosophers have found it difficult to get to grips with the details and implications of his work. This book aims to facilitate critical engagement with Brandom's ideas by providing an accessible overview of Brandom's project and the context for an initial assessment. Jeremy Wanderer's examination focuses on Brandom's inferentialist conception of rationality, and the core part of this conception that aims to specify the structure that a set of performances within a social practice must have for the participants to count as sapient beings by virtue of their participation in the practice, and for the performances within the practice to have objective semantic content by virtue of their featuring within the practice. Wanderer's exploration of these two goals forms the structure to the book. It Includes: Part I that provides a structural model of linguistic practice and considers various groups of potential participants in terms of their relationships to this practice; and, Part II that examines the meaning of the performances that are caught up in this gameplaying practice. Brandom's approach to semantics is outlined and the challenge such an approach has in allowing for a representational dimension of language and thought is explored. Wanderer offers readers a valuable framework for understanding the Brandomian system and helps situate Brandom's systematic theorizing within contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. This book will be a sought after aid to reading Brandom for advanced students and philosophers engaging with his challenging body of work.
The Paget Toynbee lectures on Dante have taken place in Oxford since the mid-1990s. Named after the great medieval scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, they have been delivered by the major Dante experts of our time. This volume gathers together twelve of the most significant lectures, given by internationally renowned scholars such as Zygmunt Baranski, John Barnes, Lino Leonardi, Emilio Pasquini, Michelangelo Picone, Jonathan Usher and the late Peter Armour. The topics range from key questions such as Dante, Ovid and the poetry of exile, to ground-breaking work on obscenity in the Divine Comedy.
This book examines the concepts behind a philosophical project on postmodernism: the social and cultural condition of our time, the age of the achieved capitalism. It proposes an original theory of postmodern humanism based on the absence of form and describes the development of philosophical thought as a musical "cadenza" that produces meaning in the empty space between the past of the modern and the future of the postmodern. The book focuses on three main postmodernist themes: the denial of identity and the assertion of the differences, the shattered subject, and the absence of teleology in history and politics.
For more than two thousand years. Aristotle's "Art of Rhetoric" has shaped thought on the theory and practice of rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech. In three sections, Aristotle discusses what rhetoric is, as well as the three kinds of rhetoric (deliberative, judicial, and epideictic), the three rhetorical modes of persuasion, and the diction, style, and necessary parts of a successful speech. Throughout, Aristotle defends rhetoric as an art and a crucial tool for deliberative politics while also recognizing its capacity to be misused by unscrupulous politicians to mislead or illegitimately persuade others. Here Robert C. Bartlett offers a literal, yet easily readable, new translation of Aristotle's "Art of Rhetoric," one that takes into account important alternatives in the manuscript and is fully annotated to explain historical, literary, and other allusions. Bartlett's translation is also accompanied by an outline of the argument of each book; copious indexes, including subjects, proper names, and literary citations; a glossary of key terms; and a substantial interpretive essay.
First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2005. Twentieth-century philosophy, more than that of any other period, has become deeply and sharply conscious of the connection between philosophical problems and language. We now seem to have entered what might well be called the Wittgensteinian 'moment' in philosophy. This volume seeks to provide a general survey of Wittgenstein's thought, considering both the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1922) and the Philosophical Investigations (1953), and also to give some account of the influence which these two very different books have exercised.
First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2005. This study seeks to identify the specific mistakes that critics were alluding to in their passing asides on Wittgenstein's failure to grasp the mechanics of Godel's second incompleteness theorem. It also includes an understanding of his attack on meta-mathematics and Hilbert's Programme. |
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