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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy
Deleuze's fondness for geography has long been recognised as
central to his thought. This is the first book to introduce
researchers to the breadth of his engagements with space, place and
movement. Focusing on pressing global issues such as urbanization,
war, migration, and climate change, Arun Saldanha presents a
detailed Deleuzian rejoinder to a number of theoretical and
political questions about globalization in a variety of
disciplines. This systematic overview of moments in Deleuze's
corpus where space is implicitly or explicitly theorized shows why
he can be called the twentieth century's most interesting thinker
of space. Anyone with an interest in refining such concepts as
territory, assemblage, body, event and Anthropocene will learn much
from the "geophilosophy" which Deleuze and Guattari proposed for
our critical times.
'Capitalist critique and proletarian reasoning fit for our time' -
Peter Linebaugh Taking the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David
Hume as its subject, this book breaks new ground in focusing its
lens on a little-studied aspect of Hume's thinking: his
understanding of money. George Caffentzis makes both an
intervention in the field of monetary philosophy and into Marxian
conceptions of the relation between philosophy and capitalist
development. He vividly charts the ways in which Hume's philosophy
directly informed the project of 'civilizing' the people of the
Scottish Highlands and pacifying the English proletariat in
response to the revolts of both groups at the heart of the empire.
Built on careful historical and philosophical detective work,
Civilizing Money offers a stimulating and radical political reading
of the ways in which Hume's fundamental philosophical claims
performed concrete political functions.
Dignity is a fundamental aspect of our lives, yet one we rarely
pause to consider; our understandings of dignity, on individual,
collective and philosophical perspectives, shape how we think, act
and relate to others. This book offers an historical survey of how
dignity has been understood and explores the concept in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition. World-renowned contributors examine the
roots of human dignity in classical Greece and Rome and the
Scriptures, as well as in the work of theologians, such as St
Thomas Aquinas and St John Paul II. Further chapters consider
dignity within Renaissance art and sacred music. The volume shows
that dignity is also a contemporary issue by analysing situations
where the traditional understanding has been challenged by
philosophical and policy developments. To this end, further essays
look at the role of dignity in discussions about transhumanism,
religious freedom, robotics and medicine. Grounded in the principal
Christian traditions of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and
Protestantism, this book offers an interdisciplinary and
cross-period approach to a timely topic. It validates the notion of
human dignity and offers an introduction to the field, while also
challenging it.
Charting a genealogy of the modern idea of the self, Felix O
Murchadha explores the accounts of self-identity expounded by key
Early Modern philosophers, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza,
Hume and Kant. The question of the self as we would discuss it
today only came to the forefront of philosophical concern with
Modernity, beginning with an appeal to the inherited models of the
self found in Stoicism, Scepticism, Augustinianism and Pelagianism,
before continuing to develop as a subject of philosophical debate.
Exploring this trajectory, The Formation of the Modern Self pursues
a number of themes central to the Early Modern development of
selfhood, including, amongst others, grace and passion. It examines
on the one hand the deep-rooted dependence on the divine and the
longing for happiness and salvation and, on the other hand, the
distancing from the Stoic ideal of apatheia, as philosophers from
Descartes to Spinoza recognised the passions as essential to human
agency. Fundamental to the new question of the self was the
relation of faith and reason. Uncovering commonalities and
differences amongst Early Modern philosophers, O Murchadha traces
how the voluntarism of Modernity led to the sceptical approach to
the self in Montaigne and Hume and how this sceptical strand, in
turn, culminated in Kant's rational faith. More than a history of
the self in philosophy, The Formation of the Modern Self inspires a
fresh look at self-identity, uncovering not only how our modern
idea of selfhood developed but just how embedded the concept of
self is in external considerations: from ethics, to reason, to
religion.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right has long been recognized as the only
systematic alternative to the dominant social contract tradition in
modern political philosophy. Dean Moyar here takes on the difficult
task of reading and representing Hegel's view of justice with the
same kind of intuitive appeal that has made social contract theory,
with its voluntary consent and assignment of rights and privileges,
such an attractive model. Moyar argues that Hegelian justice
depends on a proper understanding of Hegel's theory of value and on
the model of life through which the overall conception of value,
the Good, is operationalized. Closely examining key episodes in
Phenomenology of Spirit and the entire Philosophy of Right, Moyar
shows how Hegel develops his account of justice through an
inferentialist method whereby the content of right unfolds into
increasingly thick normative structures. He asserts that the theory
of value that Hegel develops in tandem with the account of right
relies on a productive unity of self-consciousness and life, of
pure thinking and the natural drives. Moyar argues that Hegel's
expressive account of the free will enables him to theorize rights
not simply as abstract claims, but rather as realizations of value
in social contexts of mutual recognition. Moyar shows that Hegel's
account of justice is a living system of institutions centered on a
close relation of the economic and political spheres and on an
understanding of the law as developing through practices of public
reason. Moyar defends Hegel's metaphysics of the State as an
account of the sovereignty of the Good, and he shows why Hegel
thought that philosophy needs to offer an account of world history
and reformed religion to buttress the modern social order.
Stephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod's Theogony and
traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek
creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton's own creation
myth, which sought to "soar above th' Aonian Mount [i.e., the
Theogony] ... and justify the ways of God to men." Scully also
considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories,
including the Enuma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking
of modern "scientific myths," Freud's Civilization and its
Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod's poem as a hymn to Zeus and a
city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an
idealized polity and - with but one exception - a place of communal
harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony's reception
in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and
various story of reception pays particular attention to the long
Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus,
Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to
the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in
the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucan, a few Church
fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the
poem's reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance,
including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy
exploration of Milton's imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost.
Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod's artful interplay of
narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified
abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and
treatment of epic verse.
Why were Chinese and Indian ways of thinking excluded from European
philosophy in early modern times? This is a study of what happened
to the European understanding of China and India between the late
16th century and the first half of the 18th century. Investigating
the description of these two Asian civilizations during a century
and a half of histories of philosophy, this book accounts for the
change of historiographical paradigms, from Neoplatonic philosophia
perennis and Spinozistic atheism to German Eclecticism. Uncovering
the reasons for inserting or excluding Chinese and Indian ways of
thinking within the field of Philosophy in early modern times, it
reveals the origin of the Eurocentric understanding of Philosophy
as a Greek-European prerogative. By highlighting how this narrowing
and exclusion of non-Western ways of thought was a result of
conviction of superiority and religious prejudice, this book
provides a new way of thinking about the place of Asian traditions
among World philosophies.
From populist propaganda attacking knowledge as 'fake news' to the
latest advances in artificial intelligence, human thought is under
unprecedented attack today. If computers can do what humans can do
and they can do it much faster, what's so special about human
thought? In this new book, bestselling philosopher Markus Gabriel
steps back from the polemics to re-examine the very nature of human
thought. He conceives of human thinking as a 'sixth sense', a kind
of sense organ that is closely tied our biological reality as human
beings. Our thinking is not a form of data processing but rather
the linking together of images and imaginary ideas which we process
in different sensory modalities. Our time frame expands far beyond
the present moment, as our ideas and beliefs stretch far beyond the
here and now. We are living beings and the whole of evolution is
built into our life story. In contrast to some of the exaggerated
claims made by proponents of AI, Gabriel argues that our thinking
is a complex structure and organic process that is not easily
replicated and very far from being superseded by computers. With
his usual wit and intellectual verve, Gabriel combines
philosophical insight with pop culture to set out a bold defence of
the human and a plea for an enlightened humanism for the 21st
century. This timely book will be of great value to anyone
interested in the nature of human thought and the relations between
human beings and machines in an age of rapid technological change.
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