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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy
While large bodies of scholarship exist on the plays of Shakespeare
and the philosophy of Heidegger, this book is the first to read
these two influential figures alongside one another, and to reveal
how they can help us develop a creative and contemplative sense of
ethics, or an 'ethical imagination'. Following the increased
interest in reading Shakespeare philosophically, it seems only
fitting that an encounter take place between the English language's
most prominent poet and the philosopher widely considered to be
central to continental philosophy. Interpreting the plays of
Shakespeare through the writings of Heidegger and vice versa, each
chapter pairs a select play with a select work of philosophy. In
these pairings the themes, events, and arguments of each work are
first carefully unpacked, and then key passages and concepts are
taken up and read against and through one another. As these
hermeneutic engagements and cross-readings unfold we find that the
words and deeds of Shakespeare's characters uniquely illuminate,
and are uniquely illuminated by, Heidegger's phenomenological
analyses of being, language, and art.
This book analyzes the implication of secular/liberal values in
Western and human rights law and its impact on Muslim women. It
offers an innovative reading of the tension between the religious
and secular spheres. The author does not view the two as binary
opposites. Rather, she believes they are twin categories that
define specific forms of lives as well as a specific notion of
womanhood. This divergence from the usual dichotomy opens the doors
for a reinterpretation of secularism in contemporary Europe. This
method also helps readers to view the study of religion vs.
secularism in a new light. It allows for a better understanding of
the challenges that contemporary Europe now faces regarding the
accommodation of different religious identities. For instance, one
entire section of the book concerns the practice of veiling and
explores the contentious headscarf debate. It features case studies
from Germany, France, and the UK. In addition, the analysis
combines a wide range of disciplines and employs an integrated,
comparative, and inter-disciplinary approach. The author
successfully brings together arguments from different fields with a
comparative legal and political analysis of Western and Islamic law
and politics. This innovative study appeals to students and
researchers while offering an important contribution to the debate
over the role of religion in contemporary secular Europe and its
impact on women's rights and gender equality.
This book reflects the most recent research devoted to a
systematized perspective and a critical (re)construction of
previous theoretical attempts of explaining, justifying and
continuing Kuhn's ingenious hypothesis in arts. Hofstadter, Clignet
and Habermas revealed to be the most engaged scholars in solving
this aesthetic "puzzled-problem". In this context, the structural
similarities between science and arts are attentively evaluated,
thus satisfying an older concern attributed to the historical
Kuhn-Kubler dispute, extensively commented along the pages of this
book. How can we track the matter of rationality and truth in art
and aesthetics, inspired by scientific perspectives? Are artistic
styles similar to scientific paradigms? Are we entitled to pursue
paradigms and masterpieces as rational models in science,
respectively in arts? On what possible grounds can we borrow from
science notions such as progress and predictability, in the study
of the evolution of art and its aesthetic backgrounds? Are the
historical dynamics of science and art affected by political
factors in the same manner? This book will be of interest to
philosophers, but also to historians of science and historians of
art alike in the reassessment it provides of recent debates on
reshaping the art world using Kuhn's "paradigm shift".
Friedrich Schleiermacher's Platons Werke (1804-28) changed how we
understand Plato. His translation of Plato's dialogues remained the
authoritative one in the German-speaking world for two hundred
years, but it was his interpretation of Plato and the Platonic
corpus, set forth in his Introductions to the dialogues, that
proved so revolutionary for classicists and philosophers worldwide.
Schleiermacher created a Platonic question for the modern world.
Yet, in Schleiermacher studies, surprisingly little is known about
Schleiermacher's deep engagement with Plato. Schleiermacher's Plato
is the first book-length study of the topic. It addresses two basic
questions: How did Schleiermacher understand Plato? In what ways
was Schleiermacher's own thought influenced by Plato? Lamm argues
that Schleiermacher's thought was profoundly influenced by Plato,
or rather by his rather distinctive understanding of Plato. This is
true not only of Schleiermacher's philosophy (Hermeneutics,
Dialectics) but also of his thinking about religion and Christian
faith during the first decade of the nineteenth century (Christmas
Dialogue, Speeches on Religion). Schleiermacher's Plato should be
of interest to classicists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars
of religion.
The book explores Peirce's non standard thoughts on a synthetic
continuum, topological logics, existential graphs, and relational
semiotics, offering full mathematical developments on these areas.
More precisely, the following new advances are offered: (1) two
extensions of Peirce's existential graphs, to intuitionistic logics
(a new symbol for implication), and other non-classical logics (new
actions on nonplanar surfaces); (2) a complete formalization of
Peirce's continuum, capturing all Peirce's original demands
(genericity, supermultitudeness, reflexivity, modality), thanks to
an inverse ordinally iterated sheaf of real lines; (3) an array of
subformalizations and proofs of Peirce's pragmaticist maxim,
through methods in category theory, HoTT techniques, and modal
logics. The book will be relevant to Peirce scholars,
mathematicians, and philosophers alike, thanks to thorough
assessments of Peirce's mathematical heritage, compact surveys of
the literature, and new perspectives offered through formal and
modern mathematizations of the topics studied.
The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader brings together
seminal texts from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century
and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time. With
readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes,
Newton, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell, it
analyses and discusses major classical, medieval and modern texts
and figures from the natural sciences. Grouped by topic to clarify
the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of
theories, each section includes an introduction, suggestions for
further reading and end-of-section discussion questions, allowing
students to develop the skills needed to: read, interpret, and
critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history
and philosophy of science understand and evaluate scientific
material found in a wide variety of professional and popular
settings appreciate the social and cultural context in which
scientific ideas emerge identify the roles that mathematics plays
in scientific inquiry Featuring primary sources in all the core
scientific fields - astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life
sciences - The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader is ideal
for students looking to better understand the origins of natural
science and the questions asked throughout its history. By taking a
thematic approach to introduce influential assumptions, methods and
answers, this reader illustrates the implications of an impressive
range of values and ideas across the history and philosophy of
Western science.
What is Philosophy? is the last instalment of a remarkable
twenty-year collaboration between the philosopher Gilles Deleuze
and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. This hugely important text
attempts to explain the terms of their collaboration and to define
the activity of philosophy in which they have been engaged. A major
contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy, it
nevertheless remains distinctly challenging for readers faced for
the first time with Deleuze and Guattari's unusual and somewhat
allusive style. Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?': A
Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this
hugely important and yet challenging work. Written specifically to
meet the needs of students coming to Deleuze and Guattari for the
first time, the book offers guidance on: - Philosophical and
historical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and
influence - Further reading
Overcoming Uncertainty in Ancient Greek Political Philosophy makes
an historical and theoretical contribution by explaining the role
of opinion in ancient Greek political philosophy, showing its
importance for Aristotle's theory of deliberation, and indicating a
new model for a deliberative republic. Currently, there are no
studies of opinion in ancient Greek political theory and so the
book breaks new historical ground. The book establishes that
opinion is key for the political theories of Plato, Aristotle, and
the Stoics because each sees uncertainty as a problem that needs to
be overcome if one is to establish a virtuous polity. Since they
have different notions of the nature of the uncertainty of opinion,
they develop very different political strategies to overcome it.
The book explains that Plato's and the Stoics' analyses of
uncertainty support oligarchy and monarchy, respectively, and that
theoretical support for deliberate politics requires a more nuanced
understanding of uncertainty that only Aristotle provides.
In Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Peter Mahon goes beyond
recent theoretical approaches to 'the posthuman' to argue for a
concrete posthumanism, which arises as humans, animals and
technology become entangled, in science, society and culture.
Concrete posthumanism is rooted in cutting-edge advances in
techno-science, and this book offers readers an exciting, fresh and
innovative exploration of this undulating, and often unstable,
terrain. With wide-ranging coverage, of cybernetics, information
theory, medicine, genetics, machine learning, politics, science
fiction, philosophy and futurology, Mahon examines how posthumanism
played-and continues to play-a crucial role in shaping how we
understand our world. This analysis of posthumanism centers on
human interactions with tools and technology, the centrality of
science, as well as an understanding of techno-science as a
pharmakon-an ancient Greek word for a substance that is both poison
and cure. Mahon argues that posthumanism must be approached with an
interdisciplinary attitude: a concrete posthumanism is only
graspable through knowledge derived from science and the
humanities. He concludes by sketching a 'post-humanities' to help
us meet the challenges of posthumanism, challenges to which we all
must rise. Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed provides a
concise, detailed and coherent exploration of posthumanism,
introducing key approaches, concepts and themes. It is ideal for
readers of all stripes who are interested in a concrete
posthumanism and require more than just a simple introduction.
Most human action has a technical dimension. This book examines
four components of this technical dimension. First, in all actions,
various individual, organizational or institutional agents combine
actional capabilities with tools, institutions, infrastructure and
other elements by means of which they act. Second, the deployment
of capabilities and means is permeated by ethical aspirations and
hesitancies. Third, all domains of action are affected by these
ethical dilemmas. Fourth, the dimensions of the technicity of
action are typical of human life in general, and not just a
regional or culturally specific phenomenon. In this study, an
interdisciplinary approach is adopted to encompass the broad
anthropological scope of this study and combine this bigger picture
with detailed attention to the socio-historical particularities of
action as it plays out in different contexts. Hermeneutics (the
philosophical inquiry into the human phenomena of meaning,
understanding and interpretation) and social science (as the study
of all human affairs) are the two main disciplinary orientations of
this book. This study clarifies the technical dimension of the
entire spectrum of human action ranging from daily routine to the
extreme of violent protest.
The early modern philosopher Anne Conway offers a remarkable
synthesis of ideas from differing philosophical traditions that
deserve our attention today. Exploring all of the major aspects of
Conway’s thought, this book presents a valuable guide to her
contribution to the history of philosophy. Through a close reading
of her central text, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern
Philosophy (1690), it considers her intellectual context and
addresses some of the outstanding interpretive issues concerning
her philosophy. Contrasting her position with that of
contemporaries such as Henry More, Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont
and George Keith, it examines her critique of the prominent
philosophical schools of the time, including Cartesian dualism and
Hobbesian materialism. From her accounts of dualism, time and God
to the often overlooked elements of her work such as her theory of
freedom and salvation, The Philosophy of Anne Conway illuminates
the ideas and legacy of an important early-modern woman
philosopher.
This book offers a conceptual map of Habermas' philosophy and a
systematic introduction to his work. It does so by systematically
examining six defining themes-modernity, discourse ethics, truth
and justice, public law and constitutional democracy,
cosmopolitanism, and toleration-of Habermas' philosophy as well as
their inner logic. The text distinguishes itself in content and
perspective by offering a very clear conceptual map and by
providing a new interpretation of Habermas' views in light of his
overarching system. In terms of scope, the book touches upon
Habermas' broad range of works. As for method, the text illustrates
key concepts in his philosophy making it a useful reference aid. It
appeals to students and scholars in the field looking for a current
introductory text or supplementary reading on Habermas.
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