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When in Rome (DVD)
Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Anjelica Huston, Will Arnett, Jon Heder, …
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R92
Discovery Miles 920
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Ships in 10 - 20 working days
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Romantic comedy starring Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel and Danny
DeVito. Beth Harper (Bell) is a young, career-driven New Yorker who
has hitherto been very unlucky in love. While on a whirlwind trip
to Rome for her sister's wedding, she is attracted to the best man,
Nick (Duhamel), but is dismayed to see him with another woman and
turns to drink to drown her disappointment. In her drunken state
she delves for coins in the famed 'Fontana de Amore', and is amazed
on her return to New York to find herself being pursued by not one
but five love-crazed men - including the delectable Nick. But is he
really in love with her, or simply under the fountain's spell?
Meaning (significance) and nature are this book's principal topics.
They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they
elide when meanings of a global sort-ideologies and religions, for
example-promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one
against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates
and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and
redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many
perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive
naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans,
natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually
conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or
event-storm clouds forming, nature natured-is self-differentiating,
self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or
transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise
anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had
access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond
reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is
reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience,
with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural
processes?
Traditional moral theory usually has either of two emphases:
virtuous moral character or principles for distributing duties and
goods. Zone Morality introduces a third focus: families and
businesses are systems created by the causal reciprocities of their
members. These relations embody the duties and permissions of a
system's moral code. Core systems satisfy basic interests and
needs; we move easily among them hardly noticing that moral demands
vary from system to system. Moral conflicts arise because of
discord within or among systems but also because morality has three
competing sites: self-assertive, self-regarding people; the moral
codes of systems; and regulative principles that enhance social
cohesion. Each wants authority to control the other two. Their
struggles make governance fragile. A strong church or authoritarian
government reduces conflict by imposing its rules, but democracy
resists that solution. Procedural democracy is a default position.
Its laws and equitable procedures defend people or systems having
diverse interests when society fails to create a public that would
govern for the common interest.
Cities are conspicuous among settlements because of their bulk and
pace: Venice, Paris, or New York. Each is distinctive, but all
share a social structure that mixes systems (families, businesses,
and schools), their members, and a public regulator. Cities alter
this structure in ways specific to themselves: orchestras play
music too elaborate for a quartet; city densities promote
collaborations unachievable in simpler towns. Cities, Real and
Ideal avers with von Bertalanffy, Parsons, Simmel, and Wirth that a
theory of social structure is empirically testable and confirmed.
It proposes a version of social justice appropriate to this
structure, thereby updating Marx's claim that justice is realizable
without the intervention of factors additional to society's
material conditions.
Philosophic attention shifted after Hegel from Kant s emphasis on
sensibility to criticism and analyses of the fine arts. The arts
themselves seemed as ample as nature; a disciplined science could
devote as much energy to one as the other. But then the arts began
to splinter because of new technologies: photography displaced
figurative painting; hearing recorded music reduced the interest in
learning to play it. The firm interiority that Hegel assumed was
undermined by the speed, mechanization, and distractions of modern
life. We inherit two problems: restore quality and conviction in
the arts; cultivate the interiority the sensibility that is a
condition for judgment in every domain. What is sensibility s role
in experiences of every sort, but especially those provoked when
art is made and enjoyed?"
Lost Souls examines the origins and consequences of the philosophic
idea that mind and body are distinct. The author traces mind-body
dualism from Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, and Proclus through
Descartes and Kant to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Carnap, and Quine.
Mind's separation from body has dominated philosophic thinking for
millennia, yet most mental activities are now explained in physical
terms. What are the implications if mind is material and mortal?
Considering both philosophic and scientific ideas about mind, David
Weissman explores our options. Rejecting the claim that the
character and existence of other things are an effect of the ways
we think about or perceive them, he reexamines such topics as
meaning and truth, human significance, self, and society. He argues
that philosophers have the rare opportunity to renew inquiry by
invoking the questions that once directed them: What are we? What
is our place in the world? What concerns are appropriate to being
here?
Moral and social philosophers often assume that humans beings are
and ought to be autonomous. This tradition of individualism, or
atomism, underlies many of our assumptions about ethics and law; it
provides a legitimating framework for liberal democracy and free
market capitalism. In this powerful book, David Weissman argues
against atomistic ontologies, affirming instead that all of reality
is social. Every particular is a system created by the reciprocal
causal relations of its parts, he explains. Weissman formulates an
original metaphysics of nature that remains true to what is known
through the empirical sciences, and he applies his hypothesis to a
range of topics in psychology, morals, sociology, and politics. The
author contends that systems are sometimes mutually independent,
but many systems-human ones especially-are joined in higher order
systems, such as families, friendships, businesses, and states,
that are overlapping or nested. Weissman tests this schematic claim
with empirical examples in chapters on persons, sociality, and
value. He also considers how the scheme applies to particular
issues related to deliberation, free speech, conflict, and ecology.
Is something true because we believe it to be so or because it is
true? How can a culturally bound community achieve scientific
knowledge when values, attitudes, and desires shape its beliefs? In
this book an eminent philosopher considers various schools of
thought on the nature of truth. David Weissman argues that truth
exists in the correspondence between statement and fact: what can
be said about our world can be measured against a reality that has
a character and existence independent of any property we ascribe to
it. Weissman begins by evaluating the transcendental paradigm of
Kant that has exercised enormous influence in the development of
Western thought over the past two hundred years. He develops his
critique of the Kantian model (which states that value judgments
underlie the perception or construction of truth), asserting that
it is seriously flawed because it renders a determination of truth
impossible. Weissman examines various value-driven perspectives on
truth developed by such philosophers as Foucault, Derrida, and
Rorty, who feel that truth is only the set of affirmations,
principles, and procedures sanctioned by power and value. However,
says Weissman, truth is the required adjunct to desire. Knowing who
we are, where we have been, and the consequences of what we have
done is the essential preparation for choosing what to do next. We
must respect the integrity of a world we have not made and find our
way within it with the help of attitudes and desires that have been
informed by truth.
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