Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Showing 1 - 10 of 10 matches in All Departments
This collection of facsimile reprints brings together the most important recent scholarship examining the major stages in Heidegger's philosophical career.
"What constitutes human excellence?" and "What is the best way to
live a life?" These are questions that human beings have been
asking since the beginning of time. In their critically acclaimed
book, "All Things Shining," Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly
argue that our search for meaning was once fulfilled by our
responsiveness to forces greater than ourselves, whether one God or
many. These forces drew us in and imbued the ordinary moments of
life with wonder and gratitude. Dreyfus and Kelly argue in this
thought-provoking work that as we began to rely on the power of our
own independent will we lost our skill for encountering the sacred.
Is the Internet the key to a reinvigorated public life? Or will it fragment society by enabling citizens to associate only with like-minded others? Online community has provided social researchers with insights into our evolving social life. As suburbanization and the breakdown of the extended family and neighborhood isolate individuals more and more, the Internet appears as a possible source for reconnection. Are virtual communities "real" enough to support the kind of personal commitment and growth we associate with community life, or are they fragile and ultimately unsatisfying substitutes for human interaction? Community in the Digital Age features the latest, most challenging work in an important and fast-changing field, providing a forum for some of the leading North American social scientists and philosophers concerned with the social and political implications of this new technology. Their provocative arguments touch on all sides of the debate surrounding the Internet, community, and democracy.
Technology and Values provides a highly useful collection of essays organized around issues related to science, technology, public health, economics, the environment, and ethical theory. The editors present effective introductions that provide background information as well as philosophical tools and case studies to facilitate understanding of the variety of issues emanating from the most significant developments in technology, including the effects on privacy of the widespread use of computers to store and retrieve personal information and the ethical considerations of genetic engineering.
"A picture held us captive," writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe. According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This "mediational" epistemology-internal ideas mediating external reality-continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it-by handling things, moving among them, responding to them-and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes's privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared. Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with-trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations-fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science.
Looks at the stages of human knowledge argues that artifical intelligence will never surpass human judgement, and evaluates expert systems.
|
You may like...
|