Author: John McGuire
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004364927
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
In Cynical Suspicions and Platonist Pretensions, John McGuire offers a critique of recent trends in contemporary political theory, specifically concerning the ‘dangers’ of cynicism and the contamination of public reason. In the view of many theorists and pundits, cynicism remains one of the gravest ills to befall any democratic society, injecting a virulent estrangement which leaves sufferers unable to trust elected representatives and unwilling to participate in collective action. Starting with a reconstruction of the performative and rhetorical tactics of the ‘first’ Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 323 BCE), John McGuire aims to demonstrate how cynicism’s non-defeatist, relentlessly sceptical ethos provides an important counterweight to the self-aggrandising designs of moralists and policymakers alike.
Author: Björnstjern Baade
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3662621282
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Analysing international law through the prism of “cynicism” makes it possible to look beyond overt disregard for international law, currently discussed in terms of a backlash or crisis. The concept allows to analyse and criticise structural features and specific uses of international law that seem detrimental to international law in a more subtle way. Unlike its ancient predecessor, cynicism nowadays refers not to a bold critique of power but to uses and abuses of international law that pursue one-sided interests tacitly disregarding the legal structure applied. From this point of view, the contributions critically reflect on the theoretical foundations of international law, in particular its relationship to power, actors such as the International Law Commission and international judges, and specific fields, including international human rights, humanitarian, criminal, tax and investment law.
Author: Anders Sorensen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004326197
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
In Plato on Democracy and Political technē Sørensen argues that the question of democracy’s ‘epistemic potential’ was one that Plato took more seriously than is usually assumed. While he famously rejected democracy on the basis of its inherent inability to accommodate political expertise (technē), he did not think that this failure on democracy’s part was necessarily inevitable but a concept that required further examination. Sørensen shows that in a number of his most important dialogues (Republic, Gorgias, Statesman, Protagoras, Theaetetus), Plato was ready to take up the question of democracy’s epistemic potential and to enter into strikingly technical and sophisticated discussions of what both rule by technē and rule by the people would have to look like in order for the two things to be compatible.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004493379
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
This book contains fifteen essays all seeking to regain the original meaning of philosophy as the love of wisdom. Mythos and Logos are two essential aspects of a quest that began with the ancient Greeks. As concepts fundamental to human experience, Mythos and Logos continue to guide the search for truth in the twenty-first century.
Author: Nalin Ranasinghe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
menaced by the silent violence of technology and the imperatorial tones of a false voluntaristic god - a deity who never seeks to persuade but kills those he cannot frighten. Today, it is increasingly clear that Athens and Jerusalem must combine forces and march to the relief of civilization from the joint assault of these barbarisms - old and new. It is only fitting then, that the West should return to its Socratic origins at this crucial kairos." --Book Jacket.
Author: John Dewey
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
Author: Eric A. HAVELOCK
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674038436
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought. The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction-Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative. The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.
Author: Thomas More
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN: 8027303583
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 105
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Book Description
Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694934
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
‘There is no alternative to postmetaphysical thinking’: this statement, made by Jürgen Habermas in 1988, has lost none of its relevance. Postmetaphysical thinking is, in the first place, the historical answer to the crisis of metaphysics following Hegel, when the central metaphysical figures of thought began to totter under the pressure exerted by social developments and by developments within science. As a result, philosophy’s epistemological privilege was shaken to its core, its basic concepts were de-transcendentalized, and the primacy of theory over practice was opened to question. For good reasons, philosophy ‘lost its extraordinary status’, but as a result it also courted new problems. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, the sequel to the 1988 volume that bears the same title (English translation, Polity 1992), Habermas addresses some of these problems. The first section of the book deals with the shift in perspective from metaphysical worldviews to the lifeworld, the unarticulated meanings and assumptions that accompany everyday thought and action in the mode of ‘background knowledge’. Habermas analyses the lifeworld as a ‘space of reasons’ – even where language is not (yet) involved, such as, for example, in gestural communication and rituals. In the second section, the uneasy relationship between religion and postmetaphysical thinking takes centre stage. Habermas picks up where he left off in 1988, when he made the far-sighted observation that ‘philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion’, and explores philosophy’s new-found interest in religion, among other topics. The final section includes essays on the role of religion in the political context of a post-secular, liberal society. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, religion and the social sciences and humanities generally.
Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521367813
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.
