Lessons from a Materialist Thinker

Lessons from a Materialist Thinker PDF Author: Samantha Frost
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804757478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Carefully elaborating Hobbes' materialist ontology, Samantha Frost challenges both our implicit Cartesian assumptions about the self & the commonplace Hobbes that so readily figures in our political imagination.

Lessons from a Materialist Thinker

Lessons from a Materialist Thinker PDF Author: Samantha Frost
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804757478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
Carefully elaborating Hobbes' materialist ontology, Samantha Frost challenges both our implicit Cartesian assumptions about the self & the commonplace Hobbes that so readily figures in our political imagination.

New Materialisms

New Materialisms PDF Author: Diana Coole
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392992
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie

The New Politics of Materialism

The New Politics of Materialism PDF Author: Sarah Ellenzweig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351976141
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
New materialism challenges the mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive and inert. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: agency, vitalism, complexity, contingency, and self-organization. This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is "new" about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper engagement with materialism's history, questions whether matter can be "lively," and asks whether new materialism's wish to revitalize politics and the political lives up to its promise. Contributors: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Sarah Ellenzweig, Christian J. Emden, N. Katherine Hayles, Jess Keiser, Mogens Laerke, Ian Lowrie, Lenny Moss, Angela Willey, Catherine Wilson, Charles T. Wolfe, Derek Woods, and John H. Zammito.

Zizek's Ontology

Zizek's Ontology PDF Author: Adrian Johnston
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810124564
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
By taking this avowal seriously, Adrian Johnston finally clarifies the philosophical project underlying Žižek’s efforts.

After Hegel

After Hegel PDF Author: Frederick C. Beiser
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691173710
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period’s five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson PDF Author: Jonathan Kramnick
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person's hands to move across the page, or believing something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of nature—and thus subject to laws of cause and effect—or in a special place outside the natural order. Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period, but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.

Biocultural Creatures

Biocultural Creatures PDF Author: Samantha Frost
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In Biocultural Creatures, Samantha Frost brings feminist and political theory together with findings in the life sciences to recuperate the category of the human for politics. Challenging the idea of human exceptionalism as well as other theories of subjectivity that rest on a distinction between biology and culture, Frost proposes that humans are biocultural creatures who quite literally are cultured within the material, social, and symbolic worlds they inhabit. Through discussions about carbon, the functions of cell membranes, the activity of genes and proteins, the work of oxygen, and the passage of time, Frost recasts questions about the nature of matter, identity, and embodiment. In doing so, she elucidates the imbrication of the biological and cultural within the corporeal self. In remapping the relation of humans to their habitats and arriving at the idea that humans are biocultural creatures, Frost provides new theoretical resources for responding to political and environmental crises and for thinking about how to transform the ways we live.

The Misinterpellated Subject

The Misinterpellated Subject PDF Author: James R. Martel
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373432
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Although Haitian revolutionaries were not the intended audience for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they heeded its call, demanding rights that were not meant for them. This failure of the French state to address only its desired subjects is an example of the phenomenon James R. Martel labels "misinterpellation." Complicating Althusser's famous theory, Martel explores the ways that such failures hold the potential for radical and anarchist action. In addition to the Haitian Revolution, Martel shows how the revolutionary responses by activists and anticolonial leaders to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech and the Arab Spring sprang from misinterpellation. He also takes up misinterpellated subjects in philosophy, film, literature, and nonfiction, analyzing works by Nietzsche, Kafka, Woolf, Fanon, Ellison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others to demonstrate how characters who exist on the margins offer a generally unrecognized anarchist form of power and resistance. Timely and broad in scope, The Misinterpellated Subject reveals how calls by authority are inherently vulnerable to radical possibilities, thereby suggesting that all people at all times are filled with revolutionary potential.

Rousseau and Hobbes

Rousseau and Hobbes PDF Author: Robin Douglass
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191038032
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Robin Douglass presents the first comprehensive study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's engagement with Thomas Hobbes. He reconstructs the intellectual context of this engagement to reveal the deeply polemical character of Rousseau's critique of Hobbes and to show how Rousseau sought to expose that much modern natural law and doux commerce theory was, despite its protestations to the contrary, indebted to a Hobbesian account of human nature and the origins of society. Throughout the book Douglass explores the reasons why Rousseau both followed and departed from Hobbes in different places, while resisting the temptation to present him as either a straightforwardly Hobbesian or anti-Hobbesian thinker. On the one hand, Douglass reveals the extent to which Rousseau was occupied with problems of a fundamentally Hobbesian nature and the importance, to both thinkers, of appealing to the citizens' passions in order to secure political unity. On the other hand, Douglass argues that certain ideas at the heart of Rousseau's philosophy--free will and the natural goodness of man--were set out to distance him from positions associated with Hobbes. Douglass advances an original interpretation of Rousseau's political philosophy, emerging from this encounter with Hobbesian ideas, which focuses on the interrelated themes of nature, free will, and the passions. Douglass distances his interpretation from those who have read Rousseau as a proto-Kantian and instead argues that his vision of a well-ordered republic was based on cultivating man's naturally good passions to render the life of the virtuous citizen in accordance with nature.

Hobbes's Kingdom of Light

Hobbes's Kingdom of Light PDF Author: Devin Stauffer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655306X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Was Hobbes the first great architect of modern political philosophy? Highly critical of the classical tradition in philosophy, particularly Aristotle, Hobbes thought that he had established a new science of morality and politics. Devin Stauffer here delves into Hobbes’s critique of the classical tradition, making this oft-neglected aspect of the philosopher’s thought the basis of a new, comprehensive interpretation of his political philosophy. In Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light, Stauffer argues that Hobbes was engaged in a struggle on multiple fronts against forces, both philosophic and religious, that he thought had long distorted philosophy and destroyed the prospects of a lasting peace in politics. By exploring the twists and turns of Hobbes’s arguments, not only in his famous Leviathan but throughout his corpus, Stauffer uncovers the details of Hobbes’s critique of an older outlook, rooted in classical philosophy and Christian theology, and reveals the complexity of Hobbes’s war against the “Kingdom of Darkness.” He also describes the key features of the new outlook—the “Kingdom of Light”—that Hobbes sought to put in its place. Hobbes’s venture helped to prepare the way for the later emergence of modern liberalism and modern secularism. Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light is a wide-ranging and ambitious exploration of Hobbes’s thought.