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Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623563364
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
An important work by 20-century philosopher Hans Blumenberg, here translated into English for the first time, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman describes the reception history of an anecdote best known from Plato's Theaetetus dialogue: while focused on observing the stars, the early astronomer and proto-philosopher Thales of Miletus fails to see a well directly in his path and tumbles down. A Thracian servant girl laughs, amused that he sought to understand what was above him when he was not mindful of what was right in front of him. Blumenberg sees the story as a highly sought substitute for our missing knowledge of the earliest historical events that would fit the label “theory.” By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy's past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures. In this work and others, Blumenberg demonstrates that philosophers' most beloved images and anecdotes have become indispensable to philosophy as metaphors; that is, as representations whose meanings remain indefinite and invite frequent reinterpretation.
Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623563364
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book Here
Book Description
An important work by 20-century philosopher Hans Blumenberg, here translated into English for the first time, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman describes the reception history of an anecdote best known from Plato's Theaetetus dialogue: while focused on observing the stars, the early astronomer and proto-philosopher Thales of Miletus fails to see a well directly in his path and tumbles down. A Thracian servant girl laughs, amused that he sought to understand what was above him when he was not mindful of what was right in front of him. Blumenberg sees the story as a highly sought substitute for our missing knowledge of the earliest historical events that would fit the label “theory.” By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy's past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures. In this work and others, Blumenberg demonstrates that philosophers' most beloved images and anecdotes have become indispensable to philosophy as metaphors; that is, as representations whose meanings remain indefinite and invite frequent reinterpretation.
Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623568536
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book Here
Book Description
An important work by 20-century philosopher Hans Blumenberg, here translated into English for the first time, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman describes the reception history of an anecdote best known from Plato's Theaetetus dialogue: while focused on observing the stars, the early astronomer and proto-philosopher Thales of Miletus fails to see a well directly in his path and tumbles down. A Thracian servant girl laughs, amused that he sought to understand what was above him when he was not mindful of what was right in front of him. Blumenberg sees the story as a highly sought substitute for our missing knowledge of the earliest historical events that would fit the label “theory.” By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy's past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures. In this work and others, Blumenberg demonstrates that philosophers' most beloved images and anecdotes have become indispensable to philosophy as metaphors; that is, as representations whose meanings remain indefinite and invite frequent reinterpretation.
Author: Maria Michela Sassi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120456X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
How can we talk about the beginnings of philosophy today? How can we avoid the conventional opposition of mythology and the dawn of reason and instead explore the multiple styles of thought that emerged between them? In this acclaimed book, available in English for the first time, Maria Michela Sassi reconstructs the intellectual world of the early Greek "Presocratics" to provide a richer understanding of the roots of what used to be called "the Greek miracle." The beginnings of the long process leading to philosophy were characterized by intellectual diversity and geographic polycentrism. In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, between the Asian shores of Ionia and the Greek city-states of southern Italy, thinkers started to reflect on the cosmic order, elaborate doctrines on the soul, write in solemn Homeric meter, or, later, abandon poetry for an assertive prose. And yet the Presocratics whether the Milesian natural thinkers, the rhapsode Xenophanes, the mathematician and "shaman" Pythagoras, the naturalist and seer Empedocles, the oracular Heraclitus, or the inspired Parmenides all shared an approach to critical thinking that, by questioning traditional viewpoints, revolutionized knowledge. A unique study that explores the full range of early Greek thinkers in the context of their worlds, the book also features a new introduction to the English edition in which the author discusses the latest scholarship on the subject.--
Author: Susan E. Gustafson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501315781
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Throughout his literary work Goethe portrays characters who defy and reject 18th and 19th century ideals of aristocratic and civil families, notions of heritage, assumptions about biological connections, expectations about heterosexuality, and legal mandates concerning marriage. The questions Goethe's plays and novels pose are often modern and challenging: Do social conventions, family expectations, and legal mandates matter? Can two men or two women pair together and be parents? How many partners or parents should there be? Two? One? A group? Can parents love children not biologically related to them? Do biological parents always love their children? What is the nature of adoptive parents, children, and families? Ultimately, what is the fundamental essence of love and family? Gustafson demonstrates that Goethe's conception of the elective affinities is certainly not limited to heterosexual spouses or occasionally to men desiring men. A close analysis of Goethe's explication of affinities throughout his literary production reveals his rejection of loveless relationships (for example, arranged marriages) and his acceptance and promotion of all relationships formed through spontaneous affinities and love (including heterosexual, same-sex, nonexclusive, group, parental, and adoptive).
Author: Jan Uelzmann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150134711X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Staging West German Democracy examines how political “founding discourses” of the nascent Federal Republic (FRG) were reflected, reinforced, and actively manufactured by the Federal government in conjunction with the West German, state-controlled newsreel system, the Deutsche Wochenschau. By looking at the institutional history of the Deutsche Wochenschau and its close relationship to the Federal Press Office, Jan Uelzmann traces the Adenauer administration's project of maintaining a “government channel” in an increasingly diverse, de-centralized, and democratic West German media landscape. Staging West German Democracy reconstructs the company's integral role in the planning, production, and dissemination of pro-government PR, and through detailed analyses reveals the films to celebrate the FRG as an economically successful and internationally connected democracy under Adenauer's leadership. Apart from providing election propaganda for Adenauer's CDU party, these films provided an important stabilizing factor for the FRG's project of explaining and promoting democracy to its citizens, and of defining its public image against the backdrops of the Third Reich past and a competing, contemporary incarnation of German nationhood, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In this regard, Staging West German Democracy adds in important ways to our understanding of the media's role in the West German nation building process.
Author: Markus Gabriel
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745687601
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
Where do we come from? Are we merely a cluster of elementary particles in a gigantic world receptacle? And what does it all mean? In this highly original new book, the philosopher Markus Gabriel challenges our notion of what exists and what it means to exist. He questions the idea that there is a world that encompasses everything like a container life, the universe, and everything else. This all-inclusive being does not exist and cannot exist. For the world itself is not found in the world. And even when we think about the world, the world about which we think is obviously not identical with the world in which we think. For, as we are thinking about the world, this is only a very small event in the world. Besides this, there are still innumerable other objects and events: rain showers, toothaches and the World Cup. Drawing on the recent history of philosophy, Gabriel asserts that the world cannot exist at all, because it is not found in the world. Yet with the exception of the world, everything else exists; even unicorns on the far side of the moon wearing police uniforms. Revelling in witty thought experiments, word play, and the courage of provocation, Markus Gabriel demonstrates the necessity of a questioning mind and the role that humour can play in coming to terms with the abyss of human existence.
Author: Robert Skidelsky
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590517989
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
This sweeping history of humanity’s relationship with machines illuminates how we got here and what happens next, with AI, climate change, and beyond. Faith in technological fixes for our problems is waning. Automation, which promised relief from toil, has reactivated the long-standing fear of job redundancy. Information technology, meant to liberate us from traditional authority, is placing unprecedented powers of surveillance and control in the hands of a purely secular Big Brother. And for the first time, artificial intelligence threatens anthropogenic disaster—disaster caused by our own activities. Scientists join imaginative writers in warning us of the fate of Icarus, whose wings melted because he flew too close to the sun. This book tells the story of our fractured relationship with machines from humanity’s first tools down to the present and into the future. It raises the crucial question of why some parts of the world developed a “machine civilization” and not others, and traces the interactions between capitalism and technology, and between science and religion, in the making of the modern world. Taking in the peaks of philosophy and triumphs of science, the foundation of economics and speculations of fiction, Robert Skidelsky embarks on a bold intellectual journey through the evolution of our understanding of technology and what this means for our lives and politics.
Author: Jocelyn Holland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501346075
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
The lever appears to be a very simple object, a tool used since ancient times for the most primitive of tasks: to lift and to balance. Why, then, were prominent intellectuals active around 1800 in areas as diverse as science, philosophy, and literature inspired to think and write about levers? In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, readers will discover the remarkable ways in which the lever is used to model the construction of knowledge and to mobilize new ideas among diverse disciplines. These acts of construction are shown to model key aspects of the human, from the more abstract processes of moral decision-making to a quite literal equation of the powerful human ego with the supposed stability and power of the fulcrum point.
Author: Thomas O. Haakenson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150136992X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Grotesque Visions focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedländer/Mynona, Brugman, Höch, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity. The volume concludes by examining the exhibition Grotesk!: 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit/Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Arts, 1870-1940. In contrast to the ahistorical and amorphous concept informing the exhibition, Thomas O. Haakenson reveals a unique deployment of the artistic grotesque that targeted specific established and emerging scientific discourses at the turn of the last fin-de-siècle.
Author: Nicholas J. Molinari
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 180327087X
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Through careful analysis of the archaeological record, close reading of ancient sources, and deep investigations into the languages of our past, this study demonstrates the importance of the influence of the cult of Acheloios on Thales, fundamentally changing our understanding of the origin of the philosophical experience in 6th century Ionia.
