Blurred Visions

Blurred Visions PDF Author: Rory Joseph Conces
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Blurred Visions fills an important gap in the literature on applied philosophy. It explores the relationship between ideological disputes and evidence and attempts to establish the ways in which the intractability of some ideological disputes is a function of the disputants adopting the notion of brute evidence, and the extent to which a change of epistemological venue might affect the resolution and prevention of ideological disputes. It declares that scientific theory and ideology are conceptual frameworks that allow us to make sense of the world that we live in, and contends that recognizing the ideology-ladenness of facts and observations will facilitate the resolution of these disputes by depolarizing their argumentation, thereby making it less likely that they will incite acts of armed aggression.

Blurred Visions

Blurred Visions PDF Author: Rory Joseph Conces
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Blurred Visions fills an important gap in the literature on applied philosophy. It explores the relationship between ideological disputes and evidence and attempts to establish the ways in which the intractability of some ideological disputes is a function of the disputants adopting the notion of brute evidence, and the extent to which a change of epistemological venue might affect the resolution and prevention of ideological disputes. It declares that scientific theory and ideology are conceptual frameworks that allow us to make sense of the world that we live in, and contends that recognizing the ideology-ladenness of facts and observations will facilitate the resolution of these disputes by depolarizing their argumentation, thereby making it less likely that they will incite acts of armed aggression.

Philosophical Troubles

Philosophical Troubles PDF Author: Saul A. Kripke
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199730156
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting the essential articles by the eminent and highly influential philosopher Saul A. Kripke. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished articles from various stages of Kripke's storied career.Included here are seminal and much discussed pieces such as "Identity and Necessity", "Outline of a Theory of Truth", "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference", and "A Puzzle About Belief." More recent published articles include "Russell's Notion of Scope" and "Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference" among others. Several articles are published here for the first time, including both older works ("Two Paradoxes of Knowledge", "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities", "Nozick on Knowledge") as well as newer ("The First Person" and "Unrestricted Exportation"). "A Puzzle on Time and Thought" was written expressly for this volume.Publication of this volume -- which ranges over epistemology, linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, theory of truth, and metaphysics -- represents a major event in contemporary analytic philosophy. It will be of great interest to the many who are interested in the work of one its greatest living figures.

Troubled Philosopher

Troubled Philosopher PDF Author: Charles F. Howlett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Challenge of Things

The Challenge of Things PDF Author: A. C. Grayling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408864630
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
A. C. Grayling's lucid and stimulating books, based on the idea that philosophy should engage with the world and make itself useful, are immensely popular. The Challenge of Things joins earlier collections like The Reason of Things and Thinking of Answers, but this time to collect Grayling's recent writings on the world in a time of war and conflict. In describing and exposing the dark side of things, he also explores ways out of the habits and prejudices of mind that would otherwise trap us forever in the deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds. Whether he is writing about the First World War and its legacy, free speech, the advantages of an atheist prime minister or the role of science in the arts, his essays are always enlightening, enlivening and hopeful.

Idleness

Idleness PDF Author: Brian O'Connor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204500
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
"For millennia, idleness and laziness have been regarded as vices. We're all expected to work to survive and get ahead, and devoting energy to anything but labor and self-improvement can seem like a luxury or a moral failure. Far from questioning this conventional wisdom, modern philosophers have worked hard to develop new reasons to denigrate idleness. In Idleness, the first book to challenge modern philosophy's portrayal of inactivity, Brian O'Connor argues that the case against an indifference to work and effort is flawed--and that idle aimlessness may instead allow for the highest form of freedom. Idleness explores how some of the most influential modern philosophers drew a direct connection between making the most of our humanity and avoiding laziness. Idleness was dismissed as contrary to the need people have to become autonomous and make whole, integrated beings of themselves (Kant); to be useful (Kant and Hegel); to accept communal norms (Hegel); to contribute to the social good by working (Marx); and to avoid boredom (Schopenhauer and de Beauvoir). O'Connor throws doubt on all these arguments, presenting a sympathetic vision of the inactive and unserious that draws on more productive ideas about idleness, from ancient Greece through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Schiller and Marcuse's thoughts about the importance of play, and recent critiques of the cult of work. A thought-provoking reconsideration of productivity for the twenty-first century, Idleness shows that, from now on, no theory of what it means to have a free mind can exclude idleness from the conversation."--Provided by publisher

The Trouble with Being Born

The Trouble with Being Born PDF Author: E. M. Cioran
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 162872496X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience. “A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.”—The New Yorker “In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—Publishers Weekly "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Boston Phoenix

William James, Public Philosopher

William James, Public Philosopher PDF Author: George Cotkin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252063923
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Cotkin provides a gracefully written and consistently intelligent defense of James and pragmatism that deserves a wide audience among intellectual historians and their students."--Robert C. Bannister, American Historical Review.

Heidegger's Black Notebooks

Heidegger's Black Notebooks PDF Author: Andrew J. Mitchell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544383
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebooks. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic remarks, they show Heidegger incorporating basic tropes of anti-Semitism into his philosophical thinking. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with “the Jew” or “world Judaism” cast as antagonist in his project. How, then, are we to engage with a philosophy that, no matter how significant, seems contaminated by anti-Semitism? This book brings together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the ramifications of the Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities at large. Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Martin Gessmann, Sander Gilman, Peter E. Gordon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marder, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, Tom Rockmore, Peter Trawny, and Slavoj Žižek discuss issues including anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s thought more broadly, such as German conceptions of Jews and Judaism, Heidegger’s notions of metaphysics, and anti-Semitism’s entanglement with Heidegger’s views on modernity and technology, grappling with material as provocative as it is deplorable. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, and rather than an all-or-nothing view of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself. These measured and thoughtful responses to one of the major scandals in the history of philosophy unflinchingly take up the tangled and contested legacy of Heideggerian thought.

America's Philosopher

America's Philosopher PDF Author: Claire Rydell Arcenas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663860X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
America’s Philosopher examines how John Locke has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted over three centuries of American history. The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of fields, as his writings touch on issues of identity, republicanism, and the nature of knowledge itself. Claire Rydell Arcenas’s new book tells the story of Americans’ longstanding yet ever-mutable obsession with this English thinker’s ideas, a saga whose most recent manifestations have found the so-called Father of Liberalism held up as a right-wing icon. The first book to detail Locke’s trans-Atlantic influence from the eighteenth century until today, America’s Philosopher shows how and why interpretations of his ideas have captivated Americans in ways few other philosophers—from any nation—ever have. As Arcenas makes clear, each generation has essentially remade Locke in its own image, taking inspiration and transmuting his ideas to suit the needs of the particular historical moment. Drawing from a host of vernacular sources to illuminate Locke’s often contradictory impact on American daily and intellectual life from before the Revolutionary War to the present, Arcenas delivers a pathbreaking work in the history of ideas.

Philosophy After Hiroshima

Philosophy After Hiroshima PDF Author: Fred Dallmayr
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527551601
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
Philosophy after Hiroshima offers a philosophical analysis of the issues surrounding war and peace, and their challenges to ethics. It reminds us that the threat posed to civilization by nuclear weapons persists, as does the need for continuing philosophical reflection on the nature of war, the problem of violence, and the need for a workable ethics in the nuclear age. The book recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the beginning of the nuclear age, the Cold War, and subsequently of the hegemonic unilateralism of the sole superpower. Reviewing early critical responses to the first atomic bombings by such figures as Camus, Sartre, Russell, Heidegger, Jaspers and others, the authors themselves respond to contemporary threats to peace, including the US “global war on terrorism,” the recrudescence of militarism, and the continuation of imperial power politics by other means. In the nuclear age, the use of military force as a political instrument threatens the future of humanity. This poses formidable challenges to philosophy and calls for its transformation. In using memories of the atomic bombings to help us to grasp the moral implications of the current escalation of global violence, the authors hope to show the urgent relevance of nonviolence in the contemporary context. Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions—Taoist and Western—the contributors take up a welter of philosophical and political concerns of topical interest, including human rights, toleration, the politics of memory, intercultural dialogue, the ethics of co-responsibility, and the possibility of a cosmopolitan order of law and peace. Going beyond postmodernism and deconstruction, several of the authors develop a post-critical, constructive paradigm of thinking—a philosophy of the possible and a new methodology for the realization of the creative potential of the humanities. Philosophy is viewed as a peace-promoting global dialogue.