A Soul for Europe

A Soul for Europe PDF Author: Furio Cerutti
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description

A Soul for Europe

A Soul for Europe PDF Author: Furio Cerutti
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Soul for Europe: A reader

A Soul for Europe: A reader PDF Author: Furio Cerutti
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042909953
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
After moving for ten plus years towards an ever closer union, the European Union and its citizens now face the choice whether to establish a full-fledged common polity. This decision requires a Europe-wide debate that includes the candidate states. European citizens must discuss what (if any) common values, principles and basic policies they share. A European identity involves the Union's institutions becoming rooted in the "soul" of the citizens, whatever its relationship might be to the existing national and local identities. Only then will the EU possess democratic legitimacy and support. These two volumes are written by authors with a political and intellectual interest in the European process. They discuss the EU's unprecedented character as a peacefull and voluntary union of peoples, its understandable obstacles encountered along the way to further integration, and the Union's less acceptable shortcomings. The first volume is written for the general reader. It examines the essential components of a European political identity in relation to democracy, citizenship, social justice, war and peace, freedom and borders. It also explores the history of this identity. The second volume is a collection of scientific essays. These provide in-depth analysis of fundamental aspects of European cultural identity such as religion, art and economic culture, myth and civil society. The two volumes can be read independently. However, we hope readers of either one will feel stimulated to reach for the other.

The Soul of the First Amendment

The Soul of the First Amendment PDF Author: Floyd Abrams
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300190883
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
A lively and controversial overview by the nation's most celebrated First Amendment lawyer of the unique protections for freedom of speech in America The right of Americans to voice their beliefs without government approval or oversight is protected under what may well be the most honored and least understood addendum to the US Constitution--the First Amendment. Floyd Abrams, a noted lawyer and award-winning legal scholar specializing in First Amendment issues, examines the degree to which American law protects free speech more often, more intensely, and more controversially than is the case anywhere else in the world, including democratic nations such as Canada and England. In this lively, powerful, and provocative work, the author addresses legal issues from the adoption of the Bill of Rights through recent cases such as Citizens United. He also examines the repeated conflicts between claims of free speech and those of national security occasioned by the publication of classified material such as was contained in the Pentagon Papers and was made public by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.

Precision and Soul

Precision and Soul PDF Author: Robert Musil
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226554090
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
"We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little precision in matters of the soul."—Robert Musil Best known as author of the novel The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote these essays in Vienna and Berlin between 1911 and 1937. Offering a perspective on modern society and intellectual life, they are concerned with the crisis of modern culture as it manifests itself in science and mathematics, capitalism and nationalism, the changing roles of women and writers, and more. Writing to find his way in a world where moral systems everywhere were seemingly in decay, Musil strives to reconcile the ongoing conflict between functional relativism and the passionate search for ethical values. Robert Musil was born in 1880 and died in 1942. His first novel, Young Törless, is available in English. A new two-volume translation by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins of The Man without Qualities is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. "Now we have these thirty-one invaluable and entertaining pieces, from an article on 'The Obscene and Pathological in Art' to the equally provocative talk 'On Stupidity,' which, with a new translation of The Man without Qualities forthcoming . . . amount to a literary event for the reader of English comparable to Constance Garnett's massive translation of Chekhov's stories."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune "Musil is one of the few great moderns, one of the handful who ventured to confront the issues that shape and define our time. . . . He has a range and a striking capacity every bit as great as that of Mann, Joyce, or Beckett."—Boston Review "These essays are crucial in understanding a writer and critic whose lifelong task was an attempt to resolve the dichotomy between the precision of scientific form and the soul—the matter of life and art."—Choice

Europe

Europe PDF Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694675
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
The future of Europe and the role it will play in the 21st century are among the most important political questions of our time. The optimism of a decade ago has now faded but the stakes are higher than ever. The way these questions are answered will have enormous implications not only for all Europeans but also for the citizens of Europe’s closest and oldest ally – the USA. In this new book, one of Europe's leading intellectuals examines the political alternatives facing Europe today and outlines a course of action for the future. Habermas advocates a policy of gradual integration of Europe in which key decisions about Europe's future are put in the hands of its peoples, and a 'bipolar commonality' of the West in which a more unified Europe is able to work closely with the United States to build a more stable and equitable international order. This book includes Habermas's portraits of three long-time philosophical companions, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Ronald Dworkin. It also includes several important new texts by Habermas on the impact of the media on the public sphere, on the enduring importance religion in "post-secular" societies, and on the design of a democratic constitutional order for the emergent world society.

The Idea of Europe

The Idea of Europe PDF Author: George Steiner
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468311808
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
The Idea of Europe finds George Steiner reckoning with Europe from a number of different angles. “Europe,†? he writes, “is the place where Goethe’s garden almost borders on Buchenwald, where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death.†? It is, in other words, a continent rich with contradiction, whose many tensions—cultural, social, political, economic, and religious—have for centuries conspired to pull it apart, even as it has become more and more unified. But what lies ahead for a continent whose borders are growing and economic might is strengthening, even as its cultural identity recedes? A continent where, in Steiner’s words, “young Englishmen choose to rank David Beckham high above Shakespeare and Darwin in their list of national treasures†?? This is the trajectory that Steiner explores so brilliantly in The Idea of Europe.

Perfection's Therapy

Perfection's Therapy PDF Author: Mitchell B. Merback
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1935408771
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

Transatlantic Divide

Transatlantic Divide PDF Author: Alberto Martinelli
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019152543X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The book describes, interprets, and analyzes the key features of European society and American society and major social trends in the United States and in the European Union in the last 50 years. The United States of America and the European Union are the two strongest economic powers in the contemporary world, roughly equivalent in terms of GNP, market size and scientific potential, but asymmetrical in terms of political influence and military might. The US and the EU can be both seen as successful examples of economic development and of political and cultural modernization. But they have followed different paths to reach such a position. They can be considered as two variants of Western modernity. The systematic description of trends for the US and the EU taken as whole societies, and the interpretation of similarities and differences and of major changes over time would be already a significant scientific work since they would fill a void in today's social science literature. In fact, there are several studies comparing the US with one or more European countries, but there is no comparative study of the United States with the European Union taken as a single society. The importance of the comparison is self-evident, for discussing such questions as: what kind of society the US and the EU constitute? how similar and how different are they? are they two variants of Western modernity or two wholly distinct models of society (American exceptionalism and European uniqueness)? are the two societal models converging or diverging? which are the distinctive features the American model of society? is it departing from its core culture and institutions? is there a European society in the making? how diverse are the member countries of the EU? which are the distinctive features of the European project? which model of society seems more reactive to the challenges of globalization? The approach is new insofar as it assumes the countries of the European Union as increasingly forming a single society with gradually converging trends and common features, and considers the differences among member countries as regional differences within the European society. The conclusion is that in spite of different foreign policy perspectives and different 'national' priorities however, the US and the EU are bound not only to compete, but also to work together. Although the relationship will be more or less turbulent, more or less friendly, according to the events of global politics and to the characters of governments and leaders of the two unions, it will remain a close relationship for long time. As any sea, the Atlantic ocean not only divides, but also unites, the peoples on its shores.

The Hall of Uselessness

The Hall of Uselessness PDF Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176383
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.

The Scramble for Europe

The Scramble for Europe PDF Author: Stephen Smith
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150953458X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
From the harrowing situation of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean in rubber dinghies to the crisis on the US-Mexico border, mass migration is one of the most urgent issues facing our societies today. At the same time, viable solutions seem ever more remote, with the increasing polarization of public attitudes and political positions. In this book, Stephen Smith focuses on ‘young Africa’ – 40 per cent of its population are under fifteen – anda dramatic demographic shift. Today, 510 million people live inside EU borders, and 1.25 billion people in Africa. In 2050, 450 million Europeans will face 2.5 billion Africans – five times their number. The demographics are implacable. The scramble for Europe will become as inexorable as the ‘scramble for Africa’ was at the end of the nineteenth century, when 275 million people lived north and only 100 million lived south of the Mediterranean. Then it was all about raw materials and national pride, now it is about young Africans seeking a better life on the Old Continent, the island of prosperity within their reach. If Africa’s migratory patterns follow the historic precedents set by other less developed parts of the world, in thirty years a quarter of Europe’s population will beAfro-Europeans. Addressingthe question of how Europe cancope with an influx of this magnitude, Smith argues for a path between the two extremes of today’s debate. He advocatesmigratory policies of ‘good neighbourhood’ equidistant from guilt-ridden self-denial and nativist egoism. This sobering analysis of the migration challenges we now face will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the great social and political questions of our time.