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Author: Paul Rabinow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400851793
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power. The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences.
Author: Paul Rabinow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400851793
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power. The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences.
Author: Robert Spaemann
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1621891119
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 68
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Book Description
The question of the nature of humanity is one of the most complex of all philosophical and theological inquiries. Where might one look to find a decent answer to this question? Should we turn to an investigation of genetics and DNA for such answers? Should we look to the history of humanity's adaption and evolution? Should we look to humanity's cultural achievements and the form of its social life? In this intriguing and provocative collection of essays, philosopher Robert Spaemann reacts against what he calls "scientistic" anthropology and ventures to take up afresh the quaestio de homine, "the question of man." Spaemann contends that when it comes to the nagging question of what we truly are as human beings, understanding our chemical make-up or evolutionary past simply cannot give us the full picture. Instead, without doing away with the findings of modern evolutionary science, Spaemann offers successive treatments of human nature, human evolution, and human dignity, which paint a full and compelling picture of the meaning of human life. Crucial to any anthropology, he demonstrates, is our future as well as our past. And our relationship to God as well as to our next-door neighbor. All of these themes coalesce in a vital contribution to the question of what it means to be human.
Author: Brian Jacobs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139441450
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
Kant's lectures on anthropology capture him at the height of his intellectual power. They are immensely important for advancing our understanding of Kant's conception of anthropology, its development, and the notoriously difficult relationship between it and the critical philosophy. This 2003 collection of essays by some of the leading commentators on Kant offers a systematic account of the philosophical importance of this material that should nevertheless prove of interest to historians of ideas and political theorists. There are two broad approaches adopted: a number of the essays consider the systematic relations of the anthropology to critical philosophy, especially speculative knowledge and ethics. Other essays focus on the anthropology as a major source for the clarification of both the content and development of Kant's work. The volume also serves as an interpretative complement to the translation of the lectures in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.
Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of todays most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke "context in our interpretations? How does literacy change the work of the ethnographer, and what are the boundaries between ethnology and history? This part ends with a plea for recuperating negativity in our thinking about culture. The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude, the collecting of ethnographic objects, the presentation of knowledge in narration, and the role of recognition--given or denied--in encounters with Africans. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the "imperial gaze of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium.
Author: Genese Marie Sodikoff
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253223644
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The Anthropology of Extinction offers compelling explorations of issues of widespread concern.
Author: Geoffrey Dierckxsens
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783488220
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Much has been written about animals in applied ethics, environmental ethics, and animal rights. This book takes a new turn, offering an examination of the 'animal question' from a more fundamental, philosophical-anthropological perspective. The contributors in this important volume focus on how the animal has appeared and can be used in philosophical argumentation as a metaphor or reference point that helps us understand what is distinctively human and what is not. A recurring theme in the essays is the existence of a zone of ambiguity between animals and humans, which puts into question comfortable assumptions about the uniqueness and superiority of human nature. While the chapters straddle the boundaries of historical-philosophical and systematic, continental and analytic approaches, their thematic unity knits them together, presenting a rich, broad, and yet cohesive perspective. The first part of the book offers general explorations of the relation between animal and human nature, and of the concomitant existential and ethical dimensions of this relationship. The chapters in the second part address the same theme, but, in so doing, focus on specific aspects of animal and human nature: imagination, politics, history, sense, finitude, and science
Author: Georges Canguilhem
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
Georges Canguilhem is one of France's foremost historians of science. Trained as a medical doctor as well as a philosopher, he combined these practices to demonstrate to philosophers that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and to historians that there could be no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge. A Vital Rationalist brings together for the first time a selection of Canguilhem's most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts and a critical bibliography by Camille Limoges. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, the collection allows readers, whether familiar or unfamiliar with Canguilhem's work, access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Canguilhem is a demanding writer, but Delaporte succeeds in marking out the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity; readers will come away with a heightened understanding of the complex and crucial place he holds in French intellectual history.
Author: Carles Salazar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782384885
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
The relationships between science and religion are about to enter a new phase in our contemporary world, as scientific knowledge has become increasingly relevant in ordinary life, beyond the institutional public spaces where it traditionally developed. The purpose of this volume is to analyze the relationships, possible articulations and contradictions between religion and science as forms of life: ways of engaging human experience that originate in particular social and cultural formations. Contributions expound on this theoretical and ethnographic research into different manifestations of scientific and religious cultures in the contemporary world.
Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537484
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).
Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
"In his critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Michel Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics. Instead, he explores the possibility of studying man empirically as he is affected by time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. If man is both the condition for knowledge and its ultimate object, any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language. Far from being a study of self-consciousness, anthropology is a way of questioning the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence." "Long unknown to Foucault readers, this text offers the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. Standing at a crossroad of his ouevre, it allows us to look back on Madness and Civilization while it sketches out the relationship between discourse and truth developed in The Order of Things. This "introduction" finally announces what will be considered the most scandalous aspect of Foucault's thought: the death of man, but also the joyous advent of the Ubermensch, the philosopher-artist capable of creating vital values."--BOOK JACKET.
