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Author: Gabriel Marcel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Philosophy The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcelÿs discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary, e.g.: Our crisis is a metaphysical, not merely social, one. What a man is depends partly on what he thinks he is, and a materialistic philosophy turns men into things. Can a man be free except in a free country? Stoicism is no longer a workable philosophy because today pressure can be put on the mind s well as on the body. Technical progress is not evil in itself, but a technique is a means that, regarded as en end, can become either an idol or an excuse for self-idolatry. State control of scientific research, leading to a concentration on new means of destruction, is a calamity. Fanaticism is an opinion that refuses to argue; the fanatic is an enemy of truth. We must beware of thinking in terms of great numbers and so blinding ourselves to the reality of individual suffering. Our philosophical approach to being is made possible only by our practical approach to our neighbor. We must encourage the spirit of fraternity and distrust the kind of egalitarianism that is bases on envy and resentment. No man however humble should feel that he cannot spread the light among this friends. No easy solution is offered, but Marcel conveys his own faith that ultimately love and intelligence will triumph. Book jacket.
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Get Book Here
Book Description
Philosophy The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcelÿs discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary, e.g.: Our crisis is a metaphysical, not merely social, one. What a man is depends partly on what he thinks he is, and a materialistic philosophy turns men into things. Can a man be free except in a free country? Stoicism is no longer a workable philosophy because today pressure can be put on the mind s well as on the body. Technical progress is not evil in itself, but a technique is a means that, regarded as en end, can become either an idol or an excuse for self-idolatry. State control of scientific research, leading to a concentration on new means of destruction, is a calamity. Fanaticism is an opinion that refuses to argue; the fanatic is an enemy of truth. We must beware of thinking in terms of great numbers and so blinding ourselves to the reality of individual suffering. Our philosophical approach to being is made possible only by our practical approach to our neighbor. We must encourage the spirit of fraternity and distrust the kind of egalitarianism that is bases on envy and resentment. No man however humble should feel that he cannot spread the light among this friends. No easy solution is offered, but Marcel conveys his own faith that ultimately love and intelligence will triumph. Book jacket.
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1446547523
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
I hope that this book will be widely read, and I especially commend it to four classes of persons: I. For myself I have come across nothing more important than M. Marcel’s writings here and elsewhere on the problem of metaphysics. I say problem advisedly: for we are all of us these days in the end puzzled as to what exactly metaphysics is. The strict Thomist has his answer: so has the positivist: so too the Biblical theologian who is much too ready to find in the decay of ontology an argument for the authenticity of ‘Biblical perspectives’. M. Marcel was trained in the tradition of idealism: and he knew the influence both of Bergsen and of W. E. Hocking. His conversation with himself certainly betrays their influences: but it is of far wider significance. Professor Ayer and Dr. E. L. Mascall have their answer to the question what ontology is: they have their formulae. Marcel probes beneath these answers; for him ontology is much more than a body of doctrine. It is the intellectual expression of the human situation; what is expressed in the syllogisms of, for instance, Père Garrigou-Lagrange, is valid only in so far as it catches and summarises the very being of man and the universe, as that being is lived through and met with by man in his pilgrimage through life. I find as I read M. Marcel that the frontiers are blurred reflection, metaphysics, spirituality. And that is the strength of his seemingly inconsequent method. In a way he is too wise to suppose that the arguments of the philosophia perennis are enough in their abstract form to convince a man; they only carry conviction in relation to a whole experience of life of which they are the expression. The issues between the Thomist, the positivist, the idealist are not issues simply of doctrine but of life; and to see what they are, one must probe, stretching language beyond the frontiers of poetry, somehow to convey the issues as things through which men live. 2. The book should be studied closely by the moralist whether he be philosopher or moral theologian. Where some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their ‘inside’ when we so often in our discussion think simply of their ‘outside’. What is a promise? We have our answer pat, our formula which permits us to go on with the discussion of our obligations to keep the promises we have made and so on. We don’t wait to probe. I find myself inevitably using that word ‘probe’ again and again in connection with M. Marcel: for what he does is to probe the unsuspected profundities of the familiar. Most professional students of ethics are morally philistine, men who give little time to penetrating the ‘inside’ of the ideas they are handling. And there Marcel pulls them up short. 3. The book should be widely read by the many Christian ‘fellow-travellers’ of today, those who follow, as it were, afar off the Christian way without themselves coming yet to the point of an act of faith in the Crucified. Its very incompleteness will respond to their groping anxiety, and it will enrich their vision of life. And this it can do because it eschews dogmatic exposition seeking rather to shew the inside of the truly Christian way of life. Fidelity, hope, charity, mystery—these are fundamental categories of the Christian way: and of all these Marcel has much to say, which is in every way fresh and yet at the same time rooted in the tradition of Catholic Christianity. The reader of such a work as Albert Camus’ La Peste, with its preoccupation with the problem of an atheistic sanctity, will understand M. Marcel. In a way he challenges the possibility of Camus’ vision; and he does so not on dogmatic grounds but by an analysis of holiness and goodness which shews indirectly their inseparability from acknowledgment of the all-embracing mystery of God. An age which has known evil as ours has and does still know it, is inevitably interested in goodness; and it is with goodness, as something inevitably issuing out of God because a gift from him, that Marcel’s studies deal. 4. And lastly I commend this book because at a time when minuteness and subtlety of mind are too often the prerogatives of the light-heartedly destructive, he reminds us that a true minuteness and a true intellectual subtlety are rooted in humility and purity of heart, and manifest the soil in which they are nourished by graciousness whose charm none can escape and a strength of argument which none can break.
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Publisher: New York : Herder and Herder
ISBN:
Category : Anxiety
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
"'I think we should have done with the idea of God as Cause...It could be that the God whose death Nietzsche truthfully announced was the God of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, god the prime mover,' affirms Gabriel Marcel in Problematic Man, and so illustrates that the 'Death of God' theology is neither a novel nor an exclusively Protestant phenomenon. Rather it is a human phenomenon stemming from modern man's new understanding of himself and conquest of the universe. Problematic Man antedates the American 'God is dead' fad by many years and is therefore all the more valuable in putting the latter into its larger historical and cultural context. Similarly, whereas most recent writings on this theme have been of a purely negative character, devoted more to discussing God's absense than to searching out new modes of his presence, this book seeks to define precisely the mode of experience modern man has of God. In attempting to make God once more relevant to man, Marcel first analyzes the nature of the new man who has been born of the past hundred years of conscious evolution and technological progress, and, second, sketches some of the thinkers--from every era--who have best understood or exemplified 'problematic man.' As Leslie Dewart notes in his illuminating introduction: 'Marcel's findings are expressed in passages which may be counted among the most lucid and eloquent of his distinguished philosophical career...His conclusions are highly Teilhardian. They are unquestionably relevant to the post-conciliar situation of the Church."--front and back flaps.
Author: William Mazzarella
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643639X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 9780823221844
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
These lectures and essays were regarded by Marcel as the best introduction to his thought. Creative Fidelity not only deals with perennial themes of faith, fidelity, belief, incarnate being, and participation, but also includes chapters on religious tolerance and orthodoxy and an important critical essay on Karl Jaspers.
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was a French existentialist and playwright who authored some 30 plays and an equal number of philosophical writings. This volume presents a translation of his four act play, The Broken World, with illustrations, commentary, a companion essay by Marcel titled Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery, and a number of relevant appendices. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Author: William H. Whyte
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812209265
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
Regarded as one of the most important sociological and business commentaries of modern times, The Organization Man developed the first thorough description of the impact of mass organization on American society. During the height of the Eisenhower administration, corporations appeared to provide a blissful answer to postwar life with the marketing of new technologies—television, affordable cars, space travel, fast food—and lifestyles, such as carefully planned suburban communities centered around the nuclear family. William H. Whyte found this phenomenon alarming. As an editor for Fortune magazine, Whyte was well placed to observe corporate America; it became clear to him that the American belief in the perfectibility of society was shifting from one of individual initiative to one that could be achieved at the expense of the individual. With its clear analysis of contemporary working and living arrangements, The Organization Man rapidly achieved bestseller status. Since the time of the book's original publication, the American workplace has undergone massive changes. In the 1990s, the rule of large corporations seemed less relevant as small entrepreneurs made fortunes from new technologies, in the process bucking old corporate trends. In fact this "new economy" appeared to have doomed Whyte's original analysis as an artifact from a bygone day. But the recent collapse of so many startup businesses, gigantic mergers of international conglomerates, and the reality of economic globalization make The Organization Man all the more essential as background for understanding today's global market. This edition contains a new foreword by noted journalist and author Joseph Nocera. In an afterword Jenny Bell Whyte describes how The Organization Man was written.
Author: James B. Jacobs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022621883X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Stateville penitentiary in Illinois has housed some of Chicago's most infamous criminals and was proclaimed to be "the world's toughest prison" by Joseph Ragen, Stateville's powerful warden from 1936 to 1961. It shares with Attica, San Quentin, and Jackson the notoriety of being one of the maximum security prisons that has shaped the public's conception of imprisonment. In Stateville James B. Jacobs, a sociologist and legal scholar, presents the first historical examination of a total prison organization—administrators, guards, prisoners, and special interest groups. Jacobs applies Edward Shils's interpretation of the dynamics of mass society in order to explain the dramatic events of the past quarter century that have permanently altered Stateville's structure. With the extension of civil rights to previously marginal groups such as racial minorities, the poor, and, ultimately, the incarcerated, prisons have moved from society's periphery toward its center. Accordingly Stateville's control mechanisms became less authoritarian and more legalistic and bureaucratic. As prisoners' rights increased, the preogatives of the staff were sharply curtailed. By the early 1970s the administration proved incapable of dealing with politicized gangs, proliferating interest groups, unionized guards, and interventionist courts. In addition to extensive archival research, Jacobs spent many months freely interacting with the prisoners, guards, and administrators at Stateville. His lucid presentation of Stateville's troubled history will provide fascinating reading for a wide audience of concerned readers. ". . . [an] impressive study of a complex social system."—Isidore Silver, Library Journal
Author: Guy Debord
Publisher: Bread and Circuses Publishing
ISBN: 1617508306
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.
