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Death and bereavement, Philosophy, Self help
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Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing…
tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize-finalist Michael Ignatieff.When someone we love dies, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes--war, famine, pandemic--we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists, musicians, and their works--from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Primo Levi--esteemed writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our precarious twenty-first century.
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History, Politics and government, Philosophy
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“This global affairs veteran has carved out a solid, mature path, including for ‘flawed democracies’ like the U.S. We’d all…
be wise to follow.” — Vancouver SunFrom the author of the Globe and Mail bestseller, Claws of the Panda, comes a book quite literally for our times. Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence is a thoughtful account of how we can save democracies from the despots and populists who provide easy answers to complicated situations, dumbing political discourse down to sandbox antics. Manthorpe argues that democracy is more resilient than it appears, and is capable of overcoming the attacks from within and without that have sapped its vigour since the end of the Cold War. He begins with a description of the events of 1989, one of the seminal years in modern history. This saw the end of the Cold War, and the apparent conclusive victory of democracy and its civic values. But the view of these changes as a triumph of democracy — as summed up in Francis Fukuyama’s essay "The End of History" — was short-lived. Russia, shorn of its Soviet empire, and the Chinese Communist Party, re-examining its survival after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, began devising ways to counter-attack the West’s triumphalism and these met with considerable success. Internal pressures and contradictions — wealth disparity being chief among them — threaten the survival of many democratic systems. Abandoned industrial workers turn to the repeated platitudes designed to appeal to those left behind without actually offering them the ways and means to catch up. Immigrants, refugees, and the reformist fixations of isolated liberal elites have provided ammunition for would-be despots. Adding to the pressures building on the political norms of our democracies, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought economic and social stand-still for which no country is prepared.
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Criticism, Arts and entertainment, Philosophy, Politics and government, General non-fiction
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Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s…
remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.
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Philosophy
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In Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical…
extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, Life-Destroying Diagrams is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory.
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Philosophy
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German:Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Phänomenologie der Sinnbildung bei Marc Richir. Sie ist die erste in deutscher Sprache vorgelegte Untersuchung…
zu Richirs Versuch einer Neugründung der Phänomenologie. Dieser Versuch besteht zum einen in der Thematisierung der Phänomenalität der Phänomene als solcher und der Ausarbeitung eines Schematismus der Phänomenalisierung; zum anderen aus der Erweiterung der phänomenologisch-eidetischen Sphäre um die Dimension des Symbolischen. Diese Umgestaltung der phänomenologischen Architektonik führt zu einer umfangreichen Neubewertung phänomenologischer Grundbegriffe: transzendentales Bewusstsein, Zeitkonstitution, phänomenologisches Wesen, phänomenologische Reduktion und Epoché u. v. a. Besonders in der mittleren Schaffensperiode entsteht daraus eine Phänomenologie der Sinnbildung, deren Ziel es ist, das genetische „Abenteuer“ des Sinns zu ergründen. Der Sinn ist gleichsam einer doppelten Gefahr ausgesetzt: einerseits sich in der Proteusartigkeit und Flüchtigkeit der aufkommenden Sinnregungen zu verlieren; andererseits sich im symbolischen Gestell der Stiftungen zu entfremden. Die These der vorliegenden Studie lautet, dass dieses doppelte Schweben der Sinnbildung in der Verschränkung verschiedener Zeitschematismen gründet. Das klassische immanente und prä-immanente Zeitbewusstsein verschränkt sich mit der Proto-Zeitigung und Proto-Räumlichung des Schematismus der Phänomenalisierung und den Zeitkategorien des Symbolischen. Die Integration dieser symbolischen Zeitkategorien – Überstürzung, Wiederholung und Nachträglichkeit als Zeitigungsweisen des Nicht-Erscheinens – in die Phänomenologie führt zu einer enormen Erweiterung der Dialog- und Anschlussfähigkeit derselben. Die vorliegende Untersuchung versucht zudem die theoretischen Kontexte, die diese Umgestaltung der phänomenologischen Architektonik motivieren, zu versammeln. Neben klassischen phänomenologischen Autoren wie Husserl, Heidegger und Merleau-Ponty spielen Denker wie Kant, Freud, Lacan und Derrida eine zentrale Rolle.English:This book examines the phenomenology of sense formation in Marc Richir. It is the first study presented in German on Richir's attempt to refound phenomenology. The thesis of the present study is that in Richir, the double suspension of sense formation is grounded in the entanglement of different temporal schemata. Classical immanent and pre-immanent time consciousness intertwine with the proto-temporalization and proto-spatialization of the schematism of phenomenalization and the time categories of the symbolic. The integration of these symbolic time categories - precipitation, repetition, and retroactivity as modes of temporalization of non-appearance - into phenomenology leads to an enormous expansion of the latter's capability for dialogue and connection. This volume also assembles the theoretical contexts that motivate this transformation. In addition to classical phenomenological authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, thinkers such as Kant, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida play an equally central role. This text appeals to students and researchers in the field.
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Philosophy, Psychology, General non-fiction
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Ben Lazare Mijuskovic has spent 40 years researching theories of consciousness in relation to human loneliness, using an interdisciplinary and…
"history of ideas" approach. In this book, Mijuskovic combines Kant's theory of reflexive self-consciousness with Husserl's transcendent principle of intentionality to describe the distinctive philosophical, psychological, and sociological roots of loneliness and intimacy. He argues that loneliness is innate, unavoidable, and constituted by the structure of self-consciousness itself.
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Philosophy, Death and bereavement
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A philosopher refutes our culturally embedded acceptance of death, arguing instead for the desirability of anti-aging science and radical life…
extension. Ingemar Patrick Linden&’s central claim is that death is evil. In this first comprehensive refutation of the most common arguments in favor of human mortality, he writes passionately in favor of antiaging science and radical life extension. We may be on the cusp of a new human condition where scientists seek to break through the arbitrarily set age limit of human existence to address aging as an illness that can be cured. The book, however, is not about the science and technology of life extension but whether we should want more life. For Linden, the answer is a loud and clear &“yes.&” The acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our culture. Linden examines the views of major philosophical voices of the past, whom he calls &“death&’s ardent advocates.&” These include the Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, and Montaigne. All have taught what he calls &“the Wise View,&” namely, that we should not fear death. After setting out his case against death, Linden systematically examines each of the accepted arguments for death—that aging and death are natural, that death is harmless, that life is overrated, that living longer would be boring, and that death saves us from overpopulation. He concludes with a &“dialogue concerning the badness of human mortality.&” Though Linden acknowledges that The Case Against Death is a negative polemic, he also defends it as optimistic, in that the badness of death is a function of the goodness of life.
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Philosophy
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Gregory Vlastos (1907-1991) was one of the twentieth century's most influential scholars of ancient philosophy. Over a span of more…
than fifty years, he published essays and book reviews that established his place as a leading authority on early Greek philosophy. The two volumes that comprise Studies in Greek Philosophy include nearly forty contributions by this acknowledged master of the philosophical essay. Many of these pieces are now considered to be classics in the field. Perhaps more than any other modern scholar, Gregory Vlastos was responsible for raising standards of research, analysis, and exposition in classical philosophy to new levels of excellence. His essays have served as paradigms of scholarship for several generations. Available for the first time in a comprehensive collection, these contributions reveal the author's ability to combine the skills of a philosopher, philologist, and historian of ideas in addressing some of the most difficult problems of ancient philosophy. Volume I collects Vlastos's essays on Presocratic philosophy. Wide-ranging concept studies link Greek science, religion, and politics with philosophy. Individual studies illuminate the thought of major philosophers such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. A magisterial series of studies on Zeno of Elea reveals the author's power in source criticism and logical analysis. Volume II contains essays on the thought of Socrates, Plato, and later thinkers and essays dealing with ethical, social, and political issues as well as metaphysics, science, and the foundations of mathematics.
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Philosophy
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Gregory Vlastos (1907-1991) was one of the twentieth century's most influential scholars of ancient philosophy. Over a span of more…
than fifty years, he published essays and book reviews that established his place as a leading authority on early Greek philosophy. The two volumes that comprise Studies in Greek Philosophy include nearly forty contributions by this acknowledged master of the philosophical essay. Many of these pieces are now considered to be classics in the field. Perhaps more than any other modern scholar, Gregory Vlastos was responsible for raising standards of research, analysis, and exposition in classical philosophy to new levels of excellence. His essays have served as paradigms of scholarship for several generations. Available for the first time in a comprehensive collection, these contributions reveal the author's ability to combine the skills of a philosopher, philologist, and historian of ideas in addressing some of the most difficult problems of ancient philosophy. Volume I collects Vlastos's essays on Presocratic philosophy. Wide-ranging concept studies link Greek science, religion, and politics with philosophy. Individual studies illuminate the thought of major philosophers such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. A magisterial series of studies on Zeno of Elea reveals the author's power in source criticism and logical analysis. Volume II contains essays on the thought of Socrates, Plato, and later thinkers and essays dealing with ethical, social, and political issues as well as metaphysics, science, and the foundations of mathematics.
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Philosophy, General non-fiction
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The ethics and experience of &“treacherous play&”: an exploration of three games that allow deception and betrayal—EVE Online, DayZ, and…
Survivor.Deception and betrayal in gameplay are generally considered off-limits, designed out of most multiplayer games. There are a few games, however, in which deception and betrayal are allowed, and even encouraged. In Treacherous Play, Marcus Carter explores the ethics and experience of playing such games, offering detailed explorations of three games in which this kind of &“dark play&” is both lawful and advantageous: EVE Online, DayZ, and the television series Survivor. Examining aspects of games that are often hidden, ignored, or designed away, Carter shows the appeal of playing treacherously. Carter looks at EVE Online&’s notorious scammers and spies, drawing on his own extensive studies of them, and describes how treacherous play makes EVE successful. Making a distinction between treacherous play and griefing or trolling, he examines the experiences of DayZ players to show how negative experiences can be positive in games, and a core part of their appeal. And he explains how in Survivor&’s tribal council votes, a player&’s acts of betrayal can exact a cost. Then, considering these games in terms of their design, he discusses how to design for treacherous play. Carter&’s account challenges the common assumptions that treacherous play is unethical, antisocial, and engaged in by bad people. He doesn&’t claim that more games should feature treachery, but that examining this kind of play sheds new light on what play can be.
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Philosophy, Religion, Science and technology
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An approach to understanding religion that draws on both humanities and natural science but rejects approaches that employ simple monisms…
and radical dualisms. In Beyond Heaven and Earth, Gabriel Levy argues that collective religious narratives and beliefs are part of nature; they are the basis for the formation of the narratives and beliefs of individuals. Religion grows out of the universe, but to make sense of it we have to recognize the paradox that the universe is both mental and material (or neither). We need both humanities and natural science approaches to study religion and religious meaning, Levy contends, but we must also recognize the limits of these approaches. First, we must make the dominant metaphysics that undergird the various disciplines of science and humanities more explicit, and second, we must reject those versions of metaphysics that maintain simple monisms and radical dualisms. Bringing Donald Davidson&’s philosophy—a form of pragmatism known as anomalous monism—to bear on religion, Levy offers a blueprint for one way that the humanities and natural sciences can have a mutually respectful dialogue. Levy argues that in order to understand religions we have to take their semantic content seriously. We need to rethink such basic concepts as narrative fiction, information, agency, creativity, technology, and intimacy. In the course of his argument, Levy considers the relation between two closely related semantics, fiction and religion, and outlines a new approach to information. He then applies his theory to discrete cases: ancient texts, modern media, and intimacy.
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Philosophy, Politics and government
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For readers of Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Odell, this poetic and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essay reflects on…
how we can resist the erasure of our collective memory in this American century.Our sense of our history requires us to recall the details of time, of experiences that help us find our place in the world together and encourage us in the search for our individual identities. When we lose sight of the past, our ability to see ourselves and to understand one another is diminished. In this book, Colette Brooks explores how some of the more forgotten aspects of recent American experiences explain our challenging and often puzzling present. Through intimate and meticulously researched retellings of individual stories of violence, misfortune, chaos, and persistence—from the first mass shooting in America from the tower at the University of Texas, the televised assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, life with nuclear bombs and the Doomsday Clock, obsessive diarists and round-the-clock surveillance, to pandemics and COVID-19—Brooks is able to reframe our country&’s narratives with new insight to create a prismatic account of how efforts to reclaim the past can be redemptive, freeing us from the tyranny of the present moment.
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Philosophy
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This anthology covers the whole of Kierkegaard's literary career. The selections range from the terse epigrams of the Journal through…
the famous "Diary of the Seducer" and the "Banquet" scene, in which Søren Kierkegaard reveals his great lyric and dramatic gifts, on to the philosophical and psychological works of his maturity. These are climaxed by the beautiful and moving religious discourses which accompany them; finally, there is the biting satire of his Attack upon "Christendom."This is emphatically not a collection of "snippets," but the cream of Kierkegaard, each selection interesting and intelligible in itself, and all ranking among his most important work. They are so arranged as to convey an idea of his remarkable intellectual development.Contents: A comprehensive anthology from the following works: Either/Or Fear and Trembling Stages on Life's Way Works of Love Concluding Unscientific Postscript Attack upon "Christendom" The Sickness Unto Death Philosophical Fragments and other?
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Philosophy
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The problem of justifying legal punishment has been at the heart of legal and social philosophy from the very earliest…
recorded philosophical texts. However, despite several hundred years of debate, philosophers have not reached agreement about how legal punishment can be morally justified. That is the central issue addressed by the contributors to this volume. All of the essays collected here have been published in the highly respected journal Philosophy & Public Affairs. Taken together, they offer not only significant proposals for improving established theories of punishment and compelling arguments against long-held positions, but also ori-ginal and important answers to the question, "How is punishment to be justified?" Part I of this collection, "Justifications of Punishment," examines how any practice of punishment can be morally justified. Contributors include Jeffrie G. Murphy, Alan H. Goldman, Warren Quinn, C. S. Nino, and Jean Hampton. The papers in Part II, "Problems of Punishment," address more specific issues arising in established theories. The authors are Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael Davis, and A. John Simmons. In the final section, "Capital Punishment," contributors discuss the justifiability of capital punishment, one of the most debated philosophical topics of this century. Essayists include David A. Conway, Jeffrey H. Reiman, Stephen Nathanson, and Ernest van den Haag.
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Philosophy
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This book is comprised of essays previously published in Philosophy & Public Affairs and also an extended excerpt from Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars.
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Philosophy
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Most of the core concepts of the Western philosophical tradition originate in antiquity. Yet boredom is strikingly absent from classical…
thought. In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity.Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in this way, this subject is at once the protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the staged drama of human existence. It is therefore inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and can neither escape its own presence nor get rid of it. In other words, it is bored—and this boredom is the fundamental expression and symptom of the modern condition.Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity. Nikulin also considers the alternative to the notion of the autonomous subject in the—nonbored and nonboring—dialogic and comic subject capable of shared existence with others.
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Animals and wildlife, Philosophy, Politics and government
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In the Anthropocene, the fact that human activity is enmeshed with the existence and actions of every kind of other…
being is inescapable. As a result, the planetary ecological crisis has brought forth an urgent need to rethink understandings of human action. One response holds that the transformations necessary to tackle today’s crises will emerge from the distinctive capacity of human beings to transcend their environment. Another school of thought calls for seeing action as composite, produced by distributed networks of human and nonhuman agents. Yet the first of these is open to charges of human exceptionalism, while the second, according to its critics, lacks effective political traction.Martin Crowley argues that a new conception of political agency is necessary to break this impasse. Engaging with thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and Catherine Malabou, Crowley proposes an original account of agency as both distributed and decisive. Challenging the prevailing view of agency as exclusively human, he explores how a politics that incorporates nonhuman agency can intervene in the real world, examining timely issues such as climate-related migration and digital-algorithmic politics. A major intervention into ongoing debates in posthumanism, political ecology, and political theory, Accidental Agents reshapes our understanding of political agency in and for a more-than-human world.
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Philosophy, Religion, Science and technology, Physics
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Does technology change who we are, and if so, in what ways? Can humanity transcend physical bodies and spaces? Will…
AI and genetic engineering help us reach new heights or will they unleash dystopias? How do we face mortality, our own and that of our warming planet? Questions like these—which are only growing more urgent—can be answered only by drawing on different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. They challenge us to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities and bring together perspectives that are too often kept apart.Great Minds Don’t Think Alike presents conversations among leading scientists, philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals that exemplify openness to diverse viewpoints and the productive exchange of ideas. Pulitzer and Templeton Prize winners, MacArthur “genius” grant awardees, and other acclaimed writers and thinkers debate the big questions: who we are, the nature of reality, science and religion, consciousness and materialism, and the mysteries of time. In so doing, they also inquire into how uniting experts from different areas of study to consider these topics might help us address the existential risks we face today. Convened and moderated by the physicist and author Marcelo Gleiser, these public dialogues model constructive engagement between the sciences and the humanities—and show why intellectual cooperation is necessary to shape our collective future.Contributors include David Chalmers and Antonio Damasio; Sean Carroll and B. Alan Wallace; Patricia Churchland and Jill Tarter; Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Lightman; Jimena Canales and Paul Davies; Ed Boyden and Mark O’Connell; Elizabeth Kolbert and Siddhartha Mukherjee; Jeremy DeSilva, David Grinspoon, and Tasneem Zehra Husain.
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Philosophy, Psychology, Science and technology
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Philosophers and neuroscientists address central issues in both fields, including morality, action, mental illness, consciousness, perception, and memory. Philosophers and neuroscientists…
grapple with the same profound questions involving consciousness, perception, behavior, and moral judgment, but only recently have the two disciplines begun to work together. This volume offers fourteen original chapters that address these issues, each written by a team that includes at least one philosopher and one neuroscientist who integrate disciplinary perspectives and reflect the latest research in both fields. Topics include morality, empathy, agency, the self, mental illness, neuroprediction, optogenetics, pain, vision, consciousness, memory, concepts, mind wandering, and the neural basis of psychological categories. The chapters first address basic issues about our social and moral lives: how we decide to act and ought to act toward each other, how we understand each other&’s mental states and selves, and how we deal with pressing social problems regarding crime and mental or brain health. The following chapters consider basic issues about our mental lives: how we classify and recall what we experience, how we see and feel objects in the world, how we ponder plans and alternatives, and how our brains make us conscious and create specific mental states.
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Philosophy, Politics and government, General non-fiction
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An influential sociologist revives materialist explanations of class, while accommodating the best of rival cultural theory. Following the collapse of…
the Soviet Union, analysis of class and other basic structures of capitalism was sidelined by theorists who argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture—that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, capitalism is back on the agenda, as gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival. Chibber shows that it is possible to accommodate the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework: one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency, while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. Chibber vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it in fact accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain. But he also shows that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors. The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations.”