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Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom
By Charles Halpern. 2008
Pascal's Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God
By James A. Connor. 2006
Survival of the Fireflies (Univocal)
By Georges Didi-Huberman, Lia Swope Mitchell. 2018
Seeking out the minor lights of friendship in a time of fascism Dante once spoke, in his Divine Comedy, of…
the miniscule lights, in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, who, contrary to the great lights that shined bright within the sublime circles of Paradise, frailly wandered in the somber pockets of glimmering light within the darkness. Pliny the Elder was once preoccupied by a type of fly named pyrallis or pyrotocon, which was only able to fly within fire: “as long as it remains in the fire, it can fly; when its flight takes it out too far a distance, it dies.” Through his readings of Dante, Pasolini, Walter Benjamin, and others, Georges Didi-Huberman seeks again to understand this strange, minor light, the signals of small beings in search of love and friendship. Their flickering presence serves as a counterforce to the blinding sovereign power that Giorgio Agamben calls The Kingdom and the Glory, that artificial brilliance that once surrounded dictators and today emanates from every screen. In this timely reflection, much needed in our time of excessive light, Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies offers a humble yet powerful image of individual hope and desire: the firefly-image.A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain
By Tamler Sommers. 2016
In the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain – Nine Conversations, philosopher Tamler Sommers talked…
with an interdisciplinary group of the world’s leading researchers—from the fields of social psychology, moral philosophy, cognitive science, and primatology—all working on the same issue: the origins and workings of morality. Together, these nine interviews pulled back some of the curtain, not only on our moral lives but—through Sommers’ probing, entertaining, and well informed questions—on the way morality traditionally has been studied. This Second Edition increases the subject matter, adding eight additional interviews and offering features that will make A Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for some of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview; presenting instructor and student resources online in a companion website. The resulting new publication promises to synthesize and make accessible the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a brand new way to teach philosophical ethics and moral psychology.Beyond Good and Evil
By Don Berry. 2017
No philosopher could be a better example of creative thinking in action than Friedrich Nietzsche: a German iconoclast who systematically…
attacked the traditionally accepted views of academic philosophers, seeking to tear down their rickety platform and replace it with a platform of his own. Creative thinkers are people who redefine issues and topics in novel ways to create novel connections, explanations and hypotheses – people, in short, who can turn a topic on its head and present it in an entirely new light. Nietzsche called them “free spirits” – those unwilling to accept the dogmas of the past, wanting instead to think clearly for themselves. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche focuses his attention on nothing less than the underlying basis of our moral assumptions, unleashing a powerful, polemical critique of the moral dogmas of the past and his own time. His book, which remains one of the most influential works of moral philosophy ever written, is not just an example of creative thinking at work, it is also a passionate argument for its importance. As Nietzsche wrote, “Morality in Europe … is the morality of herd animals.” But if one is ready to think differently and stand out from the herd, “other (and especially higher) moralities are … possible.”Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is To Come
By Whitley Strieber. 2011
The bestselling author probes the ultimate significance behind today's increasing reports of UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles, and other unexplained…
phenomena-and what they mean for humanity's immediate future. In 1987 writer Whitley Strieber exposed the world to the truth about alien abduction in his landmark memoir, Communion. For the first time in years, Strieber revisits his encounter with alien intelligences-but now dramatically widens his search to explore how "the visitors" connect with today's persistent and globe-spanning reports of anomalous phenomena, such as crop circles, cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, alien abductions, near-death experiences, close encounters, and unexplained bodily implants.In his magisterial style, Strieber contextualizes these bizarre and unsettling reports with his own childhood memories of strange schools, sinister experiments, and family secrets. In exploring today's most convincing cases of unexplained phenomena, Strieber reasons that they are not unrelated events. Nor are they the result of mass delusion. In some of his most persuasive writing, Strieber argues that the wave of mysterious episodes marks a transition that humanity is undergoing right now. Against all conscious understanding, we are experiencing a broadened awareness of dimensions of reality that exist beyond our current perceptions.Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction
By John Heil. 2013
When first published, John Heil's introduction quickly became a widely used guide for students with little or no background in…
philosophy to central issues of philosophy of mind.? Heil provided an introduction free of formalisms, technical trappings, and specialized terminology.? He offered clear arguments and explanations, focusing on the ontological basis of mentality and its place in the material world.? The book concluded with a systematic discussion of questions the book raises--and a sketch of a unified metaphysics of mind--thus inviting scholarly attention while providing a book very well suited for an introductory course. This Third Edition builds on these strengths, and incorporates new material on theories of consciousness, computationalism, the language of thought, and animal minds as well as other emerging areas of research.? With an updated reading list at the end of each chapter and a revised bibliography, this new edition will again make it the indispensable primer for anyone seeking better understanding of the central metaphysical issues in philosophy of mind.?The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World
By Andreas Malm. 2018
An attack on the idea that nature and society are impossible to distinguish from each otherIn a world careening towards…
climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency to set them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a counterargument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable.Enumerations: Data and Literary Study
By Andrew Piper. 2018
For well over a century, academic disciplines have studied human behavior using quantitative information. Until recently, however, the humanities have…
remained largely immune to the use of data—or vigorously resisted it. Thanks to new developments in computer science and natural language processing, literary scholars have embraced the quantitative study of literary works and have helped make Digital Humanities a rapidly growing field. But these developments raise a fundamental, and as yet unanswered question: what is the meaning of literary quantity? In Enumerations, Andrew Piper answers that question across a variety of domains fundamental to the study of literature. He focuses on the elementary particles of literature, from the role of punctuation in poetry, the matter of plot in novels, the study of topoi, and the behavior of characters, to the nature of fictional language and the shape of a poet’s career. How does quantity affect our understanding of these categories? What happens when we look at 3,388,230 punctuation marks, 1.4 billion words, or 650,000 fictional characters? Does this change how we think about poetry, the novel, fictionality, character, the commonplace, or the writer’s career? In the course of answering such questions, Piper introduces readers to the analytical building blocks of computational text analysis and brings them to bear on fundamental concerns of literary scholarship. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Digital Humanities and the future of literary study.City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right
By Michael Mayerfield Bell. 2018
How we came to seek absolute good in religion and nature—and why that quest often leads us astrayPeople have long…
looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how these two paths came to be seen as separate from human ways, and how many of today’s conflicts can be traced back thousands of years to this ancient divide.Taking readers on a spellbinding journey through history and across the globe, Bell begins with the pagan view, which sees nature and the divine as entangled with the human—and not necessarily good. But the emergence of urban societies gave rise to new moral concerns about the political character of human life. Wealth and inequality grew, and urban people sought to justify their passions. In the face of such concerns, nature and the divine came to be partitioned from the human, and therefore seen to be good—but they also became absolute and divisive.Bell charts the unfolding of this new moral imagination in the rise of Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Jainism, and many other traditions that emerged with bourgeois life. He follows developments in moral thought, from the religions of the ancient Sumerians, Greeks, and Hebrews to the science and environmentalism of today, along the way visiting with contemporary indigenous people in South Africa, Costa Rica, and the United States. City of the Good urges us to embrace the plurality of our traditions—from the pagan to the bourgeois—and to guard against absolutism and remain open to difference and its endless creativity.Functions: selection and mechanisms
By Philippe Huneman. 2013
This volume handles in various perspectives the concept of function and the nature of functional explanations, topics much discussed since…
two major and conflicting accounts have been raised by Larry Wright and Robert Cummins' papers in the 1970s. Here, both Wright's 'etiological theory of functions' and Cummins' 'systemic' conception of functions are refined and elaborated in the light of current scientific practice, with papers showing how the 'etiological' theory faces several objections and may in reply be revisited, while its counterpart became ever more sophisticated, as researchers discovered fresh applications for it. Relying on a firm knowledge of the original positions and debates, this volume presents cutting-edge research evincing the complexities that today pertain in function theory in various sciences. Alongside original papers from authors central to the controversy, work by emerging researchers taking novel perspectives will add to the potential avenues to be followed in the future. Not only does the book adopt no a priori assumptions about the scope of functional explanations, it also incorporates material from several very different scientific domains, e.g. neurosciences, ecology, or technology. In general, functions are implemented in mechanisms; and functional explanations in biology have often an essential relation with natural selection. These two basic claims set the stage for this book's coverage of investigations concerning both 'functional' explanations, and the 'metaphysics' of functions. It casts new light on these claims, by testing them through their confrontation with scientific developments in biology, psychology, and recent developments concerning the metaphysics of realization. Rather than debating a single theory of functions, this book presents the richness of philosophical issues raised by functional discourse throughout the various sciences.Integrating History and Philosophy of Science
By Seymour Mauskopf, Tad Schmaltz. 2011
Though the publication of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the…
history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') intended to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss new integrative approaches. This is therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with studies of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases.The Confluence of Philosophy and Law in Applied Ethics
By Norbert Paulo. 2016
The law serves a function that is not often taken seriously enough by ethicists, namely practicability. A consequence of practicability…
is that law requires elaborated and explicit methodologies that determine how to do things with norms. This consequence forms the core idea behind this book, which employs methods from legal theory to inform and examine debates on methodology in applied ethics, particularly bioethics. It is argued that almost all legal methods have counterparts in applied ethics, which indicates that much can be gained from comparative study of the two. The author first outlines methods as used in legal theory, focusing on deductive reasoning with statutes as well as analogical reasoning with precedent cases. He then examines three representative kinds of contemporary ethical theories, Beauchamp and Childress's principlism, Jonsen and Toulmin's casuistry, and two versions of consequentialism--Singer's preference utilitarianism and Hooker's rule-consequentialism--with regards to their methods. These examinations lead to the Morisprudence Model for methods in applied ethics.Big ideas sometimes come from the strangest places. In this wide ranging introduction, James M Russell takes the fear out…
of philosophy and selects seventy-six works - from Plato, Descartes and Wittgenstein to Philip K Dick and the Moomins as well as contemporary thinkers such as Peter Singer and John Rawls. Dividing into accessible sections - history, contemplation, happiness, and -isms, Russell gives us the lives as well as the lessons of the great thinkers, including a digest of their key ideas. A perfect antidote to the complex life.The topics and books covered include:Traditional Philosophy:The Republic, Plato; The Confessions, St Augustine; The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes; On Liberty, John Stuart Mill; Philisophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein; Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.Outsiders:Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard; Beyond Good and Evil, Frederick Nietzsche; The Outsider, Albert Camus; Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley.Contemplation as Philosophy:The Prophet, Kahil Gibran; Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig; The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff.The Continental Tradition:The Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci; The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault; Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard.How to Live Your Life:The Art of War, Sun Tzu; Maxims, La Rouchefoucauld; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung; On Sexuality, Sigmund Freud; On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers.Political and Personal Issues:Das Kapital, Karl Marx; Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre; Gaia, James Lovelock.Modern Philosophy:A Theory of Justice, John Rawls; Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett; After the Terror, Ted Honderich.Eco-socialism as Politics: Rebuilding the Basis of Our Modern Civilisation
By Qingzhi Huan. 2010
This volume consists of analyses by experts from both the West and the East on the up-to-date development of Eco-socialism…
as a red-green politics within the context of capitalist globalisation. It investigates whether and/or in what sense Eco-socialism can offer a better explanation to the causes of ecological problems than the other Green discourses - such as deep ecology and ecological modernisation theory, and thus has more contributions to make in dealing with the deteriorating ecological crisis throughout the world.Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization
By Hannes Kuch, Paulus Kaufmann, Christian Neuhaeuser. 2010
Degradation, dehumanization, instrumentalization, humiliation, and nonrecognition - these concepts point to ways in which we understand human beings to be…
violated in their dignity. Violations of human dignity are brought about by concrete practices and conditions; some commonly acknowledged, such as torture and rape, and others more contested, such as poverty and exclusion. This volume collates reflections on such concepts and a range of practices, deepening our understanding of human dignity and its violation, bringing to the surface interrelationships and commonalities, and pointing to the values that are thereby shown to be in danger. In presenting a streamlined discussion from a negative perspective, complemented by conclusions for a positive account of human dignity, the book is at once a contribution to the body of literature on what dignity is and how it should be protected as well as constituting an alternative, fresh and focused perspective relevant to this significant recurring debate. As the concept of human dignity itself crosses disciplinary boundaries, this is mirrored in the unique range of perspectives brought by the book's European and American contributors - in philosophy and ethics, law, human rights, literature, cultural studies and interdisciplinary research. This volume will be of interest to social and moral philosophers, legal and human rights theorists, practitioners and students.Authority and the Individual
By Bertrand Russell. 2010
From Ancient Greek philosophy to the French Revolution to the modern welfare state, in Authority and the Individual Bertrand Russell…
tackles the perennial questions about the balance between authority and human freedom. With characteristic clarity and deep understanding, he explores the formation and purpose of society, education, moral evolution and social, economical and intellectual progress. First of the famous BBC Reith lectures, this wonderful collection delivers Russell at his intellectual best.First published in 1985. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.Philosophers Behaving Badly
By Nigel Rodgers. 1880
An engaging and often hilarious survey of the far-from-fusty extra-curricular activities of some of philosophy's finest practitioners Philosophers Behaving Badly…
examines the lives of eight great philosophers--Rousseau, whose views on education and the social order seem curiously at odds with his own outrageous life; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, two giants of the 19th century whose words seem ever more relevant today; and five immensely influential philosophers of the 20th century, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault.The Art of War
By Ramon Pacheco Pardo. 2017
Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a series of lessons in the applied art of problem solving. Sun (544…
BC-496 BC), an experienced general from the Warring States period of Chinese history, saw war as an inevitable problem – indeed, the ultimate problem confronting the state. The Art of War summarises his lessons on how to solve the problems raised by conflict. The work comprises a series of pithy discussions of the different strategic situations that might arise, and the best responses for each. In many ways it is a masterclass in the application of critical thinking to practical affairs. Aspiring generals are advised to 'appraise the situation' according to five separate criteria, and to plan accordingly. 'The expert at battle seeks his victory from strategic advantage', Sun writes, so every general must assess their situation from every angle, and establish not only the best way to give themselves the strategic advantage – but also of preventing the other side from giving itself the advantage. Throughout the text, Sun epitomises the qualities of a good problem solver by focusing on the nature of the problem; asking productive questions about it; and making sound decisions.Wanting and Intending
By Neil Roughley. 2016
This book aims to answer two simple questions: what is it to want and what is it to intend? Because…
of the breadth of contexts in which the relevant phenomena are implicated and the wealth of views that have attempted to account for them, providing the answers is not quite so simple. Doing so requires an examination not only of the relevant philosophical theories and our everyday practices, but also of the rich empirical material that has been provided by work in social and developmental psychology. The investigation is carried out in two parts, dedicated to wanting and intending respectively. Wanting is analysed as optative attitudinising, a basic form of subjective standard-setting at the core of compound states such as 'longings', 'desires', 'projects' and 'whims'. The analysis is developed in the context of a discussion of Moore-paradoxicality and deepened through the examination of rival theories, which include functionalist and hedonistic conceptions as well as the guise-of-the-good view and the pure entailment approach, two views popular in moral psychology. In the second part of the study, a disjunctive genetic theory of intending is developed, according to which intentions are optative attitudes on which, in one way or another, the mark of deliberation has been conferred. It is this which explains intention's subjection to the requirements of practical rationality. Moreover, unlike wanting, intending turns out to be dependent on normative features of our life form, in particular on practices of holding responsible. The book will be of particular interest to philosophers and psychologists working on motivation, goals, desire, intention, deliberation, decision and practical rationality.