In Search of Human Nature

In Search of Human Nature
Mary E. Clark | 2002-12-06 00:00:00 | Routledge | 496 | Philosophy
Human Nature offers a wide-ranging and holistic view of human nature from all perspectives: scientific, historical, and sociological. Mary Clark takes the most recent data from a dozen or more fields, and works it together with clarifying anecdotes and thought-provoking images to challenge conventional Western beliefs with hopeful new insights. Balancing the theories of cutting-edge neuroscience with the insights of primitive mythologies, Mary Clark provides down-to-earth suggestions for peacefully resolving global problems. Human Nature builds up a coherent, and above all positive, picture of who we really are.
Reviews
Mary Clark focuses on the issue of the nature of human nature, and she brings a wide range of scholarship from many fields to the question. Reviewer Jeffares is quite wrong; Clark's book is heavily referenced; the endnotes comprise nearly 50 pages of small print and the reference list is more than 30 pages. Perhaps what most disturbs many about her argument is that she suggests a "story of who we are" that differs significantly from the currently dominant paradigm of humans as driven to compete for resources and status and survival. Moreover, she has the temerity to point out that what is often taught in schools and promoted by opinion leaders is also a "story," one subject to interpretation as something other than the "facts" that proponents would claim it to be. Clark is not totally rejecting of modernity; but she does argue that modern civilizations are in danger unless some important truths about "human nature" are recognized and more adequately served than such civilizations currently do. She emphasizes that survival of our species from earliest times to the present required cooperation and human bonding more than competing and persuasively presents a case that our current perspectives on humans and the world in which they live lead us to behave in maladaptive ways. We all will ignore her message at our own peril. Clark writes clearly and argues cogently on a vitally important topic. This book should be in every college, university and municipal library. It needs to be understood by all those who consider themselves public intellectuals. Her perspective could lead us toward survival not destruction of our world.

Few books could be more important to us at this moment in time. I urge you to see that your local libraries, academic and general, order this remarkable new publication.

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Nihilism (Key Ideas)

Nihilism (Key Ideas)
Bulent Diken | 2009-01-08 00:00:00 | Routledge | 200 | Philosophy

Most significant problems of contemporary life have their origins in nihilism and its paradoxical logic, which is simultaneously destructive to and constitutive of society. Yet, in social theory, nihilism is a surprisingly under-researched topic.

This book develops a systematic account of nihilism in its four main forms: escapism, radical nihilism, passive nihilism and 'perfect nihilism.' It focuses especially on the disjunctive synthesis between passive nihilism (the negation of the will) and radical nihilism (the will to negation), between the hedonism/disorientation that characterizes the contemporary post-political culture and the emerging forms of despair and violence as a reaction to it.

The book deals with nihilism at three levels. First, it addresses the genealogy and consequences of nihilism, which is followed by an excursus through film analysis. Then the book focuses on the 'social,' relating nihilism to capitalism, post-politics and terrorism. Another excursus fleshes out the theoretical argumens by focusing on Houellebecq's fiction. Finally, the possibilities of overcoming nihilism are considered by emphasizing the significance of concepts such as event, agonism and antagonism in this context.

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'Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Studies in Feminist Philosophy)'

'Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Studies in Feminist Philosophy)'
Linda Martin Alcoff | 2005-12-22 00:00:00 | Oxford University Press, USA | 344 | Philosophy
In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martin Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate. Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martin Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martin Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.
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The Aetiology of Deep Venous Thrombosis: A Critical, Historical and Epistemological Survey

The Aetiology of Deep Venous Thrombosis: A Critical, Historical and Epistemological Survey
P. Colm Malone,Paul S. Agutter | 2008-03-11 00:00:00 | Springer | 322 | Philosophy

What we now call deep venous thrombosis (DVT) has been elucidated by a diversity of investigative approaches during the past four centuries. The authors of this book survey the history of the field and ask: why has one of these perspectives the haematological/biochemical come to dominate research into the causation of DVT during the past 50 years and to exclude alternatives? In answering this question, they show that the current consensus model is conceptually flawed. Building on the work of William Harvey, John Hunter, Rudolf Virchow, Ludwig Aschoff and a number of pathologists in the mid-20^th century, they offer a revised account of the aetiology of this condition. In the process they retrace and review the 160-year-old philosophical and methodological schism in biomedical research and, using DVT as an example, propose how this schism might be bridged to the benefit of both research and clinical practice.

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On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres

On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
Nicolaus Copernicus | 1995-01-01 00:00:00 | Prometheus Books | 336 | Philosophy
The Ptolemaic system of the universe, with the earth at the centre, had held sway since antiquity as authoritative in philosophy, science, and church teaching. Following his observations of the heavenly bodies, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) abandoned the geocentric system for a heliocentric model, with the sun at the centre. His remarkable work, "On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres", stands as one of the greatest intellectual revolutions of all time, and profoundly influenced, among others, Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton.
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Nicomachean Ethics

Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle | 2009-01-01 00:00:00 | Cambridge University Press | 182 | Philosophy
Nicomachean Ethics is the name normally given to the most well-known work by Aristotle on virtue and moral character. It plays a prominent role in defining Aristotelian ethics. It consists of ten books based on notes said to be from his lectures at the Lyceum which were either edited by or dedicated to Aristotle's son, Nicomachus. In many ways this work parallels the similar Eudemian Ethics, which has only eight books, and the two works can be fruitfully compared. Aristotle states in the opening chapter that eudaimonia, often translated as well-being or happiness, is the highest goal of all human deliberate actions, and coincident with the aim of Politics, the subject of another closely related work of Aristotle. He takes this as a starting point, going on to describe what is necessary to be happy.
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Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas

Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas
Andrew Bowie | 2003-01-01 00:00:00 | Polity | 304 | Philosophy
Introduction to German Philosophy is the only book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments of modern German philosophy from Kant to the present.

the first book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments of modern German philosophy from Kant to the present.
offers an accessible introduction to the work, among others, of Kant, Fichte, the Romantics, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Gadamer, and Habermas.
considers how German philosophy reacts to revolutionary changes in modern science, society, and culture;
ideal for anyone wanting to know more about the role of the German tradition within philosophy and literature as a whole.
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Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race

Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race
Charles W. Mills | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | Cornell University Press | 244 | Philosophy
Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape. His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.

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The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life

The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life
Ingmar Persson | 2005-12-29 00:00:00 | Oxford University Press, USA | 500 | Philosophy
The Retreat of Reason brings back to philosophy the ambition of offering a broad vision of the human condition. One of the main original aims of philosophy was to give people guidance about how to live their lives. Ingmar Persson resumes this practical project, which has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy, but his conclusions are very different from those of the ancient Greeks. They typically argued that a life led in accordance with reason, a rational life, would also be the happiest or most fulfilling. By exploring the irrationality of our attitudes to time, identity, and responsibility, Persson shows that the aim of living rationally conflicts not only with the aim of leading the most fulfilling life, but also with the moral aim of promoting the maximization and just distribution of fulfilment for all. The Retreat of Reason challenges some of our most fundamental ideas about ourselves.

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Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time (Theory Out of Bounds)

Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time (Theory Out of Bounds)
Eric Alliez | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | University of Minnesota Press | 344 | Philosophy
Reviews
This is an extraorindarily important book, written by a master scholar who is a pure thinker, who here gives us a reenactment of the transformation of post-Classical Western metaphysical and theological thinking culminating in the purely abstract time of our own world. Primary here are Aristotle, Marx, Plotinus, Augustine, and Scotus, but so, too, are drawn forth the metaphysical and theological ground of modern science, modern philosophy, and modern society, with an apocalyptic culmination in the dark night of our nihilism. This is truly new philosophical and theological thinking, and one with deep consequences for all of us.

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Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle

Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle
Jeffrey A. Kottler | 2006-01-01 00:00:00 | Jossey-Bass | 331 | Philosophy
It's commonplace to observe that the line between genius and mental illness is razor thin, and critics point to a long list of writers, artists and musicians—from William Blake to Sylvia Plath—as illustrations. Kottler, a professor of counseling at California State University, Fullerton, superficially probes the relationship between madness and creativity through 10 case studies of artists who are as famous for their mental instability as their work: Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce and Brian Wilson. An excellent storyteller, he uses these case studies to illustrate the loneliness, sensitivity and intensity that characterized the lives of these artists and the extent to which their personal traumas and psychological instability blossomed into creative genius. For example, he tells how Plath's contentious relationship with her mother and her tortured marriage to Ted Hughes drove her into depression and eventually suicide but also fueled her poetic genius. But the stories of these artists are already very well known, and Kottler offers no genuinely new insights. Moreover, he resorts to sophomoric and clichйd notions—"we are all a little crazy, some more than others," "creativity is thinking outside the box"—to explain the relationship between madness and creativity.
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Aristotle on Truth

Aristotle on Truth
Paolo Crivelli | 2007-01-01 00:00:00 | Cambridge University Press | 356 | Philosophy
Aristotle's theory of truth spans several areas of philosophy: philosophy of language, logic, ontology, and epistemology. Paolo Crivelli covers the main aspects of Aristotle's views on truth and falsehood in this volume by analyzing in detail the relevant passages and addressing well-known problems of Aristotelian semantics. Although Crivelli assesses Aristotle's theory from the point of view of modern analytic philosophy, his book will be of interest to a wide range of students of ancient philosophy and modern philosophy of language as well.
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On the Way to the Postmodern : Old Testament Essays, 1967-1998 (2 vols.; JSOT Supplement Series, 268

On the Way to the Postmodern : Old Testament Essays, 1967-1998 (2 vols.; JSOT Supplement Series, 268
David J. A. Clines | 1998-11-01 00:00:00 | Sheffield Academic Press | 443 | Philosophy

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Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)
Bernstein J. M. | 2003-01-13 00:00:00 | Cambridge University Press | 356 | Philosophy
This volume brings together major works by German thinkers who were extremely influential in the crucial period of aesthetics prior to and after Kant. It includes the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's on the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, and new translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. The volume features an introduction in which J.M. Bernstein places the works in their historical and philosophical context.
Reviews
This book is a collection of essential texts concerning the bridge between Neo-Classicism and, reaching its zenith, Romanticism in German Aesthetic thought. Today, I believe these texts are one of the most important in the history of ideas, because it is the first time thinkers have questioned their ethical place in society, and under what conditions the Good is, in fact, a representation of the Beautiful. This is not only a reaction to Immanuel Kant's two books, Critique of Practical Reason and Judgment, but is also a reformation of the battle to weaken Reason in the face of the rising development of technology.



The first half, Neo-Classicism, are essays by Hamann, Lessing, and Moritz. They are excellent essays that deal with reviving themes put forth by Greek Mythology, Virgil, and Homer. The last half, the romantics, Schiller, Holderlin, Novalis, and Shlegel, rethink Neo-Classicism and puts them under a new aesthetic light, which not only believe in the classical concept of perfection and beauty, but how it relates to ethics, where at its ultimate peak, all man strives to become "a work of art."



The essays may be very technical prima facie, but through reading other texts, such as Frederick Beiser's The Romantic Imperative, you understand the central concerns of the German romantics, and how these concepts are useful today.

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Violence and Phenomenology (Studies in Philosophy)

Violence and Phenomenology (Studies in Philosophy)
James Dodd | 2009-05-18 00:00:00 | Routledge | 190 | Philosophy

This book pursues the problem of whether violence can be understood to be constitutive of its own sense or meaning, as opposed to being merely instrumental. Dodd draws on the resources of phenomenological philosophy, and takes the form of a series of dialogues between figures both inside and outside of this tradition. The central figures considered include Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger, and the study concludes with an analysis of the philosophy of Jan Patocka.

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From Newton's Sleep (Volume 0)

From Newton's Sleep (Volume 0)
Joseph Vining | 1996-12-09 00:00:00 | Princeton University Press | 414 | Philosophy
What does the presence of law say of the beliefs of individuals in a society--their actual beliefs--about language, themselves, the world around them?

In a strikingly original work intended not only for practicing lawyers but for anyone interested in the modern dilemma of the loss of meaning, Joseph Vining invites us to reconsider law as a unique form of thought, inseparably connected to everything in the world that makes up human identity. Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted at the end of the nineteenth century that human law is ultimately a phenomenon in quantitative relations to its causes and effects, and many have been left with an impression of law as a set of processes and rules. Vining takes issue with this and with various reductionist attempts in scientific thought today to express the universe in a single mathematical description of forces, as well as with post-structuralist speculation that there are no valid truth claims, and that human inter-action can be reduced to analysis of power relationships. Law, he argues, is an independent discourse, not reducible to any other, that exists only in human interaction and reflects continuing human worth. Vining's search to reinstate the spiritual dimension in public discourse brings him head-on with a wide array of powerful academic forces: linguistics theory, political science, the new historicism, and the traditional teaching of law.

This book consists of a collection of what Vining calls "amplifications" of the implied text of the law--impressions, commentaries, vignettes, poems, and dialogues--which illustrate aspects of conventional legal language and logic, and the subjects legal practice regularly deals with, such as promises, death, and crime. Throughout we see that law reaches deeply into the way we know ourselves and other persons, all of whom speak through law as law connects language to person and person to action. The texts generated by legal method constitute the living record of social acquaintance and contest, speaking across cultures and across centuries. It is the close reading of legal texts and contexts, Vining argues, that provides the present source of the transcendental in modern secular life. But unlike the other academic arts of interpretation, law alone is directly connected with the most real, the most particular and, at the same time, the most universal facts of social life.

From Newton's Sleep poses ultimate questions for a century that now approaches its end, casts doubt on certainties past and present, and creates new grounds for skepticism and conviction. The fragmentary form of the book mirrors its subject. It is intended to be picked up and read as occasion allows, especially at evening, by lawyers and all their fellow nonlawyers.
Reviews
This is beautifully written book, composed of short pensées or insights on an astonishing range of topics from language to music to mathematics, all brought into some revealing and suprising connection with the way lawyers think and listen and talk when they are acting in total good faith. Far more interesting than a non-lawyer could ever have imagined. Lyrical, profound, enlightening.

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Resisting Ethics

Resisting Ethics
Scott Schaffer | 2004-09-04 00:00:00 | Palgrave Macmillan | 336 | Philosophy
Resisting Ethics is a new contribution to an ongoing debate on how the world can be improved. Starting with the notion that resistance and ethics are theoretically and practically intertwined, Scott Schaffer develops a new socially oriented ethics based on the practical experience of resistance and ethics. Borrowing from and extending the ideas of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Bourdieu, and using case studies of the Algerian Revolution and the Zapatista rebellion, Schaffer argues that existentialism can give us new insights into how we can and should act ethically in the world. Resisting Ethics is a wide-ranging work and represents a new kind of intervention into issues of social justice and resistance.

Reviews
Okay, I'll admit that I know the author personally (he was a professor of mine and is currently a good friend) but all bias aside, this book is a great look at revolutionary movements and the sociological motivations behind them. Schaffer's ability to take existential philosophy and apply it to a practical, social setting will keep the deepest of theoretical readers engrossed from start to finish. Not only does he manage to make relevant the philosophical social theory of days gone by, but he applies it to current issues in global revolutionary politics. Schaffer's discourse on the ethics of resistance will challenge the reader to think hard about what revolution means in this "post-modern" world. A must read for anyone interested in the topic.

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Space from Zeno to Einstein: Classic Readings with a Contemporary Commentary

Space from Zeno to Einstein: Classic Readings with a Contemporary Commentary
Nick Huggett | 1999-04-23 00:00:00 | The MIT Press | 286 | Philosophy
Learning through original texts can be a powerful heuristic tool. This book collects a dozen classic readings that are generally accepted as the most significant contributions to the philosophy of space. The readings have been selected both on the basis of their relevance to recent debates on the nature of space and on the extent to which they carry premonitions of contemporary physics. In his detailed commentaries, Nick Huggett weaves together the readings and links them to our modern understanding of the subject. Together the readings indicate the general historical development of the concept of space, and in his commentaries Huggett explains their logical relations. He also uses our contemporary understanding of space to help clarify the key ideas of the texts. One goal is to prepare the reader (both scientist and nonscientist) to learn and understand relativity theory, the basis of our current understanding of space. The readings are by Zeno, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Clarke, Berkeley, Kant, Mach, Poincaré, and Einstein.
Reviews
This is, hands down, the best introduction to the philosophy of space. Huggett has made a very difficult subject accessible to freshman college students. At the same time, this book can easily provide a basis for any graduate student's knowledge per furthered studies toward scholarship. This is a real gem.
Reviews
This is a classic introduction to the main questions about space developed by well-know philosophers. Zeno's theories are my favourites. Any person interested in art, architecture, LIFE itself, should read the book. An interesting book for curious minds.
Reviews
Here is a nice Historical overview of where the current discourse has developed from. It would have been helpful to include this work with one on time, but the treatment of space as a stand alone subject was well done. This is a good place to begin one's study into the problems surrounding space and time.
Reviews
The reviewers before me are of scholars, I am still a graduate student and read this book as a part of a philosophy course material about space and time.

I find that the texts in the book are well chosen and the commentaries are very helpful.

I recommend this book for students and laymen starting their way in the philosophy world.
Reviews
This is a very fine introductory book about the concept of Space from Zeno to Einstein through Aristo, Descartes, Kant. Author, for each segment provides relevant short readings from the original thinkers and a commentary section by him follows. This is a nice book to read before or paralel with Jammer's book on same topic. Author made a difficult subject very easy to understand.

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Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris (Toronto Studies in Philosophy)

Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H.S. Harris (Toronto Studies in Philosophy)
Michael Baur,John Russon | 1997-12-27 00:00:00 | University of Toronto Press | 349 | Philosophy

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is considered a philosopher of the Tradition, both in the sense that his work is rooted in the political, artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions of European culture and in the sense that he takes up the notion of tradition as an object of philosophical investigation. This collection examines Hegel's philosophy as it bears on the meaning and relevance of tradition - historical, legal, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical. The thirteen original essays draw upon and celebrate the work of H.S. Harris, who is considered by many to be the most influential interpreter of Hegel in the English-speaking world.

The collection as a whole examines Hegel's rich and nuanced relation to his own traditions, including his creative reworking of the legacies of Greece, Rome, Christianity, the Middle Ages, early modernity, and his immediate predecessors. It also shows how Hegel's thought has direct relevance for us today as we seek to understand ourselves in relation to our inherited traditions. The volume concludes with an afterword by H.S. Harris and a comprehensive bibliography of Harris's published works.

This important anthology represents the first rigorous and systematic effort to apply Harris's seminal and innovative style of Hegel scholarship to a wide variety of philosophical and historical issues. It functions both as a study of Hegel's philosophy and as a commentary on Harris's vast contribution to Hegel scholarship.

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Foucault and the Art of Ethics

Foucault and the Art of Ethics
Timothy O'Leary | 2003-01-28 00:00:00 | Continuum | 256 | Philosophy
The work of Michael Focault has been extremely influential in fields as varied as philosophy, history, cultural studies, sociology and sexualilty studies. In his later work, Focault turned to the question of ethics. Working back through history, through the Christian interrogation of desire to the origins of the self in the texts of classical Greece, Focault attempted to concieve of ethics as an art of the self, as an aesthetics of existence and as a practice of liberty. Focault and the Art of Ethics argues that Focault's exploration of the history of sexuality and reinterpretation of the critical philosophical tradition combine to frame a new approach both to the way we understand the tasks of philosophy and to the way we live our lives. The book is essential reading for all those working at the intersection of contemporary debates in philosophy, ethics, politics and cultural studies. Timothy O'Leary is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He has spent several years working in the Focault Archives and has published on Focault, aesthetics and literature.

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