This volume showcases new and interesting ways in which the possession of civic virtues can contribute to people’s abilities to engage in public life in meaningful ways. What is the role of civic ...virtues in public life? How does possessing civic virtues affect persons and their capacities for participation in the public order? The chapters in this volume combine philosophical and empirically informed work to show how civic virtues can be informed by larger virtue ethical perspectives. The first two chapters discuss virtues of individuals that have not received significant empirical attention—authenticity and wisdom and psychological resilience. The next two chapters address education and the ways in which civic virtues can help us to better serve schoolchildren who are socially and economically disadvantaged, as well as to broaden students’ horizons with respect to character and sustainability education. The final four chapters explore the roles for virtues within various political and public realms. They offer perspectives on how virtues affect contentious politics in democratic societies, and study virtues in contexts in which democracy has been stifled or torn apart by war. Together, the chapters highlight the ever-widening impact of the virtues on our lives and in society. The Self, Civic Virtue, and Public Life will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in ethics, political philosophy, psychology, and philosophy of education. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.
This volume brings together contributions from distinguished scholars in the history of philosophy, focusing on points of interaction between discrete historical contexts, religions, and cultures ...found within the premodern period. The contributions connect thinkers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and include philosophers from the three major monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. By emphasizing premodern philosophy’s shared textual roots in antiquity, particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle, the volume highlights points of cross-pollination between different schools, cultures, and moments in premodern thought. Approaching the complex history of the premodern world in an accessible way, the editors organize the volume so as to underscore the difficulties the premodern period poses for scholars, while accentuating the fascinating interplay between the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin philosophical traditions. The contributors cover many topics ranging from the aims of Aristotle’s cosmos, the adoption of Aristotle’s Organon by al-Fārābī, and the origins of the Plotiniana Arabica to the role of Ibn Gabirol’s Fons vitae in the Latin West, the ways in which Islamic philosophy shaped thirteenth-century Latin conceptions of light, Roger Bacon’s adaptation of Avicenna for use in his moral philosophy, and beyond. The volume’s focus on ""source-based contextualism"" demonstrates an appreciation for the rich diversity of thought found in the premodern period, while revealing methodological challenges raised by the historical study of premodern philosophy. Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy: Explorations of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin Traditions is a stimulating resource for scholars and advanced students working in the history of premodern philosophy.
Being Together in Placeexplores the landscapes that convene Native and non-Native people into sustained and difficult negotiations over their radically different interests and concerns. Grounded in ...three sites-the Cheslatta-Carrier traditional territory in British Columbia; the Wakarusa Wetlands in northeastern Kansas; and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds in Aotearoa/New Zealand-this book highlights the challenging, tentative, and provisional work of coexistence around such contested spaces as wetlands, treaty grounds, fishing spots, recreation areas, cemeteries, heritage trails, and traditional village sites. At these sites, activists learn how to articulate and defend their intrinsic and life-supportive ways of being, particularly to those who are intent on damaging or destroying these places.
Using ethnographic research and a geographic perspective, Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson show how the communities in these regions challenge the power relations that structure the ongoing (post)colonial encounter in liberal democratic settler-states. Emerging from their conversations with activists was a distinctive sense that the places for which they cared had agency, a "call" that pulled them into dialogue, relationships, and action with human and nonhuman others. This being-together-in-place, they find, speaks in a powerful way to the vitalities of coexistence: where humans and nonhumans are working to decolonize their relationships; where reciprocal guardianship is being stitched back together in new and unanticipated ways; and where a new kind of "place thinking" is emerging on the borders of colonial power.
The Therapy of Desire Nussbaum, Martha C
2013, 2013., 20130606, 2009, 2018-05-22, Volume:
33
eBook
The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of ...death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought today. This edition features a new introduction by Nussbaum, in which she revisits the themes of this now classic work.
This book argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with ...the capacity for autonomy. Drawing on pragmat-istinferentialist resources from the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Sellars, Brandom), it presents a new interpretation of Foucault’s philosophy that is unified by his overlooked idea of “the archaeology of knowledge”. It explains why and how power and freedom must be entangled, but also what it means ethically to pursue and gain autonomy with respect to one’s own understanding.
In diesem Buch wird argumentiert, dass die gängige Auffassung von der Unterscheidung zwischen Freiheit und Macht verworfen werden muss, weil sie auf einer unhaltbaren Darstellung der diskursiven Kognition beruht, die Individuen mit der Fähigkeit zur Autonomie ausstattet. Unter Rückgriff auf pragmatistisch-istinferentialistische Ressourcen aus der Sprachphilosophie (Wittgenstein, Sellars, Brandom) wird eine neue Interpretation von Foucaults Philosophie vorgestellt, die durch seine übersehene Idee der „Archäologie des Wissens“ geeint wird. Sie erklärt, warum und wie Macht und Freiheit verschränkt sein müssen, aber auch, was es ethisch bedeutet, Autonomie in Bezug auf das eigene Verständnis anzustreben und zu gewinnen.
This book presents an innovative African philosophical response to coloniality and the attendant epistemicide of Africa’s knowledge systems, drawing on Igbo thinking. This book argues that theorizing ...modernity requires a critical conversation between African and Western scholarship, in order to unpack its links with coloniality and the subjugation of Africa’s indigenous knowledges. In setting out this discussion, the book also connects with Latin American scholarship, demonstrating how the modern world is structured to marginalize and destroy knowledges from across the Global South. This book draws on Igbo epistemic resources of solidarity thinking, positioned in contrast to capitalist knowledge-patterns, thereby providing an important Africa-driven response to modernity and coloniality. This book concludes by arguing that the Igbo sense of solidarity is useful and relevant to modern contexts and thus constitutes a vital resource for a less disruptive, more balanced, and more wholesome modernity. At a time of considerable global crises, this book makes an important contribution to philosophy both within Africa and beyond.
In the light of growing political and religious fundamentalism, this open access book defends the idea of freedom as paramount for the attempt to find common ethical ground in the age of globality. ...The book sets out to examine as yet unexhausted ways to boost the resilience of the principle of liberalism. Critically reviewing the last 200 years of the philosophy of freedom, it revises the principle of liberty in order to revive it. It discusses many different aspects that fall under its three main topics: the metaphysics of freedom, quantitative freedom and qualitative freedom. Open societies worldwide have come under increasing pressure in the last decades. The belief that politics and markets fare best when guided by the principle of liberty presently faces multiple challenges such as terrorism, climate warming, inequality, populism, and financial crises. In the view of its critics, the idea of freedom no longer offers adequate guidance to meet these challenges and should be partially corrected or even entirely replaced by countervailing values. Against the reduction of freedom to the merely quantitative question as to how much liberties individuals call their own, this book draws attention to the qualitative concerns which and whose opportunities society should foster. It argues that, correctly understood, the idea of liberty commits us to defend as well as advance the freedom of each and every world citizen.
Tensions of Modernity Brunstetter, Daniel R.
2012, 20120523, 2012-06-30, 2012-05-23, Volume:
44
eBook
Politics today is marked by tension between claims of universal human rights and diversity. From the war on terror to immigration, one of the major challenges facing liberalism is to understand the ...scope of equality in a world in which certain peoples are perceived to reject and/or violently resist democratic principles.
This book revisits Europe's initial encounter with the Native Americans of the New World to shed light on how the West's initial defense of so-called 'barbarians' has influenced the way we think about diversity today, and elucidate the arguments of exclusion that unconsciously permeate the moral world we live in. In doing so, Daniel R. Brunstetter traces Bartolomé de Las Casas's oft heralded defense of the Native Americans in the sixteenth century through the French Enlightenment. While this defense has been rightly lauded as an early example of human rights discourse, tracing Las Casas's arguments into the eighteenth century shows how his view of equality enabled arguments legitimizing the annihilation by 'just' war of those perceived to be 'barbarians'.
This philosophical narrative can be useful when thinking about concepts such as just war, multiculturalism, and immigration, or any area in which politics confronts radical difference.
Conceptual engineering is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with assessing representational devices such as concepts and words. Conceptual engineers looks for the problems with such devices ...and attempt to come up with ways of improving flawed concepts: they attempt to say how those concepts should be. This is the first volume devoted entirely to the possibility, benefits, problems, and applications of conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. It consists of twenty chapters; some advocate for the field, while others develop sceptical arguments, and some focus on the various methodological issues that arise while others apply the method to issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy.
Many environmental scientists, scholars and activists characterise our situation as one of alienation from nature, but this notion can easily seem meaningless or irrational. In this book, Simon ...Hailwood critically analyses the idea of alienation from nature and argues that it can be a useful notion when understood pluralistically. He distinguishes different senses of alienation from nature pertaining to different environmental contexts and concerns, and draws upon a range of philosophical and environmental ideas and themes including pragmatism, eco-phenomenology, climate change, ecological justice, Marxism and critical theory. His novel perspective shows that different environmental concerns - both anthropocentric both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric - can dovetail, rather than compete with, each other, and that our alienation from nature need not be something to be regretted or overcome. His book will interest a broad readership in environmental philosophy and ethics, political philosophy, geography and environmental studies.
