This book argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If ...materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one. The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.
What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical ...autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions What have I done?and What ought I to do?She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, Who is this 'I' who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as fallible creaturesto create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness. Judtith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The most recent of her books are Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender.
This open access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the ...face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on the realities of current human-animal relationships, particularly those of humans with cows. Dharma, yoga, and bhakti paradigms serve as starting points for bringing Hindu—particularly Vaishnava Hindu—animal ethics into conversation with contemporary Western animal ethics. The author argues that a culture of bhakti—the inclusive, empathetic practice of spirituality centered in Krishna as the beloved cowherd of Vraja—can complement recently developed ethics-of-care thinking to create a solid basis for sustaining all kinds of cow care communities. ; Offers a focused insight into a key aspect of Hindu religious practice Integrates primary research and tertiary sources to give a multifaceted understanding of the intricacies of cow care practice Challenges conventional Western thought on cow care and its worldwide implications for animal ethics
A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophy
By critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps ...readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.
New for this editionA new chapter on questions of method around important concepts such as intensity, anarchic distribution, transcendental illusion and distinctnessReflections on the place of judgement and action in Deleuze's work in order to explain its ethical and political dimensionsA new critical section, which guides students through the key debates and oppositions by engaging with latest interpretations of Deleuze by Levi Bryant, Anna Sauvagnargues, Daniel W. Smith, Henry Somers-Hall and Miguel de Beistegui
What is the relationship between “image” and human thinking? What is the role of the concept of “form” in human knowledge? Scholars from the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, the history of ...science, aesthetics, literature, anthropology, mathematics, and biology take historical and theoretical approaches to investigate the connection between the activity of thinking and concepts of image and form.
This book goes beyond a simple study of Newman’s thought and work and seeks to apply his deductions to modern value conflicts. Although it will be of particular relevance to academic readers with ...some prior knowledge of Newman’s works, it may also be of wider interest to students of history, philosophy, theology and spirituality. More generally, its unusual focus on Newman’s epistemology and philosophical deductions, and how these relate to present-day dilemmas, should also attract interest from his many non-academic followers and devotees.
Divine machines Smith, Justin E. H
2011., 20110411, 2011, 2011-04-11
eBook
Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent ...than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.
Based on an unfinished manuscript by the late philosopher Dallas Willard, this book makes the case that the twentieth century saw a massive shift in Western beliefs and attitudes concerning the ...possibility of moral knowledge, such that knowledge of the moral life and of its conduct is no longer routinely available from the social institutions long thought to be responsible for it. In this sense, moral knowledge-as a publicly available resource for living-has disappeared. Via a detailed survey of main developments in ethical theory from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, Willard explains philosophy's role in this shift. In pointing out the shortcomings of these developments, he shows that the shift was not the result of rational argument or discovery, but largely of arational social forces-in other words, there was no good reason for moral knowledge to have disappeared.
The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge is a unique contribution to the literature on the history of ethics and social morality. Its review of historical work on moral knowledge covers a wide range of thinkers including T. H. Green, G. E. Moore, Charles L. Stevenson, John Rawls, and Alasdair MacIntyre. But, most importantly, it concludes with a novel proposal for how we might reclaim moral knowledge that is inspired by the phenomenological approach of Knud Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas. Edited and eventually completed by three of Willard's former graduate students, this book marks the culmination of Willard's project to find a secure basis in knowledge for the moral life.
« Le “ Je ” de l’homme que je suis, centre d’activités sensées, peut-il s’isoler, se poser dans le vide, enfant trouvé métaphysique ? » Assurément non, pour le philosophe Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) : ...conscience humaine ne saurait être comprise que comme un cas particulier de l’activité commune à tous les vivants, voire à tout être véritable. Pour Ruyer, toutes les explications mécanistes de l’émergence de la conscience à partir d’une matière inerte ont échoué, il est donc temps de rompre tant avec le dualisme qu’avec le matérialisme mécaniste, pour repenser ensemble et radicalement la conscience, la vie et la matière. Au milieu du xxe siècle, il élabore ainsi une philosophie panpsychiste et finaliste qui fait de la conscience « l’étoffe même du monde ». S’appuyant sur une connaissance solide des sciences de son temps, de l’embryologie à la cybernétique, il s’efforce de montrer que cette version renouvelée du finalisme, inscrite dans la filiation de Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Bergson ou encore Whitehead, correspond bien mieux que le mécanisme à notre connaissance de la vie. Ce faisant, il développe une pensée originale, à l’audace métaphysique certaine, dont les intuitions donnent à voir ce que l’attention au vivant fait aux catégories classiques de la philosophie, et combien elle nous force à les refonder. Ce livre se penche sur les méthodes, les sources et les arguments de la théorie ruyérienne du vivant. Il s’efforce de mettre en évidence ses forces et ses faiblesses, voire ses dangers, quand elle prétend appliquer la « psycho-biologie » à des questions morales, sociales et politiques.
Form and Object Garcia, Tristan; Ohm, Mark Allan; Cogburn, Jon
03/2014
eBook
What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposedly derivative nature of objects to put forward a new theory of ontology ...that gives us deep insights into the world and our place in it.
