America has a love-hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of ...classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers-Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. These writers' shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived-or, in Dewey's term, "reconstructed"-individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.
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.
« 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.
It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In ...this book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.
Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method ...of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of the right.
Confucian Perfectionismexamines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.
Confucian Perfectionismcritically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era.
Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a ...wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.
When is political compromise acceptable--and when is it fundamentally rotten, something we should never accept, come what may? What if a rotten compromise is politically necessary? Compromise is a ...great political virtue, especially for the sake of peace. But, as Avishai Margalit argues, there are moral limits to acceptable compromise even for peace. But just what are those limits? At what point does peace secured with compromise become unjust? Focusing attention on vitally important questions that have received surprisingly little attention, Margalit argues that we should be concerned not only with what makes a just war, but also with what kind of compromise allows for a just peace.
The Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) is a comprehensive Marxist lexicon, which in the 9 German-language volumes concluded so far has involved over 800 scholars from around the globe. ...Conceived by philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug in 1983, the first volume of the ongoing lexicon project was published in 1994. This first English-language selection introduces readers to the HCDM’s wide range of terms: besides Marxist concepts, approached from a plural standpoint and stressing feminist, ecological, and internationalist perspectives, it boasts entries on the histories of social movements, theoretical schools, as well as cultural, political, philosophical, and aesthetic debates. Contributors are: Samir Amin, Jan Otto Andersson, Konstantin Baehrens, Lutz-Dieter Behrendt, Mario Candeias, Robert Cohen, Alex Demirović, Klaus Dörre, William W. Hansen, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Frigga Haug, Peter Jehle, Juha Koivisto, Wolfgang Küttler, Morus Markard, Eleonore von Oertzen, Christof Ohm, Rinse Reeling Brouwer, Jan Rehmann, Thomas Sablowski, Peter Schyga, Victor Strazzeri, Peter D. Thomas, André Tosel, Michael Vester, Lise Vogel, and Victor Wallis.
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultureexamines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions ...of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More'sUtopia, Shakespeare'sHamletandRomeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."
