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.
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.
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.
What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the ...biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality.
