Reality and Culture : Essays on the Philosophy of Bernard Harrison.
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More than being a volume about the philosophy of Bernard Harrison, this volume is about how Harrison conceptualizes the creation of the human world. One might be tempted to classify Harrison as a major voice in many diverse discussions-philosophy of literature, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, color studies, epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, philosophy of culture, Wittgenstein, antisemitism, and more-without recognizing a unifying strand that ties them together. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Harrison contests and destabilizes a persistent and misleading alignment of culture with subjectivity-whether found in unexamined distinctions between nature and culture or appearance and reality. His general aim has been to undermine the belief that human culture deals in smoke and mirrors, and that the only realities are those of extra-human nature. He emphasizes the paraxial foundation of meaning, and argues that the creative inventions of language and culture are as real as any extra-linguistic reality. While granting the existence of extra-human reality, he holds it to be, in itself, conceptually unorganised, but nevertheless cognitively accessible by way of sense-perception and physical manipulation. This volume offers new critical essays that examine Harrison's corpus, written by distinguished voices in philosophy and literary studies. It bridges many of the abysses of conflicting opinion opened by the culture wars of the past half-century. Importantly, it includes an opening essay by Harrison that elucidates the unifying strand running through his variegated philosophical writings, and concludes with a chapter in which he replies to and reflects on the other critical essays herein.
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1 online resource (294 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789401210669 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The anti-landscape /
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There have always been some uninhabitable places, but in the last century human beings have produced many more of them. These anti-landscapes have proliferated to include the sandy wastes of what was once the Aral Sea, severely polluted irrigated lands, open pit mines, blighted nuclear zones, coastal areas inundated by rising seas, and many others. The Anti-Landscape examines the emergence of such sites, how they have been understood, and how some of them have been recovered for habitation. The anti-landscape refers both to artistic and literary representations and to specific places that no longer sustain life. This history includes T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Cormac McCarthy's The Road as well as air pollution, recycled railway lines, photography and landfills. It links theories of aesthetics, politics, tourism, history, geography, and literature into the new synthesis of the environmental humanities. The Anti-Landscape provides an interdisciplinary approach that moves beyond the false duality of nature vs. culture, and beyond diagnosis and complaint to the recuperation of damaged sites into our complex heritage. This is the first volume in the new series Studies in Environmental Humanities .
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1 online resource (217 pages) : illustrations (some color) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789401211697 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.