Beauvoir in Time /
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Beauvoir in Time situates Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in the historical context of its writing and in later contexts of its international reception, from then till now. The book takes up three aspects of Beauvoir's work more recent feminists find embarrassing: "bad sex," "dated" views about lesbians, and intersections with race and class. Through close reading of her writing in many genres, alongside contemporaneous discourses (good and bad novels in French and English, outmoded psychoanalytic and sexological authorities, ethnographic surrealism, the writing of Richard Wright and Franz Fanon), and in light of her travels to the U.S. and China, the author uncovers insights more recent feminist methodologies obscure, showing Beauvoir is still good to think with today.
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1 online resource. :
9789004431218
9789004431201
Micro and Macro Philosophy: Organicism in Biology, Philosophy, and Politics /
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What role can philosophy play in a world dominated by neoliberalism and globalization? Must it join universalist ideologies as it did in past centuries? Or might it turn to ethnophilosophy and postmodern fragmentation? Micro and Macro Philosophy argues that universalist cosmopolitanism and egocentric culturalism are not the only alternatives. Western philosophy has created a false dichotomy. A better solution can be found in an organic philosophy that functions through micro-macro interactions. According to biologists, the twentieth century was the century of the gene, while the twenty-first century is destined to be the century of the organic. Micro and Macro Philosophy attempts to establish such a view in philosophy: by highlighting micro-macro patterns found in history, it seeks to design new ways of "organic thinking" in the human sciences.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004440425
9789004439078
The Italian Pragmatists : Between Allies and Enemies /
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The Italian Pragmatists were a group of philosophers in the early 20th century, most notably including Giovanni Vailati, Mario Calderoni, Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini. They gathered around the journal Leonardo , published in Florence. The Italian philosophers were in contact with the American Pragmatists, especially with C.S.V. Peirce and W. James, and developed many original and provocative ideas that made the Italian Pragmatists allies and enemies. Critics have often stressed the differences between their versions of Pragmatism. This volume emphasizes what they shared, and their value for philosophy and culture.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004440876
9789004440869
Explorations of Value /
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The essays in Explorations of Value are drawn from work first presented at the 20th Conference of Value Inquiry. They are not mere records of conference presentations. The authors have reflected on their initial presentations. They have re-thought arguments in light of discussions at the conference. They have revised their work. All of this has combined to bring fresh ideas on important issues into carefully considered discussions. The nineteen authors of the essays do not share a common viewpoint on all problems of value inquiry. They are certainly not in agreement in their conclusions. Their concerns, however, cluster around a recognizable body of questions. Several of the authors raise fundamental questions on the nature of values and the possibility of giving them an objective status. Some of the authors raise questions about where value inquiry becomes value advocacy. They are also ready to ask whether or not advocacy is in the legitimate purview of philosophers. A number of authors set out to examine conditions of moral practice and of harming or benefiting people in general. Other authors show a concern for juxtaposing moral values and aesthetic values, in some cases to observe similarities, in some, differences. Finally, a few authors focus on particular notions such as forgiveness, intimacy, and love that are central to our lives.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004493827
9789042002548
Persons and Immortality /
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The religious belief in personal immortality depends on the evidence for the existence of God, an immaterial soul or mind, and human nature. We also need to support the view that God will always want to maintain relationships with us in the afterlife. So, immortality is a hard sell. The suffering of innocent victims suggests that the existence of a loving God is not self-evident. Furthermore, the soul's separation from the body at death raises the troublesome problem of personal identity. How can that be me in the afterlife without my body? The tradition from Plato to Descartes plants the seed of personal immortality in our rational nature. But the deconstruction of human nature suggests that our species is not special. Yet, the belief in immortality lingers. The first step in the reconstruction of personal immortality is found in systems theory, or belief that the whole individuates the part. This view suggests that we are the outcome of relationships rather than eternal natures entering into relationships. We are the product of relationships taking place at three basic levels. 1. In psyche where being human is the result of a tendency toward good and evil. 2. As social entities where the existence of other human beings individuates us. 3. In being's unconcealment where the intelligibility of things provides a foundation for epistemic life. Heidegger's view of the nothing or horizon surrounding being allows us to identify God as creator entering into personal relationships with us - a view supported by contemporary science. That will be me in the afterlife, if the relationships that individuate me in my pre-mortem state continue into my post-mortem existence. The reversal in being's unconcealment suggests that human death continues the cycle of personal existence.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004506978
9789042004856
Evolution and Human Values /
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Initiated by Robert Wesson, Evolution and Human Values is a collection of newly written essays designed to bring interdisciplinary insight to that area of thought where human evolution intersects with human values. The disciplines brought to bear on the subject are diverse - philosophy, psychiatry, behavioral science, biology, anthropology, psychology, biochemistry, and sociology. Yet, as organized by co-editor Patricia A. Williams, the volume falls coherently into three related sections. Entitled Evolutionary Ethics, the first section brings contemporary research to an area first explored by Herbert Spencer. Evolutionary ethics looks to the theory of evolution by natural selection to find values for human living. The second section, Evolved Ethics, discusses the evolution of language and religion and their impact on moral thought and feeling. Evolved ethics was partly Charles Darwin's subject in The Descent of Man. The last section bears the title Scientific Ethics. A nascent field, scientific ethics asks about the evolution of human nature and the implications of that nature for ethical theory and social policy. Together, the essays collected here provide important contemporary insights into what it is - and what it may be - to be human.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004463851
9789051838305
Meaning and Development /
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This book is a learned yet passionate critique of alternative theories of development as addressed to traditional societies. It offers a forceful argument for sacrifice to be made in the name of moral faith. The metaphysical grounds and the scientific verification for such a faith are explored. An eloquent and original case for pursuing economic development in accordance with democracy and human dignity.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004463691
9789051837575
The Logic of Hope: Extensions of Kant's View of Religion /
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This book is a thorough study of the question posed by Kant, For what can a human being rationally hope? It offers a detailed commentary on Kant's seminal work, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, as well as an original development of the logic of three of Kant's basic ideas: ambivalence, ignorance, and hope. Sophisticated analytic techniques, including symbolic logic, are applied to this conceptual matrix. The result is a striking case for the transformation of world society into a Kingdom of Ends of individuals and a peaceful League of Nations.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004463806
9789051836936
Anatomy of What We Value Most /
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The book analyzes, synthesizes, and evaluates the insights of the world's outstanding thinkers, prophets, and literary masters on the good, the morally right, and the lovely (part one); the question whether the world operates on the basis of such universal laws as the logos, the tao, and the principle of polarity (part two); what there is and isn't in the world, including such categories as existence, reality, being, and nonbeing (part three); and pre-eminently credible and enriching beliefs about truth, wisdom, and what it all means (part four). Emphasis is placed on the divergent views of such intellectual giants as Confucius and Laotse in ancient China; the classical Hindu philosophers from ancient times to Gandhi and Tagore; patriarchs and prophets quoted in Scripture; Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages; Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant; and nineteenth- and twentieth-century luminaries such as Bentham, Mill, Peirce, James, Dewey, Sartre, and Wittgenstein. The differences and resemblances of their cogitations are portrayed as a conversation of the ages on questions of persistent concern.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004495074
9789042003910
An Idiosyncratic Ethics, Or, the Lauramachean Ethics /
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This book is an original synthesis of four elements: (1) the phenomenology of value, (2) caring, (3) the moral imagination, and (4) Kant's formula of humanity. The striking result is an ethics of caring that develops our shared humanity. The probing analysis and pungent argument are assisted by imaginative forms of dialogue, narration, and parable. This lively contribution to our ethical fulfillment concludes with a case for student-centered education that is democratic, creative and caring.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004463776
9789051836820
Institutional Violence /
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Violence can be physical and psychological. It can characterize personal actions, forms of group activity, and abiding social and political policy. This book includes all of these aspects within its focus on institutional forms of violence. Institution is also a broad category, ranging from formal arrangements such as the military, the criminal code, the death penalty and prison system, to more amorphous but systemic situations indicated by parenting, poverty, sexism, work, and racism. Violence is as complex as the human beings who resort to it; its institutional forms pervade our relational lives. We are all participants in it as victims and perpetrators. The chapters in this book were written in the hope that violence can be explicated, even if not fully understood, and that such clarification can help us in devising less violent forms of living, even if it does not lead to its total abolition. The studies bring new aspects of violence to light and offer a number of suggestions for its remedy.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004459021
9789042005082
The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 1711-1741) : From the definitive Latin text and notes, Italian commentary and introduction by Giuliano Crifò. Translated and Edited by...
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Gustavo Costa reviewing the Italian edition of Vico's Institutiones Oratoriae in New Vico Studies 9 (1991), has written that Rhetoric is the mainspring of an important trend of Vichian studies which initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century and had its manifestation in John D. Schaeffer's Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), where Schaeffer aptly noted, summing up a long exegetic tradition, Vico was imbued with rhetoric and convinced of its centrality to Western civilization. Unfortunately, the editions of Vico's works published in English have not yet included the Institutiones Oratoriae , which more or less reflects the lectures on rhetoric given by Vico at the University of Naples, starting with the academic year 1699-1700 and going through 1739-1741. The manual on rhetoric was used in Italy up to the end of the nineteenth century and established the common curriculum in rhetoric to be followed in all Universities. This English edition offers a text of the Institutiones complete on the base of the four known extant manuscripts. It offers the marginal glosses made by Vico's students, a collection of Vico's phrases and explanations of terms collected by some of the students, a glossary of Latin words and rhetorical terms from the Latin text, and a wealth of information in the commentary. The Art of Rhetoric is the manual for everyone who wants to know what rhetoric is, how it was employed in the forum or the courts, how it could be learned from the classic orators, and how it can be used whenever we speak for convincing, praising or motivating.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789401200202
9789051839159
Facts, Values, and Methodology : A New Approach to Ethics /
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Science is not value-free and ethics is not fact-free. Science and ethics should be similar, but they are not. The author indicates how research in ethics is to change in the face of this. Ethicists should accommodate empirical work in their programs and they should take heed of methodologies developed in science and philosophy of science. They should abandon the search for a single overarching theory of morality. Controversies in ethics are often spurious for lack of articulate methodological key concepts. For example, disagreements over the value of general theories are misguided since disputants implicitly use different notions of generality and different notions of theory. An appropriate methodology does not suffice for the resolution of controversies but it is indispensable for consensus. The book argues these theses in a general way and applies them to the subject of egoism and altruism in ethics. Further case studies concern the environment and psychiatric disorders.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004463738
9789051838510
Corona Phenomenon: Philosophical and Political Questions /
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This book is the outcome of one of the most extensive international academic projects on the COVID-19 pandemic in the field of humanities and social sciences. It includes the reflections of scholars from 25 universities, in Europe, Asia, Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK, on 60 important philosophical and political questions. This paradigmatic volume is unique in the history of the humanities and social sciences in dealing with pandemics and should be considered as a starting point for more coherent and synergistic academic cooperation in preparation for similar future phenomena.
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In the face of the corona phenomenon, this volume includes the reflections of scholars on 60 important philosophical and political questions, together and interconnected. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004512924
9789004512917
Philosophy of Humour : New Perspectives /
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This volume aims to reignite interest in a sorely neglected field within philosophy: the philosophy of humour. Indeed, although humour, jokes and laughter make up a quintessentially human domain of extreme universal importance, it has not received the sustained and involved attention and investigation that it merits. This volume draws on theories both distant and more nearby in order to contemporize the discussion into the 21st century, with each of the ten contributions demonstrating just how many perspectives and conversations are to be had, both on theoretical and concrete levels, now and going forward.
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1 online resource (201 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004548817
A Meaningful Life amidst a Pluralism of Cultures and Values : John Lachs's Stoic Pragmatism as a Philosophical and Cultural Project /
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There is a growing concern about living a meaningful life among those living in different contexts of cultural diversity, be it the American melting pot, the union of European nations, the multiculturally globalized, the multiformity of tribalism of various stripes, and the fashionable cyber bubbles of opinion and commentary that drive the outlooks of millions of uninformed consumers. This book argues for a wisdom that incorporates a reference for both knowledge and self-knowledge, as well as life experience and cultural traditions that have stood the test of time, all contributing to a framework in which we can navigate our lives.
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1 online resource (266 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004680050
Intelligent and Autonomous: Transforming Values in the Face of Technology /
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This book uses case analyses and industry insights and blends them with forays into philosophy and ethics to conceptualise the mismatch between human values and the values inherent in an increasingly technologized world. Bringing together contributors from the disciplines of law, politics, philosophy, and communication studies, this volume develops an interdisciplinary vocabulary for thinking about the questions and antinomies of human-technology interaction while also resisting any deceptively straightforward synthesis. The topics discussed include the competition over and regulation of technology, the harm induced by autonomous technologies, and the place and role of humans in a world that is undergoing rapid and radical change.
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1 online resource (225 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004547261
Corona Phenomenon: Philosophical and Political Questions /
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This book is the outcome of one of the most extensive international academic projects on the COVID-19 pandemic in the field of humanities and social sciences. It includes the reflections of scholars from 25 universities, in Europe, Asia, Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK, on 60 important philosophical and political questions. This paradigmatic volume is unique in the history of the humanities and social sciences in dealing with pandemics and should be considered as a starting point for more coherent and synergistic academic cooperation in preparation for similar future phenomena.
:
In the face of the corona phenomenon, this volume includes the reflections of scholars on 60 important philosophical and political questions, together and interconnected. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004512924
9789004512917
Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration /
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Parasite presents the ethico-biological problem of parasitism in a metaphorical and artistic fashion. In this book, philosophers explore the film using sources such as the ancient satirist Lucian's De Parasito, Nietzsche's "the vengeance of the weak," Dostoyevsky's "Underground," or Marxism, among others.
Parasite is a philosophically interesting film because it presents the ethico-biological problem of parasitism in a metaphorical and artistic fashion. Michel Serres, in his book called The Parasite , holds that parasites are not in fact useless, but that they establish communications between different spheres and are thus able to transform large-scale organisms. Parasites import coincidences, activate defence systems, and establish new links with the host. In this book, philosophers explore the film from various angles: using the ancient satirist Lucian's De Parasito , Nietzsche's concept of "the vengeance of the weak," Dostoyevsky's "underground," Marxism, and many more.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004521513
9789004515628
The New Science of Axiological Psychology /
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This book uses scientific validity measures to create empirical value science and a normative new science of axiological psychology by integrating cognitive psychology with Robert S. Hartman's formal theory of axiological science. It reveals a scientific way to identify and rank human values, achieving values appreciation, values clarification, and values measurement for the twenty first century.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789401202169
9789042018266