Today man's mind is under attack by all the leading schools of philosophy. We are told that we cannot trust our senses, that logic is arbitrary, that concepts have no basis in reality. Ayn Rand oppose
Richard Rorty's collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.
This important new study offers a powerful exposition of the ethical theory underlying Hegel's philosophy of society, politics, and history. Professor Woodshows how Hegel applies his theory to such topics as human rights, the justification of legal punishment, criteria of moral responsibility, and the authority of individual conscience. The book includes a critical discussion of Hegel's treatment of other moral philosophers (especially Kant, Fichte and Fries), provides an account of the controversial concept of 'ethical life', and shows the relation between the theory and Hegel's critical assessment of modern social institutions. The book is nontechnical and should interest anyone concerned with Hegel's ethical and political thought, including philosophers, political scientists, intellectual historians and students of German culture.
This book conducts a timely inquiry into contemporary conscience and politics. It examines fundamental ambiguities, dichotomies, and contradictions that we experience about the worth of our own suffer
This book seeks to explain carefully and sympathetically the Buddhist doctrine of anatta ('not-self'), which denies the existence of any self, soul or enduring essence in man. The author relates this doctrine to its cultural and historical context, particularly to its Brahmanical background, and shows how the Theravada Buddhist tradition has constructed a philosophical and psychological account of personal identity and continuity on the apparently impossible basis of the denial of self.
This book offers a detailed account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrati
This 1990 collection explores one recurrent theme connecting philosophy and politics: the relation between the nature of man and the structure of society. It does so by concentrating on the topical issue of the market economy as an attempt to resolve the clash between individual autonomy and collective action. Beginning with a historical and personal recollection by Enoch Powell and a response by Robert Skidelsky, the volume then provides a forum for political theorists and philosophers to take issue on the fundamental topics of markets and morals; liberal man; and equality and libertarianism. It succeeds equally as a stimulating textbook and a book for the general reader who wishes to understand the philosophical issues arising in a market economy.
In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late-nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. In the same period the idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion. These two parallel transformations fed into each other, so that chance made the world seem less capricious: it was legitimated because it brought order out of chaos. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breadth and verve, The Taming of Chance brings out the relations between philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authorit
This is a summation by an outstanding American theological writer of a lifetime of thought about the course that mankind has taken. This book has taken its place in religious writing as a clear statem
This book introduces the student to active philosophical thinking about political ideas, offering a more stimulating approach to the subject than traditional chronological surveys. The first edition w
This provocative new book provides guidelines for dealing with the sensitive legal and ethical issues surrounding an individual's right to die. Designed to give a global perspective on these contempor
When Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published in 1974, it caused a literary sensation. An entire generation was profoundly affected by the story of the narrator,
In Man for Himself, Erich Fromm examines the confusion of modern women and men who, because they lack faith in any principle by which life ought to be guided, become the helpless prey forces both wit
This book is not a conventional introduction to the philosophy of mind, nor is it a contribution to the physicalist/ dualist debate. Instead The Representational Theory of Mind demonstrates that we ca
This is the first book in English to elucidate the central issues in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), a figure crucial to the movement of philosophy from Kant to German idealism. The book explains Fichte's notion of subjectivity and how his particular view developed out of Kant's accounts of theoretical and practical reason. Fichte argued that the subject has a self-positing structure which distinguishes it from a thing or an object. Thus, the subject must be understood as an activity rather than a thing and is self-constituting in a way that an object is not. In the final chapter, Professor Neuhouser considers how this doctrine of the self-positing subject enables us to understand the possibility of the self's autonomy, or self-determination.
The author states that by examining his understanding of dying, sex, love, the Holocaust, politics, and other topics, they bring forth ideas, questions, and statements, and that the subjects automatic
Critical Theory and Philosophy illuminates one of the most complex and influential philosophical movements of this century. After tracking Critical Theory to its source in the works of Kant, Hegel, Ma
