- Table View
- List View
Living On / To Survive: Epidemic Writings
by Zsuzsa BarossThose familiar with the work of Derrida will recognize the double term in the title as variations, in translation, of Derrida's untimely essay Survivre. To survive in this infinite mood and indefinite form that sets no limit to number, person, or time is at once the theme and the undercurrent that runs through the diverse texts gathered together in this volume. To survive, for such is our exceptional situation, also animates the act of writing: to shelter a personal existence and actualize the promise writing holds for saving something more than (bare) life. Derrida termed it sur-vie or living on. The texts date from different times and phases of the mutating epidemic. In chronological order, they register the progressive evolution and complication of the sense of this novel crisis. The first is contemporaneous with the immediate virus outbreak and with Agamben's provocative dismissal of the health crisis. The Two Transcripts are of video interventions that appeared on Jerome Lebre's YouTube channel Philosopher en temps depidemie, one of several platforms to call for critical discourse; a third intervention, completing the triptych, was recorded in French but never published. Here an extended, more developed version closes the volume. Engaging Derrida's Survie, it also responds to the recent death of Jean-Luc Nancy. At the center, anchoring the volume, is a complex text that can be read as a belated postscript to the first volume On Contemporaneity after Agamben, and / or as a premature preface to its forthcoming successor (The Time That Remains). It asks about the newly acquired sense of the World in Paul Celan's often cited last phrase: The world is gone. Living On / To Survive is essential reading for students and scholars in literature, philosophy and psychology.
The Locusts: British Critics of Portugal before the First World War (The Portuguese-Speaking World)
by Dr. Gary ThornThe book title comes from Aubrey Bells Portugal of the Portuguese (1916): Since the murder of King Carlos and of the Crown Prince Luis Felipe on the 1st of February 1908. A swarm of writers have descended like locusts on the land The methodology is to connect a specific group of critics in the years before the First World War to a constellation of general attitudes about Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking world. Intersecting personal narratives are used, not as an argument for individual agency as dominant cause of historical change, but as contrasting discourses upon revisited events. The primary focus is to explain how the critical context of Portugals history that incubated The Locusts crystalised into the pressure group to free political prisoners. A key part of that context was the extant campaign against Portuguese slavery in West Africa. E. M. Tenison, the Secretary of the British Protest Committee, left a unique 200-page unpublished personal memoir, previously unconsulted by any published historian. The historiography of the First Republic in English is slight. There are no comparative studies in book form, just a few scholarly articles on diplomacy alone (for example. by Glyn Stone, Richard Langhorne). And likewise, there is no study of Anglo-Portuguese relations from below, i.e. popular pressure to influence government policy. British Critics of Portugal before the First World War problematises Anglo-Portuguese relations around the concept forwarded by Amilcar Cabral, and others, that Portuguese colonialism was the colonialism of the semi-colonised. It makes a broader contribution to the study of empires, and to the causes of the First World War in AngloPortugueseGerman relations.
Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections
by Alexander GuerreroDemocracy is in trouble. What is going wrong? What should we do? Lottocracy argues that, perhaps surprisingly, the problem is with the heart of modern democracy: the election. Elections are failing as accountability mechanisms. Elections provide powerful short-term incentives, leading elected politicians to downplay long-term catastrophic concerns. Elections create division where none need exist. The most powerful among us take advantage of this to control who is elected, what policies are enacted, and which problems are ignored. Policy complexity, citizen ignorance, elite capture and manipulation, algorithmically reinforced echo chambers, intensifying partisan division and distrust, and the dissolution of political community combine to render modern electoral democracies incapable of helping us solve the urgent problems we face. What should we do? Alexander Guerrero takes seriously the possibility that although electoral democracy has been better than all systems that have been tried, the basic mechanism at its core-the election-is broken, and unworkable under modern political conditions. Lottocracy moves past the Churchillian shrug ("the worst system, except for all the others"), introducing a new form of democracy: lottocracy. Lottocratic systems include many new elements, but the most striking is the shift from using elected representatives to using representatives selected through lottery. Guerrero introduces and discusses lottocratic systems, their potential advantages, and potential concerns. The argument engages with foundational philosophical questions, considering how rights of political participation, political equality, political power, considerations of accountability and legitimacy, and the nature of democracy itself are illuminated and reconfigured once we move past the electoral representative framework.
Love and its Place in Virtue
by Christine SwantonIn Love and its Place in Virtue, Christine Swanton argues for an original position on the relations between love and virtue and love and virtue ethics. For this task the distinction between love as an emotion or emotional orientation and virtuous forms of love is central, as is the role of a conception of practical wisdom in virtuous love. How love features in virtue in general, including virtues which are not virtues of love, is the central theme. This book integrates virtue ethics with a renewed interest in the role of love in ethics. Until now virtue ethics and philosophical accounts of love have been separate fields. In Swanton's account of love she argues that there are many criteria for love which feature in various ways in the different forms of love. Central is the distinction between relational love between individuals and lovingness (in its various forms) as a fundamental emotional orientation towards the world as a whole (a Grundstimmung). Love and its Place in Virtue discusses "foundational" love (universal love, self-love and dwelling love), some of the impartial virtues of love, notably universal beneficence, impartial caring and forgiveness, as well as the relation between love and the personal virtue of justice, arguing that though justice is a virtue of respect it should be loving.
Love And Power: The Role Of Religion And Morality In American Politics
by Michael J. PerryIn this sequel to hisMorality, Politics, and Law, Michael Perry addresses the proper relation of moral convictions to the politics of a morally pluralistic society. While his analysis focuses on religious morality, Perry's argument applies to morality generally. Contending that no justification of a contested political choice can be neutral among competing conceptions of human good, the author develops an ideal of "ecumenical politics" in which moral convictions about human good can be brought to bear in a productive way in political argument.
Lysis
by PlatoNo answer is given in the Lysis to the question, ‘What is Friendship?’ any more than in the Charmides to the question, ‘What is Temperance?’ There are several resemblances in the two Dialogues: the same youthfulness and sense of beauty pervades both of them; they are alike rich in the description of Greek life. The question is again raised of the relation of knowledge to virtue and good, which also recurs in the Laches; and Socrates appears again as the elder friend of the two boys, Lysis and Menexenus. In the Charmides, as also in the Laches, he is described as middle-aged; in the Lysis he is advanced in years. The Dialogue consists of two scenes or conversations which seem to have no relation to each other. The first is a conversation between Socrates and Lysis, who, like Charmides, is an Athenian youth of noble descent and of great beauty, goodness, and intelligence: this is carried on in the absence of Menexenus, who is called away to take part in a sacrifice. Socrates asks Lysis whether his father and mother do not love him very much? ‘To be sure they do.’ ‘Then of course they allow him to do exactly as he likes.’ ‘Of course not: the very slaves have more liberty than he has.’ ‘But how is this?’ ‘The reason is that he is not old enough.’ ‘No; the real reason is that he is not wise enough: for are there not some things which he is allowed to do, although he is not allowed to do others?’ ‘Yes, because he knows them, and does not know the others.’ This leads to the conclusion that all men everywhere will trust him in what he knows, but not in what he does not know; for in such matters he will be unprofitable to them, and do them no good. And no one will love him, if he does them no good; and he can only do them good by knowledge; and as he is still without knowledge, he can have as yet no conceit of knowledge. In this manner Socrates reads a lesson to Hippothales, the foolish lover of Lysis, respecting the style of conversation which he should address to his beloved. After the return of Menexenus, Socrates, at the request of Lysis, asks him a new question: ‘What is friendship? You, Menexenus, who have a friend already, can tell me, who am always longing to find one, what is the secret of this great blessing.’
Magazine (Object Lessons)
by Prof Jeff JarvisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom - enabled by new technologies - as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Maimon's Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking: A Translation and Commentary
by Timothy FranzThis is the first English translation of Salomon Maimon's Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking, originally published in Berlin in 1794. Maimon came from an impoverished yet culturally rich Lithuanian Jewish background to write brilliantly speculative philosophy in Germany in the immediate wake of Immanuel Kant's revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason. His passionate search for the truth quickly led him to try to complete Kant's conceptual system in ways that inspired Fichte's philosophy of the transcendental self and anticipated Schelling's and Hegel's philosophies of the world-soul. However, Maimon grew beyond these initial ideas to develop a sophisticated philosophy of reflection. He argued that philosophical knowledge must arise from reflection on the principles of valid cognition. In the New Logic, he conducts this reflection and develops from it systematic accounts of logic, cognition, scientific methodology, and metaphysics. He presents it as a unified improvement of Kant's Critique. Maimon also based his mature philosophies of ethics, natural rights, aesthetics, and religion on this work. Timothy Franz translates the New Logic along with the Letters of Philalethes to Aenesidemus, in which Maimon imagined conversations with his contemporaries, two hostile reviews which Maimon vigorously annotated, and relevant letters to Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte. Franz prefaces the text with a new history of Maimon's intellectual development, an introduction that relates the New Logic to contemporary Kant scholarship, and a detailed philosophical commentary that attempts to reconcile Maimon's idiosyncratically disjointed writing style with his underlying systematic vision, making the New Logic available for further study.
Marx's Ethical Vision
by Vanessa Christina Wills"The communists do not preach morality at all"; this line from The Communist Manifesto might seem to settle the question of whether Marxism has anything to offer moral philosophy. Yet, Marx issued both trenchant critiques of "bourgeois" morality and thundering condemnations of capitalism's "vampire-like" destructiveness. He decried commodity-exchange for corroding our ability to value one another for who we are, not how much our lives could be traded away for. He expressed apparently ethical views about human nature, the conditions necessary for human flourishing, and the desirability of bringing such conditions about--views that are interwoven throughout his life's work, from his youthful philosophical poetry to his unfinished masterpiece, Capital. Renewed attention to Marx's distinctively "dialectical" and historical materialist approach to conflict and change makes sense of this apparent tension in his thought. Following Marx, Vanessa Christina Wills centers labor--human beings satisfying their needs through conscious, purpose-driven, and transformative interaction with the material world--as the essential human activity. Working people's struggles reveal capitalism's worst ravages while pointing to a better future and embodying the only way there: rational transformation of our relationships to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world, so that the human condition emerges not as a burden we must bear but as life we joyfully create. The purposiveness of labor gives rise to a normativity already inherent in the present state of things, one that can guide us in knowing what sort of world we should build and that further prepares us to build it. Rather than "preach morality," the key task for moral philosophy is to theorize in the light that working peoples' struggles for survival shine on capitalism--an existential threat to humanity and the defining ethical problem of our time.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist (Oxford New Histories of Philosophy)
This volume compiles writings by and about Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a nineteenth-century Black radical feminist, an abolitionist, suffragist, and one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America. Mary Ann Shadd Cary includes letters, newspaper articles, organizational records, and never-before-published handwritten notes and essay drafts that illustrate how Shadd Cary participated in major Africana philosophical debates during the nineteenth century. Racial uplift, women's rights, and emigration first emerged as central themes in Shadd Cary's intellectual thought during the 1850s as she grappled with slavery's effects on African Americans. She was frequently mired in controversy during this era, both for her ideas and for outspokenness as a woman. Shadd Cary's support for emigration dissipated in the 1860s. During and after Reconstruction, she advocated for citizenship and economic self-determination for Black people in general and Black women in particular. By the 1880s, Shadd Cary's writings and activism prioritized Black women's needs. Shadd Cary shaped Black radical theory and praxis throughout her lifetime. She is one of many nineteenth-century Black women theorists whose intellectual contributions are often overlooked. By interrogating Shadd Cary's Black radical ethic of care, this book reveals the philosophies that have shaped Black women's centuries-long struggle for rights and freedom.
Mary Moody Emerson And The Origins Of Transcendentalism: A Family History
by Phyllis ColeMary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew's infancy, in both private and published writings, she celebrated independence, solitude in nature, and inward communion with God. Mary Moody Emerson inherited both resources and constraints from her family, a lineage of Massachusetts ministers who had earlier practiced spiritual awakening and political resistance against England. Cole discovers a previously unexamined Emerson tradition of fervent piety in the ancestors' own writing and Mary's preservation of their memory. She also examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker. Cole's biography explores this reading and writing as both a woman's vocation and a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helping to raise her nephews after their father's death, Mary Moody Emerson urged Waldo the college student to seek solitude in nature and become a divine poet. Cole's pioneering study, tracing crucial lines of influence from Mary Emerson's heretofore unknown texts to her nephew's major works, establishes a fresh and vital source for a central American literary tradition.
Mask (Object Lessons)
by Dr. Sharrona PearlObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.From the theater mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks – as faces – are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponized and politicized, Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object.By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Sharrona Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Mathematical Theologies Osht C: Nicholas Of Cusa And The Legacy Of Thierry Of Chartres
by David Albertson
The Meaning of Truth
by William JamesThe work of a leading figure in the transition from a predominantly European-centered 19th-century philosophy to a new American philosophy, this volume presents a full and definitive expression of the pragmatist epistemology. It encompasses everything James had hitherto written on the theory of knowledge, including later polemic and expository contributions, and replies to previous criticism.
Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines (Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities)
by Stuart MurrayMedical humanities and disability studies are disciplines at the cutting edge of innovative critical work in the study of health and disability, but to date there has been no book-length examination of the relationship between the two. Although each has emerged from different heritages, they share many features, from discussing the complexities of embodiment, identifying processes of exclusion and championing user participation, to a commitment to new forms of critical writing. In/Disciplines explores the connections between the two disciplines in detail. It presents a series of provocations about how they interact, the forms their practice take, and their strengths and weaknesses as working methods. With a focus on life stories that give accounts of health and disability experiences, it mixes creative and critical writing in an accessible manner aimed at a wide audience in both Medical Humanities and Disability Studies, and across new humanities more widely. The book asserts that both disciplines need to evaluate and challenge core assumptions if they are to remain critically relevant in the evolving study of social and cultural understanding of health and disability.
Meditations: with selected correspondence (Oxford World's Classics)
by Marcus Aurelius'Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to live ... while you have life in you, while you still can, make yourself good.' The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) is a private notebook of philosophical reflections, written by a Roman emperor probably on military campaign in Germany. In short, highly charged comments, Marcus draws on Stoic philosophy to confront challenges that he felt acutely, but which are also shared by all human beings - the looming presence of death, making sense of one's social role and projects, the moral significance of the universe. They bring us closer to the personality of the emperor, who is often disillusioned with his own status and with human activities in general; they are both an historical document and a remarkable spiritual diary. This translation by Robin Hard brings out the eloquence and universality of Marcus' thoughts. The introduction and notes by Christopher Gill place the Meditations firmly in the ancient philosophical context. A selection of Marcus' correspondence with his tutor Fronto broadens the picture of the emperor as a person and thinker. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
by Emperor of Rome Marcus AureliusThis work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
