Intro -- Contents -- 1: The Medieval Philosophers -- 2: The Birth of Modern Philosophy: The Renaissance Period -- 3: The British Empiricists: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume -- 4: Critical Philosophy: Immanuel Kant -- 5: Idealism and Materialism: Hegel and Marx -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Further Reading -- Picture Credits -- Index -- About the Author.
This collection of essays aims to mark a place for American philosophy as it moves into the twenty-first century. Taking their cue from the work of Peirce, James, Santayana, Dewey, Mead, Buchler, and others, the contributors assess and employ philosophy as an activity taking place within experience and culture. Within the broad background of the American tradition, the essays reveal a variety of approaches to the transition in which American philosophy is currently engaged. Some of the pieces argue from an historical dialogue with the tradition, some are more polemically involved with American philosophy's current status among the contemporary philosophical "schools," and still others seek to reveal the possibilities for the future of American philosophy. In thus addressing past, present, and future, the pieces, taken together, outline a trajectory for American philosophy that reinvents its importance from a new angle of vision
Cover -- Contents -- Contributors -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction to the Volume -- I: Political Philosophy -- Philosophy as Politics: Some Guesses as to the Future of Political Philosophy -- Philosophy as Logo: The Thought of Branding and the Branding of Thought -- II: Philosophy and Science -- Philosophy as Biology: Evolutionary Explanations in Philosophy -- Philosophy as Intensive Science -- Philosophy as Dynamic Reason: The Idea of a Scientific Philosophy -- III: Philosophizing from Different Places -- Philosophy as if Place Mattered: The Situation of African Philosophy -- Philosophy as a Problem in Latin America -- IV: Philosophical Method -- Philosophy as Bricolage -- Philosophy as Judgement -- Philosophy as Nomadism -- Philosophy as an 'As' -- V: Philosophy and Literature -- Philosophy as Poetry: The Intricate Evasions of As -- Philosophy as Sideshadowing: The Philosophical, the Literary, and the Fantastic -- VI: Therapeutic Philosophy -- Philosophy as Therapy -- Philosophy as Listening: The Lessons of Psychoanalysis -- VII: Professional Philosophy -- Philosophy as Profession -- Philosophy as Deep and Shallow Wisdom -- Epilogue: The Limits of Philosophy? -- Philosophy as Saying the Unsayable -- Glossary -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- W -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y
"Every written work," Giorgio Agamben opens the preface to Infancy and History, "can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so." Although that observation applies to any work of writing, the exemplary case is that of a work of philosophy. While every written work is put to work in its nonexistent successor, a work of philosophy is bereft of even that recourse: philosophy is written in the breakdown of destiny, so that every work of philosophy must first and foremost confront the absolute abandonment of its writing. At work in each and every work of philosophy is the question, "What is a work of philosophy?" More concretely, although well-formed and rigorously structured, What is Philosophy? abstains from work. On even a quick reading that fact must be palpable. A seminar paper? An article, or book chapter? Not in the least. Nor, essentially, may the individual pieces that compose it be so developed. Fragments unrecognizable as at one time a cast, inconceivable at a future time as anything else, the position of each piece with respect to the others thwarts development in order to preserve, in its place, the tension of its absence. As such, the articulations internal to each of the three divisions, and between them, are essential. The first division — What is Philosophy? — takes seriously Deleuze and Guattari's contention in their book of the same title that "The nonphilosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but is essentially addressed to nonphilosophers as well" — including the nonphilosopher in every philosopher. The second division — On Argument — interrogates the status and value of evidence, and self-evidence. The third division — On Not Knowing — generalizes a parenthetical observation of Agamben's on Heidegger, "If we may attempt to identify something like the characteristic Stimmung of every thinker, perhaps it is precisely this being delivered over to something that refuses itself that defines the specific emotional tonality of Heidegger's thought": Might not philosophy be defined, the phil of sophia, precisely, as what it is to be delivered over to something that refuses itself?
At the head of The Colbert Report, one of the most popular shows on television, Stephen Colbert is a pop culture phenomenon. More than one million people backed his fake candidacy in the 2008 U.S. presidential election on Facebook, a testament to the particularly rich set of issues and emotions Colbert brings to mind. Stephen Colbert and Philosophy is crammed with thoughtful and amusing chapters, each written by a philosopher and all focused on Colbert's inimitable reality — from his word creations (truthiness, wikiality, freem, and others) to his position as a faux-pundit who openly mocks Fox News and CNN. Although most of the discussion is centered around The Colbert Report, this collection does not neglect either his best-selling book, I Am America (And So Can You!), or his public performances, including his incendiary 2006 White House Press Correspondents' Dinner speech
Applied Legal Philosophy -- Contemporary Legal Philosophy -- Formal Structure of Law -- History of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy -- Justice -- Legal Institutions -- Legal Methods -- Legal Systems -- Liberty and Equality -- Schools of Legal Thought -- Social Philosophy -- The Common Good.-The Science of the Law and Social Sciences -- Theory of Rights.
For centuries philosophers have argued about the existence and nature of God. Do we need God to explain the origins of the universe? Can there be morality without a divine source of goodness? How can God exist when there is so much evil and suffering in the world? All these questions and many more are brought to life with clarity and style in The God of Philosophy. The arguments for and against God''s existence are weighed up, along with discussion of the meaning of religious language, the concept of God and the possibility of life after death. This new edition brings the debate right up to da.
Critic, poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) was a leading figure of German Romanticism. In the two years before his untimely death, he wrote three cycles of lectures intended as part of a larger project to lay the foundations of a new general philosophy. Two of these cycles, 'Philosophie des Lebens' (given in 1827, published 1828) and 'Philosophie des Sprache und des Wortes' (given in December 1828 and published posthumously), are reissued here in an 1847 English translation. The first presents Schlegel's understanding of philosophy as independent of theology or politics, concerned with the 'inner spiritual life' of humankind. The second explores the nature of communication through language and art. Schlegel argues that full human consciousness cannot be restored by Enlightenment science, but only by divine revelation and redemption. He offers no ready-made solutions, but encourages his listeners to develop their own responses to these questions