Download or read book A Philosophy of Catastrophes or a Catastrophe of Philosophies written by Jacques Richard and published by Ethics International Press. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many currents in philosophical writings, that deal with today's serious ecological problems and the catastrophes they engender. The aim of this book is to show the diversity of these currents and to judge them on the basis of their ability to provide us with concrete tools for getting out of the ecological impasse in which we find ourselves today, notably the urgency to find new types of ecological and human management. Some of these currents are hopeless: they only offer the prospect of a mental adaptation to these catastrophes, or invite us to leave planet earth and take refuge on other planets. Others, of a cynical bent, openly support the forces that have led to the current situation of 'ecological bankruptcy', arguing that the same economic system that has led us to the current ecological impasse will be able to provide us with miraculous technical solutions for our salvation. Still others, the vast majority, are so cut off from the realities of today's economic world, and in particular from the problems of practical business management, that their very general views offer very few operational solutions for changing the situation. And yet there are some philosophies, admittedly very few in number, that seem appropriate to the radical transformation that is needed of the management of capitalist firms: the philosophy of catastrophes is not necessarily synonymous with a catastrophe of philosophies. The author draws on philosophy , economics, accounting, and history to address what many consider humanity’s most serious challenge.
Download or read book Ethics for a Broken World written by Tim Mulgan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine living in the future in a world already damaged by humankind, a world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs and where a chaotic climate makes life precarious. Then imagine looking back into the past, back to our own time and assessing the ethics of the early twenty-first century. "Ethics for a Broken World" imagines how the future might judge us and how living in a time of global environmental degradation might utterly reshape the politics and ethics of the future. This book is presented as a series of history of philosophy lectures given in the future, studying the classic texts from a past age of affluence, our own time. The central ethical questions of our time are shown to look very different from the perspective of a ruined world. The aim of "Ethics for a Broken" World is to look at our present with the benefit of hindsight - to reimagine contemporary philosophy in an historical context - and to highlight the contingency of our own moral and political ideals.
Download or read book Catastrophe and Philosophy written by David J. Rosner and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a different approach to the history of philosophy, exploring a neglected theme, the relationship between catastrophe and philosophy. The book analyzes this theme within texts from ancient times to the present, from a global perspective. The book’s focus is timely and relevant today, as the planet is certainly facing a number of impending catastrophes right now, e.g., environmental degradation, overpopulation, the threat of nuclear war, etc.
Download or read book After Fukushima written by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned philosopher offers “a powerful reflection on our times . . . and the fate of our civilization, as revealed by the catastrophe of Fukushima” (François Raffoul, Louisiana State University). In 2011, a tsunami flooded Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear meltdowns, the effects of which will spread through generations and have an impact on all living things. In After Fukushima, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy examines the nature of catastrophes in the era of globalization and technology. He argues that in today’s interconnected world, the effects of any disaster will spread in the way we currently associate only with nuclear risk. Can a catastrophe be an isolated occurrence? Is there such a thing as a “natural” catastrophe when all of our technologies—nuclear energy, power supply, water supply—are necessarily implicated, drawing together the biological, social, economic, and political? In this provocative and engaging work, Nancy examines these questions and more. Exclusive to this English edition are two interviews with Nancy conducted by Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Yuji Nishiyama and Yotetsu Tonaki.
Download or read book Disasters Core Concepts and Ethical Theories written by Dónal P. O’Mathúna and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Open Access Book is the first to examine disasters from a multidisciplinary perspective. Justification of actions in the face of disasters requires recourse both to conceptual analysis and ethical traditions. Part 1 of the book contains chapters on how disasters are conceptualized in different academic disciplines relevant to disasters. Part 2 has chapters on how ethical issues that arise in relation to disasters can be addressed from a number of fundamental normative approaches in moral and political philosophy. This book sets the stage for more focused normative debates given that no one book can be completely comprehensive. Providing analysis of core concepts, and with real-world relevance, this book should be of interest to disaster scholars and researchers, those working in ethics and political philosophy, as well as policy makers, humanitarian actors and intergovernmental organizations..
Download or read book Ethics for Disaster written by Naomi Zack and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethics for Disaster shows how individual and government preparation and response to hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, pandemics, and other disasters are ethical matters. Confronting the social inequalities revealed by these disasters, we must also acknowledge how the lack of preparation for climate change and pandemics has shifted these threats from modern, isolated disasters into constant contemporary risks. This second edition presents four new chapters about disaster-as-risk from; climate change, the natural elements of earth, air, wind, and fire; the COVID-19 and other pandemics; and innocent victims and refugees. Now more than ever, we need good and just moral principles to guide us through the disruptive crises ahead––especially for minorities. Humanism and humanitarianism are vital. Zack combines moral philosophy, political theory, public policy, and environmental science to present new ways to think about changes in the world we all share.
Download or read book Catastrophizing written by Gerard Passannante and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.
Download or read book The Precipice written by Toby Ord and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker
Download or read book A Philosophy of Ruin written by Nicholas Mancusi and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An InsideHook Best Book of the Year “Riveting fun to read.”—New York Times Book Review A TIME Magazine Best Book of Summer A Vol. 1 Brooklyn Book of the Month A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of Summer An Evening Standard Summer Reading Pick An InsideHook Best Book of the Month “An unforgettable debut. Mancusi is a writer to watch.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel A young philosophy professor finds himself in the middle of a drug-running operation after his personal life derails in this taut, white-knuckle debut for fans of Breaking Bad Oscar Boatwright, a disenchanted philosophy professor, receives terrible news. His mother, on her way home from Hawaii with Oscar’s father, has died midflight, her body cooling for hours until the plane can land. Deeply grieving, Oscar feels his life slipping out of his control. His family is in debt, and desperate to help them, Oscar agrees to help his student Dawn with a drug run. A Philosophy of Ruin rumbles with brooding nihilism, then it cracks like a whip, hurtling Oscar and Dawn toward a terrifying threat on the road. Can Oscar halt the acceleration of chaos? Or was his fate never in his control? Taut, ferocious and blazingly intelligent, A Philosophy of Ruin is a heart-pounding thrill ride into the darkest corners of human geography, and a philosophical reckoning with the forces that determine our destiny.
Download or read book Catastrophe and Redemption written by Jessica Whyte and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been "biopolitics" since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben's thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.
Download or read book Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe written by Isak Winkel Holm and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Søren Kierkegaard's work is teeming with images of earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, burned down cities, and apocalyptic events that 'let the heavens fall and the stars change their places in the overturning of everything'. These disaster images are not just rhetorical packaging of the philosophical and theological content of his works. Rather, disasters play an important but largely understudied role in Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe focuses on prophetic noir in Kierkegaard's work: the sombre mood that is evoked when the shadow of future disaster falls upon the present. Isak Winkel Holm's core contention is that the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard, modelled after the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, contributes to making his works urgently relevant today. From the vantage point of the contemporary world threatened by rapidly evolving climate catastrophes, Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence emerges in a more sombre light, dimmed by the future disaster: to exist, in the emphatic sense Kierkegaard gave to that word, is to live a meaningful human life even if things are darkened by the coming calamity. Thus, a thorough analysis of the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard offers an existential perspective on living in a world threatened by environmental devastation.
Download or read book Tickle Your Catastrophe written by Frederik Le Roy and published by Academia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that takes stock of the current impact of the image and imagination of the catastrophe in art, science and philosophy
Download or read book The Democracy of Suffering written by Todd Dufresne and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Democracy of Suffering philosopher Todd Dufresne provides a strikingly original exploration of the past, present, and future of this epoch, the Anthropocene, demonstrating how the twin crises of reason and capital have dramatically remade the essential conditions for life itself. Images, cartoons, artworks, and quotes pulled from literary and popular culture supplement this engaging and unorthodox look into where we stand amidst the ravages of climate change and capitalist economics. With humour, passion, and erudition, Dufresne diagnoses a frightening new reality and proposes a way forward, arguing that our serial experiences of catastrophic climate change herald an intellectual and moral awakening - one that lays the groundwork, albeit at the last possible moment, for a future beyond individualism, hate, and greed. That future is unapologetically collective. It begins with a shift in human consciousness, with philosophy in its broadest sense, and extends to a reengagement with our greatest ideals of economic, social, and political justice for all. But this collective future, Dufresne argues, is either now or never. Uncovering how we got into this mess and how, if at all, we get out of it, The Democracy of Suffering is a flicker of light, or perhaps a scream, in the face of human extinction and the end of civilization.
Download or read book A Paradise Built in Hell written by Rebecca Solnit and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities? In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.
Download or read book Melville among the Philosophers written by Corey McCall and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-18 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century readers have found Herman Melville’s writing rich with philosophical ideas, yet there has been relatively little written about what, exactly, is philosophically significant about his work and why philosophers are so attracted to Melville in particular. This volume addresses this silence through a series of essays that: (1) examine various philosophical contexts for Melville’s work, (2) take seriously Melville’s writings as philosophy, and (3) consider how modern philosophers have used Melville and the implications of appropriating Melville for contemporary thought. Melville among the Philosophers is ultimately an intervention across literary studies and philosophy that carves new paths into the work of one of America’s most celebrated authors, a man who continues to enchant and challenge readers well into the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Catastrophizing written by Gerard Passannante and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.
Download or read book A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis written by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1755 the city of Lisbon was destroyed by a terrible earthquake. Almost 250 years later, an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean unleashed a tsunami whose devastating effects were felt over a vast area. In each case, a natural catastrophe came to be interpreted as a consequence of human evil. Between these two events, two indisputably moral catastrophes occurred: Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet the nuclear holocaust survivors likened the horror they had suffered to a natural disaster—a tsunami. Jean-Pierre Dupuy asks whether, from Lisbon to Sumatra, mankind has really learned nothing about evil. When moral crimes are unbearably great, he argues, our ability to judge evil is gravely impaired, and the temptation to regard human atrocity as an attack on the natural order of the world becomes irresistible. This impulse also suggests a kind of metaphysical ruse that makes it possible to convert evil into fate, only a fate that human beings may choose to avoid. Postponing an apocalyptic future will depend on embracing this paradox and regarding the future itself in a radically new way. The American edition of Dupuy’s classic essay, first published in 2005, also includes a postscript on the 2011 nuclear accident that occurred in Japan, again as the result of a tsunami.
