Download or read book Play as Symbol of the World written by Eugen Fink and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eugen Fink is considered one of the clearest interpreters of phenomenology and was the preferred conversational partner of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Play as Symbol of the World, Fink offers an original phenomenology of play as he attempts to understand the world through the experience of play. He affirms the philosophical significance of play, why it is more than idle amusement, and reflects on the movement from "child's play" to "cosmic play." Well-known for its nontechnical, literary style, this skillful translation by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner invites engagement with Fink's philosophy of play and related writings on sports, festivals, and ancient cult practices.
Download or read book Human Existence and Transcendence written by Jean Wahl and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William C. Hackett’s English translation of Jean Wahl’s Existence humaine et transcendence (1944) brings back to life an all-but-forgotten book that provocatively explores the philosophical concept of transcendence. Based on what Emmanuel Levinas called “Wahl’s famous lecture” from 1937, Existence humaine et transcendence captured a watershed moment of European philosophy. Included in the book are Wahl's remarkable original lecture and the debate that ensued, with significant contributions by Gabriel Marcel and Nicolai Berdyaev, as well as letters submitted on the occasion by Heidegger, Levinas, Jaspers, and other famous figures from that era. Concerned above all with the ineradicable felt value of human experience by which any philosophical thesis is measured, Wahl makes a daring clarification of the concept of transcendence and explores its repercussions through a masterly appeal to many (often surprising) places within the entire history of Western thought. Apart from its intrinsic philosophical significance as a discussion of the concepts of being, the absolute, and transcendence, Wahl's work is valuable insofar as it became a focal point for a great many other European intellectuals. Hackett has provided an annotated introduction to orient readers to this influential work of twentieth-century French philosophy and to one of its key figures.
Download or read book Socrates and Self Knowledge written by Christopher Moore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic study of Socrates' interest in selfhood, examining ancient philosophical ideas of what constitutes the self.
Download or read book Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition written by Ahmed Alwishah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Aristotle's vast influence upon the medieval Arabic philosophical tradition and includes contributions from every discipline within his corpus.
Download or read book Plotinus on the Soul written by Damian Caluori and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of Plotinus' theory of the soul for half a century.
Download or read book Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace written by Gregory M. Reichberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of Aquinas's teaching on just war, its antecedents, and its reception by subsequent thinkers.
Download or read book Explanatory Pluralism written by C. Mantzavinos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explaining phenomena is one of the main activities in which scientists engage. This book proposes a new philosophical theory of scientific explanation by developing and defending the position of explanatory pluralism with the help of the notion of 'explanatory games'. Mantzavinos provides a descriptive account of the explanatory activity of scientists in different domains and shows how they differ from commonsensical explanations offered in everyday life by ordinary people and also from explanations offered in religious contexts. He also shows how an evaluation and a critical appraisal of explanations put forward in different social arenas can take place on the basis of different values. Explanatory Pluralism provides solutions to all important descriptive and normative problems of the philosophical theory of explanation as illustrated in sophisticated case studies from economics and medicine, but also from mythology and religion.
Download or read book Divination and Human Nature written by Peter T. Struck and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divination and Human Nature casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, Divination and Human Nature illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.
Download or read book Essays on Plato s Epistemology written by Franco Trabattoni and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Innovating approach to Plato’s philosophy Through a careful survey of several significant Platonic texts, mainly focussing on the nature of knowledge, Essays on Plato’s Epistemology offers the reader a fresh and promising approach to Plato’s philosophy as a whole. From the very earliest reception of Plato’s philosophy, there has been a conflict between a dogmatic and a sceptical interpretation of his work and thought. Moreover, the two sides are often associated, respectively, with a metaphysical and an anti-metaphysical approach. This book, continuing a line of thought that is nowadays strongly present in the secondary literature – and also followed by the author in over thirty years of research –, maintains that a third way of thinking is required. Against the widespread view that an anti-dogmatic philosophy must go together with an anti-metaphysical stance, Trabattoni shows that for Plato, on the contrary, a sober and reasonable assessment of both the powers and limits of human reason relies on a proper metaphysical outlook.
Download or read book Puzzling Identities written by Vincent Descombes and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a logical concept, identity refers to one and the same thing. So how can it describe membership in various groups, as in ethnic and religious identity? Bringing together an analytic conception of identity with a psychosocial understanding, Vincent Descombes demonstrates why a person has more than one answer to the essential question Who am I?
Download or read book Ultimate Questions written by Bryan Magee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to live meaningfully in the face of the unknowable We human beings had no say in existing—we just opened our eyes and found ourselves here. We have a fundamental need to understand who we are and the world we live in. Reason takes us a long way, but mystery remains. When our minds and senses are baffled, faith can seem justified—but faith is not knowledge. In Ultimate Questions, acclaimed philosopher Bryan Magee provocatively argues that we have no way of fathoming our own natures or finding definitive answers to the big questions we all face. With eloquence and grace, Magee urges us to be the mapmakers of what is intelligible, and to identify the boundaries of meaningfulness. He traces this tradition of thought to his chief philosophical mentors—Locke, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer—and shows why this approach to the enigma of existence can enrich our lives and transform our understanding of the human predicament. As Magee puts it, "There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark." The crowning achievement to a distinguished philosophical career, Ultimate Questions is a deeply personal meditation on the meaning of life and the ways we should live and face death.
Download or read book Problems from Reid written by James Van Cleve and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A contemporary of Hume, Thomas Reid is especially known today for his opposition to skepticism and "the way of ideas" (the notion that what the mind perceives is not objective reality, but simply an internal image). Reid was one of the first to question this view, which is still prevalent today, and pointed out some of the negative consequences to which it leads. For the growing recognition about these and other contributions in epistemology, theory of action, and moral theory, Reid has increasingly attracted attention in Anglo-American philosophy over the last twenty years"--
Download or read book New Approaches to Neo Kantianism written by Nicolas de Warren and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of new essays examining the impact of Neo-Kantianism on a range of philosophical topics and fields of study.
Download or read book Plato s Animals written by Jeremy Bell and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A unique and intriguing point of entry into the dialogues and a variety of concerns from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics, politics, and aesthetics.” —Eric Sanday, University of Kentucky Plato’s Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato’s dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato’s work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato’s understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English. “Plato’s Animals is a strong volume of beautifully written paeans to postmodern themes found in premodern thought.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews “Shows readers of Plato that he remains significant to issues currently pursued in Continental thought and especially in relation to Derrida and Heidegger.” —Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver “Will provide fertile ground for future work in this area.” —Jill Gordon, author of Plato’s Erotic World
Download or read book Adorno and Existence written by Peter E. Gordon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise. As Peter E. Gordon shows, Adorno’s writings on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger present us with a photographic negative—a philosophical portrait of the author himself.
Download or read book Nishida Kitaro s Chiasmatic Chorology written by John W. M. Krummel and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945) is considered Japan's first and greatest modern philosopher. As founder of the Kyoto School, he began a rigorous philosophical engagement and dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, especially the work of G. W. F. Hegel. John W. M. Krummel explores the Buddhist roots of Nishida's thought and places him in connection with Hegel and other philosophers of the Continental tradition. Krummel develops notions of self-awareness, will, being, place, the environment, religion, and politics in Nishida's thought and shows how his ethics of humility may best serve us in our complex world.
Download or read book Truth and Irony written by Terence J. Martin and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tapping into selected works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, this book offers a series of philosophical meditations designed to retrieve and deploy a distinctively Erasmian manner of thinking - one that is capacious in its perception, agile in its judgments, and unsettling in its irony. In purpose, it takes a philosophical route, addressing perennial questions of self-knowledge - what we can know and how best to communicate what we take to be true, what we ought to do or how we should live, and what we might hope for or what would offer us fulfilment. In method, however, this work taps into the various strategies of irony at play in the works of Erasmus, looking for guidance in handling these age-old questions. What readers will find in Erasmus is a knack for playfully reversing appearances and realities, a penchant for pushing disturbing questions relentlessly to the limit, and a skill for juxtaposing oddly matched opposites. Again and again, Erasmus presses readers to rethink these fundamental questions with dexterity and nuance, ever ready to appreciate the surprising and unsettling upshot of ironic insight.
