Download or read book Descent of the Dialectic written by Michael J. Thompson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality. This book argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management, leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness. The first half of the book demonstrates the various ways that social power erodes and undermines critical-rational forms of consciousness. The second part of the book constructs an alternative basis for critical reason by showing how it requires seeing human value as essentially ontological: that is, constituted by objective forms of sociality that either promote human freedom or pervert our capacities and drive toward pathological forms of life. The philosophical claim is that a critical theory of ethics must be rooted in these concrete forms of life and that this will serve as a critical vantage point for critical political judgment and transformational praxis. Descent of the Dialectic will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy, political theory, social theory, and critical theory.
Download or read book Descent of the Dialectic written by MICHAEL J. THOMPSON and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2024-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality. This book argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness. The first half of the book demonstrates the various ways that social power erodes and undermines critical-rational forms of consciousness. The second part of the book constructs an alternative basis for critical reason by showing how it requires seeing human value as essentially ontological: that is, constituted by objective forms of sociality that either promote human freedom or pervert our capacities and drives toward pathological forms of life. The philosophical claim is that a critical theory of ethics must be rooted in these concrete forms of life and that this will serve as a critical vantage point for critical political judgment and transformational praxis. Descent of the Dialectic will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy, political theory, social theory, and critical theory.
Download or read book Origin of Negative Dialectics written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1979-12 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Buck-Morss examines and stresses the significance of Critical Theory for young West Germ intellectuals after World War II. Looking at the differences between German and American situations during this time period, Origin of Negative Dialectics convincingly sketches the learning process that ended in antagonism. “[The Origin of Negative Dialectics] is by far the best introduction for the American reader to the complex, esoteric, and illusive structure of thought of one of the most seminal Marxian thinkers of the twentieth century. It belongs on the same shelf as Martin Jay’s history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination.” – Lewis A. Coser, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Download or read book Desire Dialectic and Otherness written by William Desmond and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a philosophical effort to deal with the problem of otherness, particularly as it has been bequeathed to contemporary thought by the legacy of German idealism, whose most challenging, influential thinker was Hegel.
Download or read book Desire Dialectic and Otherness written by William Desmond and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-11-08 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many philosophers since Hegel have been disturbed by the thought that philosophy inevitably favors sameness over otherness or identity over difference. Originally published at a time when the issue was not so widely discussed in the English-speaking world, William Desmond here offers a constructive and positive approach to the problem of difference and otherness. He systematically explores the question of dialectic and otherness by analyzing how human desire inevitably seeks immanent wholeness in a manner that opens it to irreducible otherness. He faces the difficulties bequeathed to Continental thought by Hegelian dialectic and its tendency to subordinate difference to identity, whether appropriately or not. Unlike many recent critics of Hegel, he argues that we must preserve what is genuine in dialectic. Granting the positive power of dialectic, Desmond offers his first articulation of a further philosophical possibility--what he terms the Metaxological--a discourse of the "between,"a discourse doing justice to desire's search for wholeness without any truncating of its radical openness to otherness. In a wide-ranging yet unified discussion, Desmond tackles such issues as the nature of the self, the ambiguous restlessness and inherent power of being revealed by human desire, desire's relation to transcendence, its openness to otherness in agapeic good will and in relation to the sublime as an aesthetic infinitude. Finally, Desmond brings this metaxological understanding to bear on the metaphysical question of the ultimate origin. This book is a remarkable introduction to Desmond's metaxological philosophy, prefiguring many of the ideas with which his later thought is associated. This second edition contains a substantial new preface and an afterword to each chapter in which Desmond reflects on the material from the standpoint of his current thinking.
Download or read book The Origins of Liberty An Essay in Platonic Ontology written by Alexander Zistakis and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike the vast majority of existing literature on Plato, this book seeks to argue that liberty constitutes the central notion and preoccupation of Platonic thought and that his theory of ideas is indeed a theory of liberty. Moreover, this book contends that Plato’s thought can be understood to be both one of liberty and a theory of liberation. Bound up in its efforts to reveal both the ideal liberty and the conditions and possibility of its existence in the so-called ‘real world,’ the thought of liberty tends to be all-encompassing. Consequently, this book seeks to expose how liberty can be understood to influence Plato’s ontological form of analysis in relation to politics, philosophy, and anthropology, as well as its influence on the structural unity of all three. Understood from such a perspective, this book frames Platonic philosophy as primarily an investigation, an articulation and as a way of establishing the relationship between the individual and the collective. Importantly, this relationship is acknowledged to be the natural and original framework for any conception and exercise of human liberty, especially within democratic theory and politics. By treating Plato’s philosophy as a continuous effort to find modes and dimensions of liberation in and through different forms of this relationship, this book hopes to not only engage in the discussion about the meaning of Platonic ontological-political insights on different grounds, but also to provide a different perspective for the evaluation of its relevance to the main contemporary issues and problems regarding liberty, liberation, democracy and politics. This book will be of interest to both undergraduate students, experienced scholars and researchers, as well as to the general public who have an interest in philosophy, classics, and political theory.
Download or read book Liberation Method and Dialogue written by Roberto S. Goizueta and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the theological method of liberation theologian Enrique Dussel and, by comparing it with the meta-method of Bernard Lonergan, establishes a paradigm for international theological dialogue. The author suggests that Dussel's non-reductionist understanding of liberation and Lonergan's understanding of the subject-as-subject provide a methodological foundation for critical dialogue between Latin American and North American theologians. The methodological maturation of liberation theology rehearsed in this study suggests how the insights of Latin American theology demand the development of an indigenous form of North American theology of liberation.
Download or read book Dialectics and the Sublime in Underhill s Mysticism written by Peter Chong-Beng Gan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a study of Evelyn Underhill’s premier work on mysticism, using Hegel’s dialectics and Kant’s theory of the sublime as interpretive tools. It especially focuses on two prominent features of Underhill’s text: the description of the mystical life as one permeated by an intense love between the mystic and infinite reality, and the detailed delineation of stages of mystical development. Given these two features, the text lends itself to a construction of a valuable discourse predicated on dialecticism, sublimity, and mysticism. The book also articulates a number of insights into the content and nature of the writings of Christian mystics.
Download or read book Deleuze s Philosophical Lineage written by Graham Jones and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is increasingly gaining the prestige that its astonishing inventiveness calls for in the Anglo-American theoretical context. His wide-ranging works on the history of philosophy, cinema, painting, literature and politics are being taken up and put to work across disciplinary divides and in interesting and surprising ways. However, the backbone of Deleuze's philosophy - the many and varied sources from which he draws the material for his conceptual innovation - has until now remained relatively obscure and unexplored. This book takes as its goal the examination of this rich theoretical background. Presenting essays by a range of the world's foremost Deleuze scholars, and a number of up and coming theorists of his work, the book is composed of in-depth analyses of the key figures in Deleuze's lineage whose significance - as a result of either their obscurity or the complexity of their place in the Deleuzean text - has not previously been well understood. This work will prove indispensable to students and scholars seeking to understand the context from which Deleuze's ideas emerge.Included are essays on Deleuze's relationship to figures as varied as Marx, Simondon, Wronski, Hegel, Hume, Maimon, Ruyer, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Reimann, Leibniz, Bergson and Freud.
Download or read book Athens Victorious written by Greg Recco and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Republic is typically thought to recommend a form of government that, from our current perspective, seems perniciously totalitarian. Athens Victorious demonstrates that Plato intended quite the opposite: to demonstrate the superiorityof a democratic constitution. Greg Recco provides a brilliant rereading of Book Eight. Often considered an anticlimax, Book Eight seems to be a mere catalogue of mistakes but is in fact one of Plato's most neglected literary creations: a mythic or epic restaging of the Peloponnesian War that pitted Sparta's militaristic oligarchy against Athens' democracy. In Plato's reenactment, Athens wins. Recco argues that the values identified in Book Eight as distinctively democratic were the very ones that served as the unannounced touchstones of moral and political judgment throughout the dialogue.Athens Victorious is an important reinterpretation ofThe Republic. It is an excellent resource for students and scholars of Classical Studies, Philosophy, and Political Theory.
Download or read book Descent Into Discourse written by Bryan D. Palmer and published by . This book was released on 1990-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Critical theory is no substitute for historical materialism; language is not life." With this statement, Bryan Palmer enters the debate that is now transforming and disrupting a number of academic disciplines, including political science, women's studies, and history. Focusing on the ways in which literary or critical theory is being promoted within the field of social history, he argues forcefully that the current reliance on poststructuralism--with its reification of discourse and avoidance of the structures of oppression and struggles of resistance--obscures the origins, meanings, and consequences of historical events and processes. Palmer is concerned with the emergence of "language" as a central focus of intellectual work in the twentieth century. He locates the implosion of theory that moved structuralism in the direction of poststructuralism and deconstruction in what he calls the descent into discourse. Few historians who champion poststructuralist thought, according to Palmer, appreciate historical materialism's capacity to address discourse meaningfully. Nor do many of the advocates of language within the field of social history have an adequate grounding in the theoretical making of the project they champion so ardently. Palmer roots his polemical challenge in an effort to "introduce historians more fully to the theoretical writing that many are alluding to and drawing from rather cavalierly." Acknowledging that critical theory can contribute to an understanding of some aspects of the past, Palmer nevertheless argues for the centrality of materialism to the project of history. In specific discussions of how critical theory is constructing histories of politics, class, and gender, he traces the development of the descent into discourse within social history, mapping the limitations of recent revisionist texts. Much of this writing, he contends, is undertheorized and represents a problematic retreat from prior histories that attempted to address such material forces as economic structures, political power, and class struggle. Descent into Discourse counters current intellectual fashion with an eloquent argument for the necessity to analyze and appreciate lived experience and the structures of subordination and power in any quest for historical meaning.
Download or read book Negativity and Politics written by Diana Coole and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2000. Although frequently invoked by philosophers and political theorists, the theory of negativity has received remarkably little sustained attention. Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and dialectics from Kant to poststructuralism is the first full length study of this crucial problematic within philosophy and political theory. Diana Coole clearly and skilfully shows how the problem of negativity lies at the heart of philosophical and political debate. First, she explores the meaning of negativity as it appears in modern and postmodern thinking. Second, she sets out the significance of negativity for politics and our understanding of what constitutes the political. A key theme of Negativity and Politics is the recurring hostility between the dialectical use of negativity found in Hegel and running through Marxism and critical theory, and the Dionysian use of negativity as developed by Nietzsche and found in important strands of French thought. Diana Coole shows how the appropriation of negativity in both cases threatens but also informs our understanding of politics and the political. A fascinating and bold intervention in political theory and philosophy, Negativity and Politics will be of interest to all those in politics, philosophy and contemporary social theory.
Download or read book Anglo American Encyclopedia written by and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Platonic Dialogue and the Education of the Reader written by A. K. Cotton and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Cotton examines Plato's ideas about education and learning. With a particular focus on the experiences a learner must go through in developing philosophical understanding, the book argues that a reader's experience can be parallel in kind and value to that of the interlocutors we see conversing in the dialogues, in constituting learning. The study suggests that, just as Socratic conversation acts as a context for the interlocutors development of dialectical virtues, so the corpus of Plato's works presents an arena for readers to progress through the different stages of learning, providing them with the stimuli appropriate to their philosophical advancement at each point and encouraging them to take increasing responsibility for their own learning. Accordingly, the study proposes that the shape of the corpus, and the changes we observe between early, middle, and late dialogues, are best interpreted with reference to the changing needs of receivers at different stages of their philosophical development. Individual chapters focus on characterization, argumentation, structure and unity, plot, and myth as means by which the dialogues encourage their readers to engage in this productive and distinctive way.
Download or read book A Less Familiar Plato written by Kevin Corrigan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides new views of perception; embodiment; the Good/Forms; art, imagination, and the divine; interdialogue connections and unwritten teachings
Download or read book Hitchcock s Romantic Irony written by Richard Allen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive worldview-the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is achieved through a titillating combination of suspense and black humor that subverts the moral framework of the romantic thriller, and a meticulous approach to visual style that articulates the lure of human perversity even as the ideal of romance is being deliriously affirmed. Discussing more than thirty films from the director's English and American periods, Allen explores the filmmaker's adoption of the idioms of late romanticism, his orchestration of narrative point of view and suspense, and his distinctive visual strategies of aestheticism and expressionism and surrealism.
Download or read book The Encyclopaedia Britannica Pay to Ree written by and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
