Download or read book On the Duties of Philosophers written by Eric v.d. Luft and published by Gegensatz Press. This book was released on 2020-09-13 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how and why philosophy is the most important and most practical of all human endeavors, because its mission is to sit in judgment of everything, including itself.
Download or read book Philosophers in the Republic written by Roslyn Weiss and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Plato’s Republic Socrates contends that philosophers make the best rulers because only they behold with their mind’s eye the eternal and purely intelligible Forms of the Just, the Noble, and the Good. When, in addition, these men and women are endowed with a vast array of moral, intellectual, and personal virtues and are appropriately educated, surely no one could doubt the wisdom of entrusting to them the governance of cities. Although it is widely—and reasonably—assumed that all the Republic’s philosophers are the same, Roslyn Weiss argues in this boldly original book that the Republic actually contains two distinct and irreconcilable portrayals of the philosopher. According to Weiss, Plato’s two paradigms of the philosopher are the "philosopher by nature" and the "philosopher by design." Philosophers by design, as the allegory of the Cave vividly shows, must be forcibly dragged from the material world of pleasure to the sublime realm of the intellect, and from there back down again to the "Cave" to rule the beautiful city envisioned by Socrates and his interlocutors. Yet philosophers by nature, described earlier in the Republic, are distinguished by their natural yearning to encounter the transcendent realm of pure Forms, as well as by a willingness to serve others—at least under appropriate circumstances. In contrast to both sets of philosophers stands Socrates, who represents a third paradigm, one, however, that is no more than hinted at in the Republic. As a man who not only loves "what is" but is also utterly devoted to the justice of others—even at great personal cost—Socrates surpasses both the philosophers by design and the philosophers by nature. By shedding light on an aspect of the Republic that has escaped notice, Weiss’s new interpretation will challenge Plato scholars to revisit their assumptions about Plato’s moral and political philosophy.
Download or read book The Failures of Philosophy written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to address the historical failures of philosophy—and what we can learn from them Philosophers are generally unaware of the failures of philosophy, recognizing only the failures of particular theories, which are then remedied with other theories. But, taking the long view, philosophy has actually collapsed several times, been abandoned, sometimes for centuries, and been replaced by something quite different. When it has been revived it has been with new aims that are often accompanied by implausible attempts to establish continuity with a perennial philosophical tradition. What do these failures tell us? The Failures of Philosophy presents a historical investigation of philosophy in the West, from the perspective of its most significant failures: attempts to provide an account of the good life, to establish philosophy as a discipline that can stand in judgment over other forms of thought, to set up philosophy as a theory of everything, and to construe it as a discipline that rationalizes the empirical and mathematical sciences. Stephen Gaukroger argues that these failures reveal more about philosophical inquiry and its ultimate point than its successes ever could. These failures illustrate how and why philosophical inquiry has been conceived and reconceived, why philosophy has been thought to bring distinctive skills to certain questions, and much more. An important and original account of philosophy’s serial breakdowns, The Failures of Philosophy ultimately shows how these shortcomings paradoxically reveal what matters most about the field.
Download or read book Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy written by Peter Olsthoorn and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military and some other pockets of resistance, the notion of honor has become seriously out of date, while the term itself has almost disappeared from our moral language. Most of us think that people ought to do what is right based on a love for jus-tice rather than from a concern with how we are perceived by others. Wide-ranging and accessible, the book explores the role of honor in not only philosophy but also literature and war to make the case that honor can still play an important role in contemporary life.
Download or read book Animal Rights and Wrongs written by Roger Scruton and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this acclaimed book, Scruton takes the issues relating to vivisection, hunting, animal testing and BSE and places them in a wider framework of thought and feeling. Now available in paperback
Download or read book The Republic written by By Plato and published by BookRix. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BCE, concerning the definition of justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man. The dramatic date of the dialogue has been much debated and though it must take place some time during the Peloponnesian War, "there would be jarring anachronisms if any of the candidate specific dates between 432 and 404 were assigned". It is Plato's best-known work and has proven to be one of the most intellectually and historically influential works of philosophy and political theory. In it, Socrates along with various Athenians and foreigners discuss the meaning of justice and examine whether or not the just man is happier than the unjust man by considering a series of different cities coming into existence "in speech", culminating in a city (Kallipolis) ruled by philosopher-kings; and by examining the nature of existing regimes. The participants also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the roles of the philosopher and of poetry in society.
Download or read book What Do Philosophers Do written by Penelope Maddy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you know the world around you isn't just an elaborate dream, or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? If all you have to go on are various lights, sounds, smells, tastes and tickles, how can you know what the world is really like, or even whether there is a world beyond your own mind? Questions like these -- familiar from science fiction and dorm room debates -- lie at the core of venerable philosophical arguments for radical skepticism: the stark contention that we in fact know nothing at all about the world, that we have no more reason to believe any claim -- that there are trees, that we have hands -- than we have to disbelieve it. Like non-philosophers in their sober moments, philosophers, too, find this skeptical conclusion preposterous, but they're faced with those famous arguments: the Dream Argument, the Argument from Illusion, the Infinite Regress of Justification, the more recent Closure Argument. If these can't be met, they raise a serious challenge not just to philosophers, but to anyone responsible enough to expect her beliefs to square with her evidence. What Do Philosophers Do? takes up the skeptical arguments from this everyday point of view, and ultimately concludes that they don't undermine our ordinary beliefs or our ordinary ways of finding out about the world. In the process, Maddy examines and evaluates a range of philosophical methods -- common sense, scientific naturalism, ordinary language, conceptual analysis, therapeutic approaches -- as employed by such philosophers as Thomas Reid, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin. The result is a revealing portrait of what philosophers do, and perhaps a quiet suggestion for what they should do, for what they do best.
Download or read book Plato s Natural Philosophy written by Thomas Kjeller Johansen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's dialogue the Timaeus-Critias presents two connected accounts, that of the story of Atlantis and its defeat by ancient Athens and that of the creation of the cosmos by a divine craftsman. This book offers a unified reading of the dialogue. It tackles a wide range of interpretative and philosophical issues. Topics discussed include the function of the famous Atlantis story, the notion of cosmology as 'myth' and as 'likely', and the role of God in Platonic cosmology. Other areas commented upon are Plato's concepts of 'necessity' and 'teleology', the nature of the 'receptacle', the relationship between the soul and the body, the use of perception in cosmology, and the work's peculiar monologue form. The unifying theme is teleology: Plato's attempt to show the cosmos to be organised for the good. A central lesson which emerges is that the Timaeus is closer to Aristotle's physics than previously thought.
Download or read book Thought Economics written by Vikas Shah and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including conversations with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, Vikas Shah quizzes the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all.
Download or read book Laws written by Plato and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Laws is Plato's last, longest, and perhaps, most famous work. It presents a conversation on political philosophy between three elderly men: an unnamed Athenian, a Spartan named Megillus, and a Cretan named Clinias. They worked to create a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony that would make all of its citizens happy and virtuous. In this work, Plato combines political philosophy with applied legislation, going into great detail concerning what laws and procedures should be in the state. For example, they consider whether drunkenness should be allowed in the city, how citizens should hunt, and how to punish suicide. The principles of this book have entered the legislation of many modern countries and provoke a great interest of philosophers even in the 21st century.
Download or read book The Philosophy Scare written by John McCumber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents John McCumber s extensive researches into the fascinating story of how a New and Improved Philosophy was born during the early Cold War period. McCumber argues that underlying the search for truth through the application of logic and mathematics to experience was the repressive politics of the McCarthy Era. Utilizing ideas from both Kuhn and Foucault he uncovers the origins of the paradigm of philosophy as a science which came to dominate much of American intellectual life in general and the teaching of philosophy in particular in the years 1947-1959 and whose effects are still felt today. McCumber argues outward from the particularly egregious example of how philosophy came to be taught at UCLA during this period to discussions of the rise of analytic philosophy, rational choice theory, and reductionistic theories of the stratified sciences. Tellingly, he identifies stealth philosophy as one aspect of Cold War mentality: philosophy professors just didn t talk about certain things (such as Marxism) or publicly take them seriously for fear that the general public could not handle it. As a consequence they preferred to stay out of the public eye as much as possible, and even out of the life of the rest of the university. Philosophy departments across the country became hermetically sealed bastions of politically inconsequential conceptual analysis. This bold and original work makes an important contribution to the history of American philosophy and Cold War studies."
Download or read book The Art of Living written by John Sellars and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient philosophy was conceived as a way of life or an art of living, but if ancient philosophers did think that philosophy should transform an individual's way of life, then what conception of philosophy stands behind this claim? John Sellars explores this question through a detailed account of ancient Stoic ideas about the nature and function of philosophy. He considers the Socratic background to Stoic thinking about philosophy and Sceptical objections raised by Sextus Empiricus, and offers readings of late Stoic texts by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Sellars argues that the conception of philosophy as an 'art of living', inaugurated by Socrates and developed by the Stoics, has persisted since antiquity and remains a living alternative to modern attempts to assimilate philosophy to the natural sciences. It also enables us to rethink the relationship between an individual's philosophy and their biography. The book appears here in paperback for the first time with a new Preface by the author.
Download or read book The Ontology and Function of Money written by Leonidas Zelmanovitz and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central thesis of the book is that in order to evaluate monetary policy, one should have a clear idea about the characteristics and functions of money as it evolved and in its current form. That is to say that without an understanding about how money evolved as a social institution, what it is today, and what is possible to know about monetary phenomena, it is not possible to develop a meaningful ethics for money; or, to put it differently, to find what kind of institutional arrangements may be deemed good money for the kind of society we are in. And without that, one faces severe limitations in offering a normative position about monetary policy. The project is, consequently, an interdisciplinary one. Its main thread is an inquiry of moral philosophy and its foundations, as applied to money, in order to create tools to evaluate public policy in regard to money, banking, and public finance; and the views of different schools on those topics are discussed. The book is organized in parts on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics of money to facilitate the presentation of all the subjects discussed to an educated readership (and not necessarily just one with a background in economics).
Download or read book The Happiness Philosophers written by Bart Schultz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A colorful history of utilitarianism told through the lives and ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and its other founders In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries. Best known for arguing that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong," utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin (the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley), Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Together, they had a profound influence on nineteenth-century reforms, in areas ranging from law, politics, and economics to morals, education, and women's rights. Their work transformed life in ways we take for granted today. Bentham even advocated the decriminalization of same-sex acts, decades before the cause was taken up by other activists. As Bertrand Russell wrote about Bentham in the late 1920s, "There can be no doubt that nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived." Yet in part because of its misleading name and the caricatures popularized by figures as varied as Dickens, Marx, and Foucault, utilitarianism is sometimes still dismissed as cold, calculating, inhuman, and simplistic. By revealing the fascinating human sides of the remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, The Happiness Philosophers provides a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives—one that also helps explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and is again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems.
Download or read book Nicomachean Ethics written by Aristotle and published by SDE Classics. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Ethics of Giving written by Paul Woodruff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In giving to charity, should we strive to do the greatest good or promote a lesser good? This is a unique collection of new papers on philanthropy from a range of philosophical perspectives, including intuitionism, virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, theories of justice, and ideals of personal integrity.
Download or read book Duty to Self written by Paul Schofield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That we owe duties to others is a commonplace, the subject of countless philosophical treatises and monographs. Morality is interpersonal and other-directed, many claim. But what of what we owe ourselves? In Duty to Self, Paul Schofield flips the paradigm of interpersonal morality by arguing that there are moral duties we owe ourselves, and that in light of this, philosophers need to significantly rethink many of their views about practical reason, moral psychology, politics, and moral emotions. Among these views is the idea that divisions within a person's life enable her to relate to herself second-personally--that is, as though she were relating to a distinct other person--in the way required by morality. Further, there exist political duties owed to the self, which the state may coerce persons to perform. This amounts to a novel argument for paternalistic law, which appeals to considerations of right, justice, and freedom in order to justify coercing a person for their own sake--a liberal justification for an idea typically thought to be deeply at odds with liberalism. Schofield untangles how this view would impact various issues in applied ethics and political philosophy, for example, financial prudence and risk, the pursuit of the good life, and medical ethics. Duty to Self is essential for anyone working in moral and political philosophy or political theory.
