Download or read book On the Genealogy of Universals written by Fraser MacBride and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of particular and universal have become so familiar that their significance has become difficult to discern, like coins that have been passed back and forth too many times, worn smooth so their values can no longer be read. On the Genealogy of Universals seeks to overcome our sense of over-familiarity with these concepts by providing a case study of their evolution during the late 19th century and early 20th century, a study that shows how the history of these concepts is bound up with the origins and development of analytic philosophy itself. Understanding how these concepts were taken up, transfigured and given up by the early analytic philosophers, enables us to recover and reanimate the debate amongst them that otherwise remains Delphic - to interpret some of the early, originating texts of analytic philosophy that have hitherto baffled commentators, including Moore's early papers, to appreciate afresh the neglected contributions of philosophical figures that historians of analytic philosophy have mostly since forgot, including Stout and Whitehead, and to shed new light upon the relationships of Moore to Russell and Russell to Wittgenstein.
Download or read book On the Genealogy of Universals written by Fraser MacBride and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of particular and universal have become so familiar that their significance has become difficult to discern, like coins that have been passed back and forth too many times, worn smooth so their values can no longer be read. On the Genealogy of Universals seeks to overcome our sense of over-familiarity with these concepts by providing a case study of their evolution during the late 19th century and early 20th century, a study that shows how the history of these concepts is bound up with the origins and development of analytic philosophy itself. Understanding how these concepts were taken up, transfigured and given up by the early analytic philosophers, enables us to recover and reanimate the debate amongst them that otherwise remains Delphic - to interpret some of the early, originating texts of analytic philosophy that have hitherto baffled commentators, including Moore's early papers, to appreciate afresh the neglected contributions of philosophical figures that historians of analytic philosophy have mostly since forgot, including Stout and Whitehead, and to shed new light upon the relationships of Moore to Russell and Russell to Wittgenstein.
Download or read book Genealogy as Critique written by Colin Koopman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.
Download or read book Uncountable written by David Nirenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-20 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From the time of Pythagoras, we have been tempted to treat numbers as the ultimate or only truth. This book tells the history of that habit of thought. But more, it argues that the logic of counting sacrifices much of what makes us human, and that we have a responsibility to match the objects of our attention to the forms of knowledge that do them justice. Humans have extended the insights and methods of number and mathematics to more and more aspects of the world, even to their gods and their religions.Today those powers are greater than ever, as computation is applied to virtually every aspect of human activity.But the rules of mathematics do not strictly apply to many things-from elementary particles to people-in the world.By subjecting such things to the laws of logic and mathematics, we gain some kinds of knowledge, but we also lose others. How do our choices about what parts of the world to subject to the logics of mathematics affect how we live and how we die?This question is rarely asked, but it is urgent, because the sciences built upon those laws now govern so much of our knowledge, from physics to psychology.Number and Knowledge sets out to ask it. In chapters proceeding chronologically from Ancient Greek philosophy and the rise of monotheistic religions to the emergence of modern physics and economics, the book traces how ideals, practices, and habits of thought formed over millennia have turned number into the foundation-stone of human claims to knowledge and certainty.But the book is also a philosophical and poetic exhortation to take responsibility for that history, for the knowledge it has produced, and for the many aspects of the world and of humanity that it ignores or endangers.To understand what can be counted and what can't is to embrace the ethics of purposeful knowing"--
Download or read book Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals written by Paul V. Spade and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1994-03-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New translations of the central mediaeval texts on the problem of universals are presented here in an affordable edition suitable for use in courses in mediaeval philosophy, history of mediaeval philosophy, and universals. Includes a concise Introduction, glossary of important terms, notes, and bibliography.
Download or read book Genealogy of Nihilism written by Conor Cunningham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-06-29 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text re-reads Western history in the light of nihilistic logic, which pervades two millennia of Western thought. From Parmenides to Alain Badiou, via Plotinus, Avicenna, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida, a genealogy of nothingness can be witnessed in development, with devastating consequences for the way we live.
Download or read book Truth and Truthfulness written by Bernard Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-28 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine. Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth: suspicion of being deceived (no one wants to be fooled) and skepticism that objective truth exists at all (no one wants to be naive). This tension between a demand for truthfulness and the doubt that there is any truth to be found is not an abstract paradox. It has political consequences and signals a danger that our intellectual activities, particularly in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces. Williams's approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy, blends philosophy, history, and a fictional account of how the human concern with truth might have arisen. Without denying that we should worry about the contingency of much that we take for granted, he defends truth as an intellectual objective and a cultural value. He identifies two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity, the first of which aims at finding out the truth and the second at telling it. He describes different psychological and social forms that these virtues have taken and asks what ideas can make best sense of them today. Truth and Truthfulness presents a powerful challenge to the fashionable belief that truth has no value, but equally to the traditional faith that its value guarantees itself. Bernard Williams shows us that when we lose a sense of the value of truth, we lose a lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics written by Michael J. Loux and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the world's specialists provide in this handbook essays about what kinds of things there are, in what ways they exist, and how they relate to each other. They give the word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness.
Download or read book The Theological Origins of Modernity written by Michael Allen Gillespie and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as his starting point the collapse of the medieval world, Gillespie argues that from the very beginning moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life- and that they did so not out of hostility but in order to sustain certain religious beliefs. He goes on to explore the ideas of such figures as William of Ockham, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, and Hobbes, showing that modernity is best understood as the result of a series of attempts to formulate a new and coherent metaphysics or theology.
Download or read book Identity and Modality written by Fraser MacBride and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2006-07-20 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume address fundamental, and interrelated, philosophical issues concerning modality and identity, issues that have not only been pivotal to the development of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, but remain a key focus of metaphysical debate in the twenty-first. How are we to understand the concepts of necessity and possibility? Is chance a basic ingredient of reality? How are we to make sense of claims about personal identity? Do numbers requiredistinctive identity criteria? Does the capacity to identify an object presuppose an ability to bring it under a sortal concept?Rather than presenting a single, partisan perspective, Identity and Modality enriches our understanding of identity and modality by bringing together papers written by leading researchers working in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mathematics. The resulting variety of perspectives correspondingly reflects both the breadth and depth of contemporary theorizing about identity and modality, each paper addressing a particular issue andadvancing our knowledge of the area.This volume will provide essential reading for graduate students in the subject and professional philosophers.
Download or read book How We Became Our Data written by Colin Koopman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational person” and the “informational power” we are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood—and how we can resist its erosion.
Download or read book The Time of Our Lives written by David Couzens Hoy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-01-13 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the emergence in post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of temporality. The project of all philosophy may be to gain reconciliation with time, even if not every philosopher has dealt with time expressly. A confrontation with the passing of time and with human finitude runs through the history of philosophy as an ultimate concern. In this genealogy of the concept of temporality, David Hoy examines the emergence in a post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of the “time of our lives” rather than on the time of the universe. The purpose is to see how phenomenological and poststructuralist philosophers have tried to locate the source of temporality, how they have analyzed time's passing, and how they have depicted our relation to time once it has been—in a Proustian sense—regained. Hoy engages with competing theoretical tactics for reconciling us to our fleeting temporality, drawing on work by Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Sartre, Bourdieu, Foucault, Bergson, Deleuze, Žižek, and Derrida. Hoy considers four existential strategies for coping with the apparent flow of temporality, including Proust's passive and Walter Benjamin's active reconciliation through memory, Žižek's critique of poststructuralist politics, Foucault's confrontation with the temporality of power, and Deleuze's account of Aion and Chronos. He concludes by exploring whether a dual temporalization could be what constitutes the singular “time of our lives.”
Download or read book Mind Values and Metaphysics written by Anne Reboul and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses five main topics of metaphysics in its first section: formal objects and truth-makers; tropes; properties and predicates; varieties of relations; and the notion of explanation in metaphysics. The second part of this volume focuses on the history of philosophy with an emphasis on Austrian philosophy: the ideas of Bolzano, Wittgenstein, Locke and Bergson, amongst others, are explored in the papers presented here. This is the first volume in a two-volume set that originates from papers presented to Professor Kevin Mulligan, covering the subjects that he contributed to during his career including ontology, mind and value, history and philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. This volume contains thirty two chapters, written by researchers from across Europe, North America and North Africa. These papers cover topics in metaphysics ranging from Lehrer and Tolliver’s discussion of truth and tropes, to Johansson’s defence of the distinction between thick and thin relations and Persson and Sahlin’s presentation of the difficulties inherent in applying the concept of explanation in metaphysics. Papers on the history of philosophy include a look at Bolzano’s formative years and his conception of mathematics. De Libera examines Brentano’s adverbial theory of judgment and Fisette traces the history of the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th century. Marion contests the trendy pragmatist accounts that lump Wittgenstein and Heidegger together and there are analyses of Locke and Bergson’s work, amongst the many papers presented here. This volume contains three chapters in French and one in Spanish. The second volume of this set looks at ethics, values and emotions, epistemology, perception and consciousness, as well as philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.
Download or read book Aspects of Truth written by Catherine Pickstock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold new work discusses truth, and the value of a metaphysical approach to truth, from philosophical and theological perspectives.
Download or read book Plato A Very Short Introduction written by Julia Annas and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-02-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and accessible introduction to Plato focuses on the philosophy and argument of his writings, drawing the reader into Plato's way of doing philosophy, and the general themes of his thinking. This is not a book to leave the reader standing in the outer court of introduction and background information, but leads directly into Plato's argument. It looks at Plato as a thinker grappling with philosophical problems in a variety of ways, rather than a philosopher with a fully worked-out system. It includes a brief account of Plato's life and the various interpretations that have been drawn from the sparse remains of information. It stresses the importance of the founding of the Academy and the conception of philosophy as a subject. Julia Annas discusses Plato's style of writing: his use of the dialogue form, his use of what we today call fiction, and his philosophical transformation of myths. She also looks at his discussions of love and philosophy, his attitude to women, and to homosexual love, explores Plato's claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and touches on his arguments for the immortality of the soul and his ideas about the nature of the universe. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Friction written by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-23 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around us Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement, action, and effect. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. Tsing focuses on the rainforests of Indonesia, where in the 1980s and 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, province, or nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforests includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, United Nations funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students—all drawn into unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out. Providing an invaluable portfolio of methods for the study of global interconnections, Friction shows how cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter and reveals how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.
Download or read book Liberty and Security written by Conor Gearty and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All aspire to liberty and security in their lives but few people truly enjoy them. This book explains why this is so. In what Conor Gearty calls our 'neo-democratic' world, the proclamation of universal liberty and security is mocked by facts on the ground: the vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, the authoritarian regimes with regular elections, and the terrible socio-economic deprivation camouflaged by cynically proclaimed commitments to human rights. Gearty's book offers an explanation of how this has come about, providing also a criticism of the present age which tolerates it. He then goes on to set out a manifesto for a better future, a place where liberty and security can be rich platforms for everyone's life. The book identifies neo-democracies as those places which play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. But it is not just the new 'democracies' that have turned 'neo', the so-called established democracies are also hurtling in the same direction, as is the United Nations. A new vision of universal freedom is urgently required. Drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science this book argues for just such a vision, one in which the great achievements of our democratic past are not jettisoned as easily as were the socialist ideals of the original democracy-makers.
