Download or read book Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory written by Patricia Cook and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does philosophy have a future? Postmodern thought, with its rejection of claims to absolute truth or moral objectivity, would seem to put the philosophical enterprise in jeopardy. In this volume some of today's most influential thinkers face the question of philosophy's future and find an answer in its past. Their efforts show how historical traditions are currently being appropriated by philosophy, how some of the most provocative questions confronted by philosophers are given their impetus and direction by cultural memory. Unlike analytic philosophy, a discipline supposedly liberated from any manifestation of cultural memory, the movement represented by these essays demonstrates how the inquiries, narratives, traditions, and events of our cultural past can mediate some of the most interesting exercises of the present-day philosophical imagination. Attesting to the power of historical tradition to enhance and redirect the prospects of philosophy these essays exemplify a new mode of doing philosophy. The product of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in 1990, it is the task of this book to show that history can be reclaimed by philosophy and resurrected in postmodernity. Contributors. George Allan, Eva T. H. Brann, Arthur C. Danto, Lynn S. Joy, George L. Kline, George R. Lucas, Jr., Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert C. Neville, John Rickard, Stanley Rosen, J. B. Scheenwind, Donald Phillip Verene
Download or read book Memory written by Dmitri Nikulin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history.
Download or read book Collective Memory and the Historical Past written by Jeffrey Andrew Barash and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.
Download or read book Intellectual Imagination written by Omedi Ochieng and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-06-25 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Intellectual Imagination unfolds a sweeping vision of the form, meaning, and value of intellectual practice. The book breaks new ground in offering a comprehensive vision of the intellectual vocation. Omedi Ochieng argues that robust and rigorous thought about the form and contours of intellectual practices is best envisioned in light of a comprehensive critical contextual ontology—that is, a systematic account of the context, forms, and dimensions in and through which knowledge and aesthetic practices are created, embodied, translated, and learned. Such an ontology not only accounts for the embeddedness of intellectual practices in the deep structures of politics, economics, and culture, but also in turn demonstrates the constitutive power of critical inquiry. It is against this background that Ochieng unfolds a multidimensional and capacious theory of knowledge and aesthetics. In a critique of the oppositional binaries that now reign in the modern and postmodern academy—binaries that pit fact versus value, science versus the humanities, knowledge versus aesthetics—Ochieng argues for the inextricable intertwinement of reason, interpretation, and the imagination. The book offers a close and deep reading of North Atlantic and African philosophers, thereby illuminating the resonances and contrasts between diverse intellectual traditions. The upshot is an incisively rich, layered, and textured reading of the archetypal intellectual styles and aesthetic forms that have fired the imagination of intellectuals across the globe. Ochieng’s book is a radical summons to a practice and an imagination of the intellectual life as the realization of good societies and good lives.
Download or read book Before Imagination written by John D. Lyons and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the practice of vivid, self-directed imagination in the optimistic spirit of the early-modern French writers.
Download or read book Writing Philosophical Autoethnography written by Alec Grant and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Philosophical Autoethnography is the result of Alec Grant’s vision of bringing the disciplines of philosophy and autoethnography together. This is the first volume of narrative autoethnographic work in which invited contributing authors were charged with exploring their issues, concerns, and topics about human society, culture, and the material world through an explicitly philosophical lens. Each chapter, while written autoethnographically, showcases sustained engagement with philosophical arguments, ideas, concepts, theories, and corresponding ethical positions. Unlike much other autoethnographic work, within which philosophical ideas often appear to be "grafted on" or supplementary, the philosophical basis of the work in this volume is fundamental to its shifting content, focus, and context. The narratives in this book, from scholars working in a range of disciplines in the humanities and human sciences, function as narrative, conceptual, and analytical exemplars to act as a guide for autoethnographers in their own writing, and suggest future directions for making autoethnography more philosophically rigorous. This book is suitable for students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative methods in a range of disciplines, including the humanities, social and human sciences, communication studies, and education.
Download or read book Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity written by Dan Ben-Amos and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural memory and the Construction of Identity brings together scholars of folklore, literature, history, and communication to explore the dynamics of cultural memory in a variety of contexts. Memory is a powerful tool that can transform a piece of earth into a homeland and common objects into symbols. The authors of this volume show how memory is shaped and how it operates in uniting society and creating images that attain the value of truth even if they deviate from fact.
Download or read book Memory History Justice in Hegel written by Angelica Nuzzo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reconstruction of the work of 'dialectical memory' in Hegel raises the fundamental question of the principle that presides on the articulation of history and indicates in Hegel's philosophy two alternative models of conceiving history: one that grounds history on 'ethical memory,' the other that sees justice as the moving principle of history.
Download or read book The Penumbra of Personhood written by G.V. Loewen and published by Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The drive to overcome nature is a projection of the anxiety about succumbing to our own nature. Inevitably, this conflict creates a vicious circle. For in subduing nature to our technical goals - themselves arranged so that our human frailty is to be overcome - we end up destroying the world in which we must live. Of late, we have begun to recognize this viciousness, both in our acts and more profoundly, in our thoughts. Yet the attempt to lose our nature by losing Nature holds an even deeper conflict: "The most effective means of escaping spiritual trial is to become spiritless, and the sooner the better. If only taken care of in time, everything takes care of itself." (Kierkegaard, 1844). Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of forty books on ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was a professor in the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades. "The Penumbra of Personhood is not only the cumulative effect and expression of the primordial characters of Dasein, flung along with my being into the world," writes the author, "it is also the most graceful and eloquent response to the unknown that we possess. It is, in its own thrown essence, the fullest divergence from any violence of the reactionary or technique of the manager. It is objectively what we are and thus what we have to offer our own time." Ironically, the State has to contend not with history, the writing of which it mainly controls, but rather morality, part of the pre-State metaphysics and a version of collective human vanity that also claims to be timeless. If it is at first striking that even in our time, morality has retained such a hold, on second glance it is at least not surprising. It has ironically become the weapon of the private person, and this is very much against its own cosmogonical backdrop. Morality is shared, as is belief that the one stems from the other, and in this they are quite unlike either ethics or opinion, also having become the pedestal upon which any demagogue can be placed. The uttering of a "higher law" betrays the moralist at every turn. Even if the State can delicately navigate these potentially dangerous currents while affording to ignore mere moral editorializing - an inevitable whirlpool in any democracy at least - if enough "private" people recognize that their misgivings are shared, morality can once again assume a vestige of its former mantle. It becomes a rip-tide of conventional "wisdom" against which this or that elected regime may ride or be ridden over. If this is the most vulgar expression of Dasein's will to life, and even ontically, will to freedom, then it cannot be ignored by the reflective person. It is the final avenue of appeal in a rationalist social organization. Equipped with its own divinity, morality finds that it still has some suasion in the courts, certainly within many families, and in the schools. It is society's "back door man," to use an old Blues phrase, to point up its consistent vulgarity.
Download or read book Ordering of Time written by Lucas George Lucas and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the history of philosophy? What exactly is this the history of and how is that history to be understood in relationship to philosophy itself? Can philosophy's history, on any of a number of diverse descriptions, ever be said in its own right to constitute a unique and genuine source of philosophical wisdom or insight? George Lucas sweeps aside the constraints of traditional methodological and cultural boundaries to reflect broadly on a variety of answers to these questions, as posed by many of the major philosophical figures of the past century. Inviting a re-consideration of the work of scholars as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Danto, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, Keith Lehrer and Jerome Schneewind, Lucas ranges widely over the history of philosophy itself in search of original, probing answers to these profound and perennial issues.
Download or read book Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork of the Organon of the Cultural Sciences written by Israel Bar-Yehuda Idalovichi and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work reclassifies and restructures the history of ideas and the philosophy of culture through a wide-ranging and novel use of the idea of the organon. It does so by radically revising standard interpretations and theories of all branches of philosophy, and by providing an intellectual and philosophical foundation for the new organon of the cultural sciences. Furthermore, the seeded idea that saw its growth in the form of this book is the unshakable conviction that the only way by which a new apparatus of philosophy, an organon, could be created is by harking back to the vast sources of imagination, inspiration and mimēsis. This entire study is based on the notion that metaphysics, insofar as it is concerned with the world in its entirety and with human being’s existence and thought, should provide the foundation for the organon of cultural sciences, based on symbolic forms. Given that the colossal amount of information and knowledge of philosophy, arts, humanities, logic, mathematics, social sciences and natural sciences cannot be comprised, analyzed and comprehended per se, it is the organon’s objective to extract the main principles, ideas, postulates, theorems and theories of the cultural sciences, and, subsequently, to shape and restructure them as symbolic forms. Since all these principles are grounded on Becoming—which is not a stable or fixed entity such as Being, substance or thing—the symbolic forms preserve and change, elevate and further the organon of the cultural sciences, via a critical-dialectical process.
Download or read book Russian Thought After Communism The Rediscovery of a Philosophical Heritage written by James P. Scanlan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of Russia's philosophical heritage. It extends from the Slavophiles to the philosophers of the Silver Age, from emigre religious thinkers to Losev and Bakhtin and assesses the meaning for Russian culture as a whole.
Download or read book Who Will Remember You written by Israel B. Bitton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory. A word so often said, often thought of, and continuously studied. Yet, we know relatively so little other than how vast and magnificent it is. In Who Will Remember You? A Philosophical History and Theory of Memory and Will, Israel B. Bitton, offers an interdisciplinary perspective that unifies philosophy of memory with history, neuroscience, culture and ethics, yielding novel insights into the elusive phenomena of memory, namely its universality. Bitton posits that the current and typical “misunderstanding of memory” stems from over-specialization in scientific research, a compartmentalization that does not support reaching holistic conclusions which are necessary for fully appreciating the totality of memory phenomena. No longer should memory be thought of as residing only in the brain, for the body is known to have memory too, but neither should it be thought of as exclusively human since it inheres in all matter as a physical and biological fact. Indeed, Bitton extends the philosophical and practical meanings of memory furthest in great detail, employing the latest research in neuroscience to support his case. In this work, Bitton traces the kernels of these ideas from the ancient Egyptians and Israelites all the way through to the modern period in philosophy, science and popular culture, demonstrating that his philosophical formulation has always been and remains accepted de facto by society as can easily be detected in various social trends. Upon offering his holistic account that considers the magnitude of memory phenomena across several disciplines, Bitton presents a novel theory that postulates the primary human drive as categorized by a will to significance, which, because of the universality of memory becomes a will to memorability. By placing the individual at the center of their own memory-reality, they can be empowered to safeguard, enhance, and extend the universal force of memory within and around them. From that vantage point, this book provides its audience with ideas meant to provoke and incite the readers’ own reflections on memory’s meaning and import as well as what it takes to be an ethical “memory agent” in an era of hyper-fake news.
Download or read book Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy written by J. B. Schneewind and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.B. Schneewind presents a selection of his published essays on ethics, the history of ethics and moral psychology, together with a new piece offering an intellectual autobiography. The essays range across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, with a particular focus on Kant and his relation to earlier thinkers.
Download or read book Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy written by Vivienne Orchard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was unquestionably one of the most celebrated and reviled French thinkers of the last thirty years. Outside France his influence in comparative literature circles, through deconstruction and other ideas, has been so profound that his personal role as a leader of contemporary French philosophy has been almost overlooked. Perhaps because there is no equivalent in English-speaking countries to the timetabling of philosophy in the French education system, writers on Derrida outside France have not fully appreciated the importance of this political and cultural struggle. In this ground-breaking book, Orchard examines a hard-fought debate of great importance not only to Derrida himself, but also to France's idea of what studying 'philosophy' might mean after the student uprisings of 1968."
Download or read book Applied Ethics written by Ruth F. Chadwick and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2002 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christianity and Confucianism written by Christopher Hancock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity and Confucianism: Culture, Faith and Politics, sets comparative textual analysis against the backcloth of 2000 years of cultural, political, and religious interaction between China and the West. As the world responds to China's rise and China positions herself for global engagement, this major new study reawakens and revises an ancient conversation. As a generous introduction to biblical Christianity and the Confucian Classics, Christianity and Confucianism tells a remarkable story of mutual formation and cultural indebtedness. East and West are shown to have shaped the mind, heart, culture, philosophy and politics of the other - and far more, perhaps, than either knows or would want to admit. Christopher Hancock has provided a rich and stimulating resource for scholars and students, diplomats and social scientists, devotees of culture and those who pursue wisdom and peace today.
