Download or read book Philosophy in Culture written by J. Tosam and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the symbiotic relationship between philosophy and culture. Every philosophy emerges as a reaction to, or as justification for a particular culture and it is for this reason that philosophy may differ from one culture to another. It argues that philosophy is an essential part of every culture. Philosophy is the means by which every culture provides itself with justification for its values, beliefs and worldview and also serves as a catalyst for progress. Philosophy critically questions and confronts established beliefs, customs, practices, and institutions of a society. As reflective critical thinking, philosophy is linked to a way of life; a form of enquiry intended to guide behaviour; a form of thinking that sharpens and broadens our intellectual horizon, scrutinizes our assumptions, and clarifies the beliefs and values by which we live. Philosophy helps to liberate the individual from the imprisonment of ignorance, prejudice, superstition, narrow-mindedness, and the despotism of custom. Culture constitutes the raw data, the laboratory from which philosophers do their analytic experimentation. Culture is considered as philosophy of the first order activity. The book maintains that any genuine global philosophy must include philosophical traditions from all cultures and regions of the world, as it is by seeking alternative philosophical answers to some of the thorniest problems facing humanity that we are most likely to find more lasting solutions to some global problems. In this commitment to a universal humanity, we cannot afford to depend on solutions from a single culture or from the most influential cultures.
Download or read book Plato and Tradition written by Patricia Fagan and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato’s dialogues are some of the most widely read texts in Western philosophy, and one would imagine them fully mined for elemental material. Yet, in Plato and Tradition, Patricia Fagan reveals the dialogues to be continuing sources of fresh insight. She recovers from them an underappreciated depth of cultural reference that is crucial to understanding their central philosophical concerns. Through careful readings of six dialogues, Fagan demonstrates that Plato’s presentation of Socrates highlights the centrality of tradition in political, erotic, and philosophic life. Plato embeds Socrates’s arguments and ideas in traditional references that would have been familiar to contemporaries of Socrates or Plato but that today’s reader typically passes over. Fagan’s book unpacks this cultural and literary context for the proper and full understanding of the philosophical argument of the Platonic dialogues. She concludes that, as Socrates demonstrates in word and deed, tradition is essential to successful living. But we must take up tradition with a critical openness to questioning its significance and future. Her original and compelling analyses may change the views of many readers who think themselves already well versed in the dialogues.
Download or read book Nature in Indian Philosophy and Cultural Traditions written by Meera Baindur and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working within a framework of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, this book describes and postulates alternative understandings of nature in Indian traditions of thought, particularly philosophy. The interest in alternative conceptualizations of nature has gained significance after many thinkers pointed out that attitudes to the environment are determined to a large extent by our presuppositions of nature. This book is particularly timely from that perspective. It begins with a brief description of the concept of nature and a history of the idea of nature in Western thought. This provides readers with a context to the issues around the concept of nature in environmental philosophy, setting a foundation for further discussion about alternate conceptualizations of nature and their significance. In particular, the work covers a wide array of textual and non-textual sources to link and understand nature from classical Indian philosophical perspectives as well as popular understandings in Indian literary texts and cultural practices. Popular issues in environmental philosophy are discussed in detail, such as: What is ‘nature’ in Indian philosophy? How do people perceive nature through landscape and mythological and cultural narratives? In what ways is nature sacred in India? To make the discussion relevant to contemporary readers, the book includes a section on the ecological and ethical implications of some philosophical concepts and critical perspectives on alternate conceptualizations of nature.
Download or read book Understanding African Philosophy written by Richard H. Bell and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book African Philosophy Culture and Traditional Medicine written by M. Akin Makinde and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over two centuries, Western scholars have discussed African philosophy and culture, often in disparaging, condescending terms, and always from an alien European perspective. Many Africans now share this perspective, having been trained in the western, empirical tradition. Makinde argues that, particularly in view of the costs and failings of western style culture, Africans must now mold their own modern culture by blending useful western practices with valuable indigenous African elements. Specifically, Makinde demonstrates the potential for the development of African philosophy and even African traditional medicine. Following the lead of a number of countries with government policies of incorporating indigenous medicine with orthodox Western medicine, Makinde argues that traditional African practices should be taken seriously, both medically and scientifically. Further, he charges African scholars with the responsibility of investigating these and other elements of traditional African culture in order to dispel their mystery and secrecy through modern research and useful publications.
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 Culture And Self written by Douglas B. Allen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional scholars of philosophy and religion, both East and West, often place a major emphasis on analyzing the nature of "the self." In recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in analyzing self, but most scholars have not claimed knowledge of an ahistorical, objective, essential self free from all cultural determinants. The contributors of this volume recognize the need to contextualize specific views of self and to analyze such views in terms of the dynamic, dialectical relations between self and culture. An unusual feature of this book is that all of the chapters not only focus on traditions and individuals, East and West, but include as primary emphases comparative philosophy, religion, and culture, reinforcing individual and cultural creativity. Each chapter brings specific Eastern and Western perspectives into a dynamic, comparative relation. This comparative orientation emphasizes our growing sense of interrelatedness and interdependency.
Download or read book A Philosophical Defense of Culture written by Shuchen Xiang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Shuchen Xiang draws on the Confucian philosophy of "culture" and Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to argue for the importance of "culture" as a philosophic paradigm. A defining ideal of Confucian-Chinese civilization, culture (wen) spans everything from natural patterns and the individual units that make up Chinese writing to literature and other refining vocations of the human being. Wen is thus the soul of Confucian-Chinese philosophy. Similarly, as a philosopher who bridged the classical age of German humanism and postwar modernity, Cassirer implored his and future generations to think of humankind in terms of their culture and to think of the human being as a "symbolic animal." The philosophies of culture of these two traditions, very much compatible, are of urgent relevance to our contemporary epoch. Xiang describes the similarity of their projects by way of their conception of the human being, her relationship to nature, the relationship of human culture to nature, the importance of cultural pluralism, and the role of the arts in human life, as well as the metaphysical frameworks that gave rise to such conceptions. Combining textual exegesis in classical Chinese texts and an exposition of Cassirer's most important insights against the backdrop of post-Kantian philosophy, this book is philosophy written in a cosmopolitan mode, arguing for the contemporary philosophical relevance of "culture" by drawing on and bringing together two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition.
Download or read book Equality and Tradition written by Samuel Scheffler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by noted philosopher Samuel Scheffler combines discussion of abstract questions in moral and political theory with attention to the normative dimension of current social and political controversies. In addition to chapters on more abstract issues such as the nature of human valuing, the role of partiality in ethics, and the significance of the distinction between doing and allowing, the volume also includes essays on immigration, terrorism, toleration, political equality, and the normative significance of tradition. Uniting the essays is a shared preoccupation with questions about human value and values. The volume opens with an essay that considers the general question of what it is to value something - as opposed, say, to wanting it, wanting to want it, or thinking that it is valuable. Other essays explore particular values, such as equality, whose meaning and content are contested. Still others consider the tensions that arise, both within and among individuals, in consequence of the diversity of human values. One of the overarching aims of the book is to illuminate the different ways in which liberal political theory attempts to resolve conflicts of both of these kinds.
Download or read book Philosophy Emerging from Culture written by William Sweet and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beyond Faith and Rationality written by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with the relation between faith and reason, and brings the latest developments of modern logic into the scene. Faith and rationality are two perennial key concepts in the history of ideas. Philosophers and theologians have struggled to bring into harmony these otherwise conflicting concepts. Despite the diversity of approaches about what rationality effectively means, logic remains the cannon of objective and rational thought. The chapters in this volume analyze several issues pertaining to the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology from the perspective of their relation to logic and the benefit they can derive from the use of modern logic tools. The book is divided into five parts: (I) Introduction, (II) Analytic Philosophy of Religion, (III) Logical Philosophy of Religion, (IV) Computational Philosophy and Religion and (V) Logic, Language and Religion. This text appeals to students and researchers in the field.
Download or read book Engaging Japanese Philosophy written by Thomas P. Kasulis and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-12-31 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy challenges our assumptions—especially when it comes to us from another culture. In exploring Japanese philosophy, a dependable guide is essential. The present volume, written by a renowned authority on the subject, offers readers a historical survey of Japanese thought that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Adhering to the Japanese philosophical tradition of highlighting engagement over detachment, Thomas Kasulis invites us to think with, as well as about, the Japanese masters by offering ample examples, innovative analogies, thought experiments, and jargon-free explanations. He assumes little previous knowledge and addresses themes—aesthetics, ethics, the samurai code, politics, among others—not in a vacuum but within the conditions of Japan’s cultural and intellectual history. For readers new to Japanese studies, he provides a simplified guide to pronouncing Japanese and a separate discussion of the language and how its syntax, orthography, and linguistic layers can serve the philosophical purposes of a skilled writer and subtle thinker. For those familiar with the Japanese cultural tradition but less so with philosophy, Kasulis clarifies philosophical expressions and problems, Western as well as Japanese, as they arise. Half of the book’s chapters are devoted to seven major thinkers who collectively represent the full range of Japan’s historical epochs and philosophical traditions: Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō. Nuanced details and analyses enable an engaged understanding of Japanese Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintō, and modern academic philosophy. Other chapters supply social and cultural background, including brief discussions of nearly a hundred other philosophical writers. (For additional information, cross references to material in the companion volume Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook are included.) In his closing chapter Kasulis reflects on lessons from Japanese philosophy that enhance our understanding of philosophy itself. He reminds us that philosophy in its original sense means loving wisdom, not studying ideas. In that regard, a renewed appreciation of engaged knowing can play a critical role in the revitalization of philosophy in the West as well as the East.
Download or read book The Origin and Evolution of Cultures written by Robert Boyd and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-20 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford presents, in one convenient and coherently organized volume, 20 influential but until now relatively inaccessible articles that form the backbone of Boyd and Richerson's path-breaking work on evolution and culture. Their interdisciplinary research is based on two notions. First, that culture is crucial for understanding human behavior; unlike other organisms, socially transmitted beliefs, attitudes, and values heavily influence our behavior. Secondly, culture is part of biology: the capacity to acquire and transmit culture is a derived component of human psychology, and the contents of culture are deeply intertwined with our biology. Culture then is a pool of information, stored in the brains of the population that gets transmitted from one brain to another by social learning processes. Therefore, culture can account for both our outstanding ecological success as well as the maladaptations that characterize much of human behavior. The interest in this collection will span anthropology, psychology, economics, philosophy, and political science.
Download or read book Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy written by Jill Kraye and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of classical thought on Renaissance philosophy is the subject of this volume. In the first part Dr Kraye deals with the interpretations of ancient philosophy put forward by various thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, including the humanist Angelo Poliziano and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino; in the second, she examines the central role of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics within Renaissance moral philosophy and considers the influence of other classical treatises on ethics, especially the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The final section explores controversies concerning the authenticity of works in the Aristotelian canon, together with the early printing history of Aristotle. All the articles aim to locate philosophical questions within the historical and cultural context of the Renaissance, and particular attention is paid to the importance of philological scholarship within philosophical debates. The collection includes an essay on Philipp Melanchthon's ethical commentaries and textbooks which has previously appeared only in German translation.
Download or read book Being After Rousseau written by Richard L. Velkley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Being after Rousseau, Richard L. Velkley presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the founder of a modern European tradition of reflection on the relation of philosophy to culture—a reflection that calls both into question. Tracing this tradition from Rousseau to Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Martin Heidegger, Velkley shows late modern philosophy as a series of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to resolve the dichotomies between nature and society, culture and civilization, and philosophy and society that Rousseau brought to the fore. The Rousseauian tradition begins, for Velkley, with Rousseau's criticism of modern political philosophy. Although the German Idealists such as Schelling accepted much of Rousseau's critique, they believed, unlike Rousseau, that human wholeness could be attained at the level of society and history. Heidegger and Nietzsche questioned this claim, but followed both Rousseau and the Idealists in their vision of the philosopher-poet striving to recover an original wholeness that the history of reason has distorted.
Download or read book Tradition and Modernity written by Kwame Gyekye and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gyekye offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times, and shows how Western philosophical concepts help in addressing a wide range of specifically African problems.
Download or read book Philosophy written by Ron Mallon, Ph.D. and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, the fields of empirical and experimental philosophy have generated tremendous excitement, due to unexpected results that have challenged philosophical dogma. Responding to this trend, Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings is the first introductory philosophy reader to integrate cutting-edge work in empirical and experimental philosophy with traditional philosophy. Featuring coverage that is equal parts historical, contemporary, and empirical/experimental, this topically organized reader provides students with a unique introduction to both the core and the vanguard of philosophy.
