Download or read book The View From Nowhere written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way, but at the same time each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world. Thomas Nagel's ambitious and lively book tackles this fundamental issue, arguing that our divided nature is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching every aspect of human life. He deals with its manifestations in such fields of philosophy as the mind-body problem, personal identity, knowledge and skepticism, thought and reality, free will, ethics, the relation between moral and other values, the meaning of life, and death.
Download or read book The View From Nowhere written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-09 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way, but at the same time each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world. Thomas Nagel's ambitious and lively book tackles this fundamental issue, arguing that our divided nature is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching every aspect of human life. He deals with its manifestations in such fields of philosophy as the mind-body problem, personal identity, knowledge and skepticism, thought and reality, free will, ethics, the relation between moral and other values, the meaning of life, and death.
Download or read book The View from Somewhere written by Lewis Raven Wallace and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the history of the idea of the objective journalist and how this very ideal can often be used to undercut itself. In The View from Somewhere, Lewis Raven Wallace dives deep into the history of “objectivity” in journalism and how its been used to gatekeep and silence marginalized writers as far back as Ida B. Wells. At its core, this is a book about fierce journalists who have pursued truth and transparency and sometimes been punished for it—not just by tyrannical governments but by journalistic institutions themselves. He highlights the stories of journalists who question “objectivity” with sensitivity and passion: Desmond Cole of the Toronto Star; New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse; Pulitzer Prize-winner Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah; Peabody-winning podcaster John Biewen; Guardian correspondent Gary Younge; former Buzzfeed reporter Meredith Talusan; and many others. Wallace also shares his own experiences as a midwestern transgender journalist and activist who was fired from his job as a national reporter for public radio for speaking out against “objectivity” in coverage of Trump and white supremacy. With insightful steps through history, Wallace stresses that journalists have never been mere passive observers. Using historical and contemporary examples—from lynching in the nineteenth century to transgender issues in the twenty-first—Wallace offers a definitive critique of “objectivity” as a catchall for accurate journalism. He calls for the dismissal of this damaging mythology in order to confront the realities of institutional power, racism, and other forms of oppression and exploitation in the news industry. The View from Somewhere is a compelling rallying cry against journalist neutrality and for the validity of news told from distinctly subjective voices.
Download or read book Loose Women Lecherous Men written by Linda LeMoncheck and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author discusses methods for mediating the tensions among apparently irreconcilable feminist perspectives on women's sexuality and shows how a feminist epistemology and ethic can advance the dialogue in women's sexuality across a broad political spectrum.
Download or read book Confucian Ren and Feminist Ethics of Care written by Lijun Yuan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rehabilitation of Confucian tradition raised new challenges to Chinese feminist thinkers. Can a Confucian ideal of reciprocity help women realize their equality? What is the hope for Chinese women seeking a social ideal of equality given the growing gender gap in the current economic development of China? Yuan argues Confucianism cannot help unless it is integrated with feminism. In this book, Yuan explores why gendered stratifications perpetuated so deeply in today’s China through the influences of Confucian cultural tradition, but reading early Confucian texts as a cosmological vision of Ren with Dao and ontological oneness as a whole that is the unity of heaven, earth, and humanism, we might reclaim Confucian egalitarian aspects to develop its openness for gender equity with integration of feminist critical care ethics. Throughout the book, Yuan provides multiple perspectives of comparison: relational self vs. power differentials, gender roles differences vs. political demand for equality, and individual reciprocity vs. connection based reciprocity, etc. to embrace inclusive methodology and caring democracy. We see a great hope to break through stereotypes of binary thinking of Minben (people oriented) and Minzhu (autonomous democracy), gender division of labor, reason and emotion, etc. Yuan argues we should integrate feminist critical thoughts of global justice/care with early Confucianism, since both traditions emphasize caring relationships in humanity and interdependency between social individuals within and beyond their communities in a global scale. Importantly, the integration enlarges our philosophical visions of how cultural traditions can be undeniable sources for strengthening contemporary social ideas of humanity, democracy, equality, and freedom for all.
Download or read book Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World written by Ryan Muldoon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. Listen to Robert Talisse interview Ryan Muldoon about Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World on the podcast, New Books in Philosophy: http://tinyurl.com/j9oq324 Also, read Ryan Muldoon’s related Niskanen Center article, "Diversity and Disagreement are the Solution, Not the Problem," published Jan. 10, 2017: https://niskanencenter.org/blog/diversity-disagreement-solution-not-problem/
Download or read book Pragmatism as Anti Authoritarianism written by Richard Rorty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Provocative and engaging...The array of urgent questions and crises facing our democracy makes one miss Richard Rorty’s voice: insistent, relentlessly questioning, and dedicated to the proposition that we can’t afford to let our democracy fail.” —Chris Lehmann, New Republic “Richard Rorty was the most iconoclastic and dramatic philosopher of the last half-century. In this final book, his unique literary style, singular intellectual zest, and demythologizing defiance of official philosophy are on full display.” —Cornel West “Coherent, often brilliant, and it presents a clear and timely case for political pragmatism.” —Jonathan Rée, Prospect “Today, there are few philosophers left whose thoughts are inspired by a unifying vision; there are even fewer who can articulate such a view in terms of such a ravishing flow of provocative, but sharp and differentiated, arguments.” —Jürgen Habermas Richard Rorty’s final masterwork offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, in this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on—and argue with—are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. It demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, and that we account for their doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. No book offers a more accessible account of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.
Download or read book The View from Here written by R. Jay Wallace and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Must we always later regret actions that were wrong for us to perform at the time? Can there ever be good reason to affirm things in the past that we know were unfortunate? In this original work of moral philosophy, R. Jay Wallace shows that the standpoint from which we look back on our lives is shaped by our present attachments-to persons, to the projects that imbue our lives with meaning, and to life itself. Through a distinctive "affirmation dynamic", these attachments commit us to affirming the necessary conditions of their objects. The result is that we are sometimes unable to regret events and circumstances that were originally unjustified or otherwise somehow objectionable. Wallace traces these themes through a range of examples. A teenage girl makes an ill-advised decision to conceive a child - but her love for the child once it has been born makes it impossible for her to regret that earlier decision. The painter Paul Gauguin abandons his family to pursue his true artistic calling (and eventual life project) in Tahiti--which means he cannot truly regret his abdication of familial responsibility. The View from Here offers new interpretations of these classic cases, challenging their treatment by Bernard Williams and others. Another example is the "bourgeois predicament": we are committed to affirming the regrettable social inequalities that make possible the expensive activities that give our lives meaning. Generalizing from such situations, Wallace defends the view that our attachments inevitably commit us to affirming historical conditions that we cannot regard as worthy of being affirmed--a modest form of nihilism.
Download or read book Law Love and Freedom written by Joshua Neoh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving from monasticism to constitutionalism, and from antinomianism to anarchism, this book reveals law's connection with love and freedom.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics written by Gil Eyal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last several decades, there has been a surge of interest in expertise in the social scientific, philosophical, and legal literatures. While it is tempting to attribute this surge of interest in expertise to the emergence and consolidation of a "knowledge society," "post-industrial society," or "network society," it is more likely that the debates about expertise are symptomatic of significant change and upheaval. As the number of contenders for expert status has increased, as the bases for their claims have become more diverse, and as the struggles between these would-be experts intensified, expertise became problematic and contested. In The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics, Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz have brought together a broad group of scholars who have engaged substantively and theoretically with debates regarding the nature of expertise and the social roles of experts to examine these areas within sociology and allied disciplines. The analyses take an historical and relational approach to the topic and are motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today. The chapters will be organized into three general parts: key theoretical and historical debates, the politics of expertise, and expertise within and across professional, disciplinary, legal, and intellectual spheres. Among the topics considered here are the value and relevance of the boundary between experts and laypeople; the causes and consequences of mistrust in experts; the meanings and social uses of objectivity; and the significance of recent transformations in the organization of the professions. Bringing together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise, this Handbook connects interdisciplinary work done in science and technology studies with the more classic concerns, topics, and concepts of sociologists of professions and intellectuals.
Download or read book Facts Values and Objectivity in Economics written by José Castro Caldas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Economics an ‘objective’ or ‘positive’ science, independent of ethical and political positions? The financial crisis that began in 2007 gave rise to renewed doubts regarding the ‘objectivity’ of economics and brought into the public arena a debate that was previously confined to academia. A remarkable feature of the public debate on the value neutrality of economics since then was that it not only involved indictments of ideological biases in economic theory, but also the attribution of the crisis itself to the unethical orientation of economic agents, of economists acting as experts and of ‘economic science’ itself. The contributors to this volume believe that economists of all persuasions are once again compelled to probe the normative foundations of their discipline and give a public account of their doubts and conclusions.
Download or read book Working from Within written by Sander Verhaegh and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a "naturalistic" approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy--the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning--philosophers today largely follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. Sander Verhaegh here offers a comprehensive study of Quine's groundbreaking naturalism. Building on Quine's published corpus as well as a wealth of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, Verhaegh aims to reconstruct both the nature and the development of his naturalism. As such, Working from Within aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. Transcriptions of five unpublished papers, letters, and notes are included in the appendix.
Download or read book Geographies of Nature written by Steve Hinchliffe and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2007-10-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An exemplary introduction to cutting edge work on the geographies of nature. Intellectually demanding, clearly written and empirically rich, this is a book that deserves a wide readership within and beyond the geographical discipline." - Sarah J. Whatmore, Oxford University Centre for the Environment Geographies of Nature introduces readers to conventional understandings of nature - realist, environmental, constructivist - while examining alternative accounts from different disciplines where nature resists easy classification. Accessibly written, it demonstrates how recent thinking has urgent relevance and impact on the ways in which we approach environmental problems. The text: Makes concepts like ′environment′, ′conservation′, and ′sustainability′ accessible and applicable with the extensive use of case studies. Uses text boxes to introduce readers to debates and ideas. Grounds the reader and proceeds to the explanation of more complex arguments progressively. Geographies of Nature presents a new kind of environmental analysis, one that refuses to view nature as wholly separate to the human and nonhuman practices through which it is constantly made and remade.
Download or read book A Fundamental Theological Study of Radical Secularization and its Aftermath written by Alpo Penttinen and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-17 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of various secularization processes, a growing number of people in Western societies are now describing themselves as “non-religious.” But what does this sociological fact really mean, for the Church and for society at large? Has human religiosity a future after secularization? It does, this book argues, but in a radically altered form. Taking its cue from Pope Francis’s suggestion that globalizing humanity is presently living through a genuine “epochal shift,” this book presents an original analysis of the transformative effect of secularization on our spiritual predicament in the Western, now definitively post-Christian, world. Instead of succumbing to the all-too-common polarizations in contemporary religious discourse, this book aspires to overcome the “religious” vs. “secular” dichotomy through developing the logic of “Radical Secularization,” arguably the genuine novelty of the particularly Western process of secularization. The past homogeneously religious culture is certainly dusking, but this only paves the way for the dawn of the future and radically open horizon for our human search for meaning. This challenging book will offer intellectual impulses and spiritual incentives to everybody who ponders the future of human religious evolution after secularization.
Download or read book Faith Thinking Second Edition written by Trevor Hart and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith Thinking provides a stimulating introduction to some vital questions of method in Christian theology. The book argues that faith commitments are necessary not in theology alone but in all serious acts of our knowing anything at all as human beings. Knowledge, in other words, is always bound to be the outcome of some process of "faith seeking understanding." Fresh consideration is given too in this book to relationships obtaining between the authoritative canon of Scripture, tradition, and "reason" in the theological task. Finally, in this new edition an important reevaluation is undertaken of the potentially explosive impact of "truth claims" in a post-truth world.
Download or read book Socrates Cafe A Fresh Taste of Philosophy written by Christopher Phillips and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A bracing, rollicking read about the spark that ignites when people start asking meaningful questions." —O Magazine Christopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. "Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day-care centers, elementary and high schools, and churches, forming lasting communities of inquiry" (Utne Reader). Phillips not only presents the fundamentals of philosophical thought in this "charming, Philosophy for Dummies-type guide" (USA Today); he also recalls what led him to start his itinerant program and re-creates some of the most invigorating sessions, which come to reveal sometimes surprising, often profound reflections on the meaning of love, friendship, work, growing old, and others among Life's Big Questions. "How to Start Your Own Socrates Café" guide included.
Download or read book Scale Theory written by Joshua DiCaglio and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering call for a new understanding of scale across the humanities How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? In this way, we routinely transform reality into things already outside of direct human experience, things we hardly comprehend even as we speak of DNA, climate effects, toxic molecules, and viruses. How do we find ourselves with these disorienting layers of scale? Enter Scale Theory, which provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale refigures reality—that teaches us how to think in terms of scale, no matter where our interests may lie. Joshua DiCaglio takes us on a fascinating journey through six thought experiments that provide clarifying yet provocative definitions for scale and new ways of thinking about classic concepts ranging from unity to identity. Because our worldviews and philosophies are largely built on nonscalar experience, he then takes us slowly through the ways scale challenges and reconfigures objects, subjects, and relations. Scale Theory is, in a sense, nondisciplinary—weaving together a dizzying array of sciences (from nanoscience to ecology) with discussions from the humanities (from philosophy to rhetoric). In the process, a curious pattern emerges: attempts to face the significance of scale inevitably enter terrain closer to mysticism than science. Rather than dismiss this connection, DiCaglio examines the reasons for it, redefining mysticism in terms of scale and integrating contemplative philosophies into the discussion. The result is a powerful account of the implications and challenges of scale, attuned to the way scale transforms both reality and ourselves.
