Download or read book The Crisis of Reason written by J. W. Burrow and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This elegantly written book explores the history of ideas in Europe from the revolutions of 1848 to the beginning of the First World War. Broader than a straight survey, deeper and richer than a textbook, this work seeks to place the reader in the position of an informed eavesdropper on the intellectual conversations of the past. J. W. Burrow first outlines the intellectual context of the mid-nineteenth century, using ideas taken from physics, social evolution, and social Darwinism, and anxieties about modernity and personal identity, to explore the impact of science and social thought on European intellectual life. The discussion encompasses powerful and fashionable concepts in evolution, art, myth, the occult, and the unconscious mind; the rise of the great cities of Berlin, Paris, and London; and the work of literary writers, philosophers, and composers. Most of the great intellectual figures of the age—and many of the lesser known—populate the book, among them Mill, Bakunin, Nietzsche, Bergson, Renan, Pater, Proust, Clough, Flaubert, Wagner, and Wilde. The author wears his erudition lightly, and this distinguished book will be both entertaining and accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike.
Download or read book Apostles of Reason written by Molly Worthen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen offers a sweeping history of modern American evangelicalism, arguing that the faith has been shaped not by shared beliefs but by battles over the relationship between faith and reason.
Download or read book Environmental Culture written by Val Plumwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-09-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this much-needed account of what has gone wrong in our thinking about the environment, Val Plumwood digs at the roots of environmental degradation. She argues that we need to see nature as an end itself, rather than an instrument to get what we want. Using a range of examples, Plumwood presents a radically new picture of how our culture must change to accommodate nature.
Download or read book Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism written by Corine Pelluchon and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can Leo Strauss's critique of modernity and his return to tradition, especially Maimonides, help us to save democracy from its inner dangers? In this book, Corine Pelluchon examines Strauss's provocative claim that the conception of man and reason in the thought of the Enlightenment is self-destructive and leads to a new tyranny. Writing in a direct and lucid style, Pelluchon avoids the polemics that have characterized recent debates concerning the links between Strauss and neoconservatives, particularly concerns over Strauss's relation to the extreme right in Germany. Instead she aims to demystify the origins of Strauss's thought and present his relationship to German and Jewish thought in the early twentieth century in a manner accessible not just to the small circles devoted to the study of Strauss, but to a larger public. Strauss's critique of modernity is, she argues, constructive; he neither condemns modernity as a whole nor does he desire a retreat back to the Ancients, where slaves existed and women were not considered citizens. The question is to know whether we can learn something from the Ancients and from Maimonides—and not merely about them.
Download or read book Modernity and Crisis in the Thought of Michel Foucault written by Matan Oram and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few studies of Foucault have examined his thought from a sustained interdisciplinary perspective. Through the interpretative prism of the concept of the ‘Totality of Reason’, this book suggests an original analytical reading of Foucault's thought. This book addresses Foucault’s characterizations of the Enlightenment, asking whether the developmental history of the modern conception of knowledge – from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment – warrants the conclusion he draws. From the perspective of a critical evaluation of Foucault's thesis on ‘the crisis of modernity’, the book examines whether Foucault, the philosophical and social critic, truly belongs to those intellectual trends known as a ‘deconstruction’ and ‘post-modernism’ that advocate a wholesale rejection of the project of modernity, demonstrating how a classification of this kind contributes to an impoverishment of our understanding of Foucault's thought. This book will attract the attention of readers interested in Foucault, and what is broadly perceived to be the ‘crisis of modernity’. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students of sociology, political philosophy and political science, psychology, philosophy, interdisciplinary studies and cultural studies.
Download or read book A Profession Without Reason written by Bruce E. Levine and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2022-06-22 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is today a crisis in psychiatry. Even the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, has said: “Whatever we’ve been doing for five decades, it ain’t working.” The field requires a completely fresh look, and clinical psychologist Bruce Levine—a man often at odds with his profession—enlists the early Enlightenment philosopher Baruch de Spinoza to help work through the problem. Readers unfamiliar with Spinoza will be intrigued by the modern relevance of his radical philosophical, psychological, and political ideas. Levine compares the radical/moderate divide among Enlightenment thinkers to a similar divergence between contemporary critics of psychiatry, siding historically with Spinoza in order to bring an equivalent intellectual force to bear upon our modern crisis and calling for new forms of free and enlightened thinking.
Download or read book Leap of Reason written by Mario Morino and published by Mario Morino. This book was released on 2011 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leap of Reason is the product of decades of hard-won insights from philanthropist Mario Morino, McKinsey & Company, and top social-sector innovators. It is intended to spark the critically important conversations that every nonprofit board and leadership team should have in this new era of austerity. The authors make a convincing case that the nation's growing fiscal crisis will force all of us in the social sector to be clearer about our aspirations, more intentional in defining our approaches, more rigorous in gauging our progress, more willing to admit mistakes, more capable of quickly adapting and improving--all with an unrelenting focus on improving lives.
Download or read book Out of the Crisis reissue written by W. Edwards Deming and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic and deeply influential work on business management, leadership, problem solving, and quality control—based on Denning’s famous 14 Points for Management. Now reissued for the managers and leaders of today! Translated into 12 languages and continuously in print since its original publication in 1982, this highly influential framework presents the foundations for a completely transformational way to lead and manage people, processes, and resources. According to Deming, American company management’s failure to plan for the future brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to: • Stay in business • Protect investment • Ensure future dividends • Provide more jobs through improved product and service In simple, direct language, Deming explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them. This edition includes a foreword by Deming’s grandson, Kevin Edwards Cahill, and Kelly Allan, business consultant and Deming expert.
Download or read book Descartes Malebranche and the Crisis of Perception written by Walter Ott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth century witnesses the demise of two core doctrines in the theory of perception: naïve realism about color, sound, and other sensible qualities and the empirical theory, drawn from Alhacen and Roger Bacon, which underwrote it. This created a problem for seventeenth century philosophers: how is that we use qualities such as color, feel, and sound to locate objects in the world, even though these qualities are not real? Ejecting such sensible qualities from the mind-independent world at once makes for a cleaner ontology, since bodies can now be understood in purely geometrical terms, and spawns a variety of fascinating complications for the philosophy of perception. If sensible qualities are not part of the mind-independent world, just what are they, and what role, if any, do they play in our cognitive economy? We seemingly have to use color to visually experience objects. Do we do so by inferring size, shape, and motion from color? Or is it a purely automatic operation, accomplished by divine decree? This volume traces the debate over perceptual experience in early modern France, covering such figures as Antoine Arnauld, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Régis alongside their better-known countrymen René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche.
Download or read book The Age of the Crisis of Man written by Mark Greif and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-18 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury America In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts. Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel" challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities—race, religious faith, and the rise of technology—that kept difference and diversity alive. By the 1960s, the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.
Download or read book The Crisis of Democratic Pluralism written by Brendan Sweetman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that contemporary liberal democracy is reaching a crisis. Brendan Sweetman contends that this crisis arises from a contentious pluralism involving the rise of incommensurable worldviews that emerge out of the absolutizing of freedom over time in a democratic setting. This clash of worldviews is further complicated by a loss of confidence in reason and by the practical failure of public discourse. A contributory factor is the growing worldview of secularism which needs to be distinguished from both the process of secularization and the concept of the secular state. After describing the crisis, and exploring these themes, and also rejecting proposed solutions from recent liberal political theory, Sweetman develops an approach to pluralist disagreement which requires a re-envisioning of the relationship between religion, secularism and politics, and which allows a limited place for all worldviews in the state, including religious worldviews. Engaging with the work of Philip Kitcher, Robert Audi, John Rawls, A.C. Grayling, Martin Luther King, Cécile Laborde, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and Plato, Sweetman's approach is a formidable innovation in the quest to maintain a free and fair society.
Download or read book University on Watch written by J Peters and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: University on Watch is a story about youthful hope, yearning for more, and triumph over failures and mistakes beyond our own control and doing. The book is a native story to New York state, but couldn’t be more otherworldly, at times supernatural and grippingly suspenseful as the book unfolds. The crisis in the academy, or New London University, is one that goes to the very epicenter of higher learning and education. This crisis is also conjectured, created by the mind of Jacques Peters, a student rejected from the graduate school in English at New London University. Jacques Peters will do everything in his power to uncover the reason for his rejection from graduate school. Meta-power, a word Jacques Peters believes is behind the root of power in the English department and the reason for his rejection becomes the point of departure for a quest into the very root of power in New London. During this quest, Jacques stops at nothing to hold university officials, department offices, and the community accountable for terminating his education prematurely. Mr. Peters will travel across New York State, visiting friends, loved ones, and old schoolmates from his High School days at Wales. Through his journey, Jacques will undergo another transformation while contesting the admission decision to the very end, putting his health and life at risk forever.
Download or read book Reason in a Dark Time written by Dale Jamieson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. Yet greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life. In this book, philosopher Dale Jamieson explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do. Centered in philosophy, the volume also treats the scientific, historical, economic, and political dimensions of climate change. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly to climate change, Jamieson argues, reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities. The climate change that is underway is remaking the world in such a way that familiar comforts, places, and ways of life will disappear in years or decades rather than centuries. Climate change also threatens our sense of meaning, since it is difficult to believe that our individual actions matter. The challenges that climate change presents go beyond the resources of common sense morality -- it can be hard to view such everyday acts as driving and flying as presenting moral problems. Yet there is much that we can do to slow climate change, to adapt to it and restore a sense of agency while living meaningful lives in a changing world.
Download or read book The Comfort Crisis written by Michael Easter and published by Rodale Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you’ve been looking for something different to level up your health, fitness, and personal growth, this is it.”—Melissa Urban, Whole30 CEO and New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Boundaries “Michael Easter’s genius is that he puts data around the edges of what we intuitively believe. His work has inspired many to change their lives for the better.”—Dr. Peter Attia, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Outlive Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild—from the author of Scarcity Brain, coming in September! In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort. Easter’s journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA’s top exercise scientist, who uses an ancient Japanese practice to build championship athletes; to the mystical country of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who’s found that nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways that expand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places on Earth; and more. Along the way, Easter uncovers a blueprint for leveraging the power of discomfort that will dramatically improve our health and happiness, and perhaps even help us understand what it means to be human. The Comfort Crisis is a bold call to break out of your comfort zone and explore the wild within yourself.
Download or read book Husserl s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology written by Dermot Moran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-23 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's last and most influential book, written in Nazi Germany where he was discriminated against as a Jew. It incisively identifies the urgent moral and existential crises of the age and defends the relevance of philosophy at a time of both scientific progress and political barbarism. It is also a response to Heidegger, offering Husserl's own approach to the problems of human finitude, history and culture. The Crisis introduces Husserl's influential notion of the 'life-world' – the pre-given, familiar environment that includes both 'nature' and 'culture' – and offers the best introduction to his phenomenology as both method and philosophy. Dermot Moran's rich and accessible introduction to the Crisis explains its intellectual and political context, its philosophical motivations and the themes that characterize it. His book will be invaluable for students and scholars of Husserl's work and of phenomenology in general.
Download or read book The Human Relationship to Nature written by Matthew R. Foster and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-11-02 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing alarm over the harm done by humans to the natural world, and even to the viability of our own industrial civilization, compels us to ask the deeper moral question: What should be the human relationship to nature? Matthew R. Foster starts by assessing three contrasting patterns of moral reasoning: the Progress Ethic that created the world we live in; the biblically-inspired Stewardship Ethic; and the Connection Ethic based on scientific understanding of the interdependence of all natural entities. Critical analysis reveals that none of these ethics is able to sustain the values it advocates due to two unsupportable presumptions—that the norms of human morality are commensurate with the natural world, and that the value of an entity is an intrinsic property. Foster argues that in order for a future environmental ethic to be both logically coherent and environmentally constructive, it must start from unconventional notions. First, because nature will never be commensurate with human moral reasoning, non-rational resources must be employed despite the risks involved. Second, value resides in the relationship of one entity to another, and does not belong intrinsically to either—in short, value is foremost a verb, rather than a noun. Foster proposes a new paradigm attentive to the realm of value relations among all natural entities, one which offers mediating opportunities between nature and morality. In this new ethic there are no “shoulds.” Rather, moral responsibilities to the natural entities around us are elective, placing us in an unfamiliar yet potentially liberating network of relationships. This book will be of interest to scholars—both instructors and students—of environmental ethics, philosophy, religion, and intellectual history, and all who are concerned about the environmental challenges of our time.
Download or read book Evolution and Society written by J. W. Burrow and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1966 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the reasons why Victorian pioneers of social science were habitually approaching the study of other societies with largely positivistic and evolutionary methodologies.
